Some time ago I had a conversation with a young man, working in a business context, who had asked me:
“How did you plan all the work you are now doing in the world?
Which goals did you set for yourself earlier in life?”

He somehow admired my work and wanted to get inspiration on how create a business from following passion and purpose.

My first answer was a disappointment: “I didn´t plan any of this!”

In my life I had often tried and worked with the usual concepts of setting goals, and I know that this is a very powerful tool.

I can be very determined and strong-willed when it comes to executing what I had set out to do.
​Yet more often than not, simply setting goals for myself didn’t really work, and it often left me with a sense of disappointment, frustration, or worse, doubting myself.

As you can imagine, he first didn´t believe me at all.

“This can´t be possible. What did you then, instead of setting goals?”

Recognizing that he had a point here, I took time to reflect and came up with a metaphor that comes close to how I experience myself moving through the world.

I would call it, Aiming at Nothingness.

Imagine you are about to shoot an arrow, which represents your life´s movements. When the bow is arched, you need to aim somewhere, otherwise the whole movement makes no sense.

In my experience though, it is not simply aiming at something that you already clearly know. Sometimes there simply is no clear bulls eye visible yet and there is just a sense of the direction you are aiming.

This doesn´t mean though that you are just shooting randomly.

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Outer goals – such as you would typically define in classical goal-oriented coaching – are great when they are in tune with your inner self. They can also be a distraction or even a disturbing strategy moving us away from our deeper and true Self.

What I recognize that I have been practicing is not follow just an outer orientation to what I think I want, but being guided by a deeper resonance of my true heart´s wishes.
This is not wishful thinking, but following that within you that moves you deeply.

This often can feel like at aiming at Nothingness, because the form of what you want, your aim is not clear yet, it remains “unformed”. Yet, your inner sense is able to perceive it, and orient towards it.

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It is important to mention here that in order to practice this, you need a lot of discipline, courage and practices that do orient and anchor you everyday in the reality of daily living while staying connected to follow that which moves you deeply.

This has nothing to do with day-dreaming or avoiding to do the hard and often boring work that make you reliable and competent in the world.

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One thing I found over the years very helpful in aiming at Nothingness is to work through Exclusion.

Sometimes you don´t know yet what you want, but you can suspend following the things you don´t want. In order for this to work, you need to allow yourself to make all possible mistakes and run down all wrong alleys without giving up, becoming bitter or angry at yourself.

Allow life to teach and orient you, learn from mistakes, stay curious and receptive and by learning what it is not, you are more and more aiming at the center.

The real Center is black, empty and will forever remain out of sight.
It is aiming at Nothingness.
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Yet this is not absence, devoid of energy, it is pure potentiality, energy not having been confined to concrete form of appearance. It can still take any form in the world. Creativity beyond measure.

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In practicing this it can feel you are actually aiming at your worst nightmare, your mind projecting your greatest fear onto this empty screen of pure potentiality.

There will be a strong impulse to turn away from this darkness and aim at something familiar, something your mind already knows. ​
In doing so you will greatly reduce the possibility of what can happen, reducing creativity to repetition, evolution to a replay of yesterday.

If you can resist this impulse, life will become more intense, adventurous, unpredictable and definitely more creative than what your mind could ever imagine.

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I am grateful for the questioning of this young man, helping me to find words for what I seem to practice in my life.

May you find what helps you to come closer to your true heart´s whish and desire.