Existential Goals Proposition One and Two

You might expect to read in a blog on health, fitness and goal setting motivational stories extolling people t o run marathons, swim oceans or climb mountains. You might expect to hear that you can overcome anything obstacle and achieve the unimaginable. Some self help books make wild claims that we can be anything we want to be, we just have to want it bad enough. You might see advertisements for business programs purporting that anybody can be a multi-millionaire in two weeks by share trading. Well if that was true, if everybody could be a multi-millionaire, you would have to pay Jim’s Mowing fifty thousand dollars to mow your lawn, clearly not everybody can be a multi-millionaire. This is not what existentialism goal setting about. Existential goal setting is based on self-awareness and understanding our limits; the ultimate limit being life is short and you are dead for a long time. In this philosophy goal setting becomes essential, because we limited opportunity of goals to chose from.

The first proposition is self-awareness. We do not have unlimited capacity to do everything we want to do in life. As an example, if you want to run a marathon that is great and I would not dissuade you, but by choosing to run a marathon you must give up other things in life to put in the training. The existentialist would ask the basic question “what do we really want out of life”? Once we have answered that question then we are in the position to decide how we will use our precious time. Being self aware means that we can accept our limits yet still feel worthwhile; we are also free from accepting the limits place on us by other people and society. Surprisingly, it is only by being self aware that we can fully aware of all the choices available to us. A common excuse for failing to complete a goal is that “I was too busy” or “I started training but I did not have time, the kids demand a lot of time”. These are all examples of failing to understand our limitations and or to fully committing to a project. If a project or goal truly answered the question “what do I want out of life” you would be so motivated to achieve that goal that you make time, you would organise the kids so you had time.

The second proposition is freedom and responsibility. If we are free to choose between all the available options in life and hence we must be responsible for our choices. Sounds a bit harsh, but stay with for a while. There are many things in life that we have no choice over; soldiers coming back from war don’t have no choice in acquiring post traumatic stress disorder. However this is an extreme case and many things in life we do have a choice about, but only if we accept the responsibility of making those choices. The alternative is making non-decisions. By doing nothing or procrastinating over what we should do we are actually making a choice, we have chose the status quo. As an example you might never have considered yourself a good runner hence you might never have tried to run a marathon, you have made a non-choice not to run. Strangely it is only when we accept that we are the result of our previous choices that we can put the past behind us. Once we put the past behind and accept the responsibility that we  must and will make choices about the future can we really appreciate what options we do have to make our lives better.

Existentialism has been used in a range of areas from psychotherapy, counselling to sports psychology and it might sound a bit sombre. However for health and fitness it is quite a simple process to apply. This blog is a brief introduction to existentialism and in the next blog we will talk about two other propositions of existentialism, identity and creating new meaning after which I will present a simple goal setting structure. However the main points to date are to be self aware to our limitations and the real alternatives we can choose from. Next, to need to accept responsibility for the choices we have made and to understand we need to make choices to improve our future.