I’ve got a confession to make. I don't believe in goals.

There's nothing wrong with goals, per se. I just don't believe in taking goals at face value. Through my experience coaching hundreds of business people, there is a tipping point when goals become a source of scarcity.

You know. You’ve been there.

Maybe it was a job or a promotion. Maybe it was a person or a car or looking a certain way. Maybe it was that gazillion dollar lottery ticket – haven’t we all fantasized about that one?

You know, holding onto something so bad that you can’t see yourself living without it.

The bottom line is that we all want things. We even want life to be a certain way. Often we know what it takes to get what we want. But knowing and wanting it really bad aren’t enough.

So why don’t we get what we want? Why don’t we do what we can do to get what we want? Goals can quickly become a ball and chain instead of the catalyst we long for them to be.

In my work, I began to notice patterns that kept showing up in my client’s lives and businesses. I call these patterns “illusions” and I have found them to be the primary sources of scarcity thinking in our culture today. To me, the ultimate scarcity is resisting who you are. Each of the illusions, then, becomes a specific expression of resistance.

Take the Illusion of Certainty, for example. This illusion occurs when the need to know an outcome keeps us from being who we naturally are. Abundance is more than the belief that there’s enough to go around. True abundance is exercising the freedom to be who you are. Certainty is a funny thing. It's an illusion most of the time because there are very few things in life we can actually be certain of. (Yup, I know, death and taxes.) And yet we thirst for it.

Certainty impacts our goals when our need to know the outcome of something keeps us from doing what we can do. Take Josie, for example. Her goal was to start her own floral shop, but she kept procrastinating and adding to her to do list, never actually taking any of the steps to make her floral business a reality. She couldn't sleep at night, her mind reeling with fears about the risks involved. The Illusion of Certainty is at play here. Josie loved the familiarity of her boring, unfulfilling job. She loved the "security" of a weekly paycheck.

And yet, slowly, surely, that satin lined coffin of certainty was suffocating her.

Josie couldn't get past the need to know, to have proof that her floral business would succeed. And nobody could give that to her. As a result, her goal slowly died on the vine.

Take a look at your own goals. Are you comfortable? Have you furnished a satin lined coffin?

How many of you have at least one goal you've not met for at least 2 years? (It's ok, you can raise your hand - this is a newsletter and no one can see you.) Having an ongoing goal is not necessarily a bad thing - it's when we keep recycling the same old goals year after year, with no focused, intentional action to go along with it that we run into problems.

When Goal Recycling happens, it can quickly become a sign that the Illusion of Hope is at play. One of the sources of scarcity thinking, the Illusion of Hope is what causes us to put our greatness on hold by waiting for someone or something else to solve our uneasiness of who we are.

The Illusion of Hope is characterized by expectation, powerlessness, and assumption. How do these conditioned patterns keep us from reaching our goals? When we expect life (and people) to be a certain way, we make assumptions about what will happen. If I assume that I will train 100 people this year because I believe I have such a great program, I may expect that I will make over 6 figures as my goal. However, if underneath this goal, I have a deep rooted fear that I'm really not that great of a trainer, or my program has a lot of kinks in it, or I hate flying (and my training success requires a lot of travel) any one of these fears can be a sign of powerlessness. And if that keeps me from doing what I can do - marketing my program, networking with prospects, I'm stuck in the Illusion of Hope and recycling my goals.

What goals have you been recycling?

I've seen a lot of unrealistic goal setting in business people. It's great to dream big and everyone can benefit by creating a big vision, but if that vision is not grounded in practical, tangible ways, it is unrealistic. So why do so many people recycle unrealistic goals year after year? I believe it's related to the Illusion of Struggle and the Illusion of Control. A lot of us have a love affair with struggle, don't we? We identify with struggle. We think it shows us the boundaries of who we are. When things are hard, they may be more familiar. By always striving, we negate who we are by buying into the idea that we're incomplete, less than, not enough. When we create goals that are ungrounded and always out of our reach, it's a way to keep things safe and predictable. We can stay in control of our lives, because we can predict how it's going to turn out.

Unrealistic goals are like the tug of war you played at those family picnics as a kid. There's a lot of effort back and forth, struggling to win, but in the end, there's only one winner. The loser usually ends up in the mud. When a person creates unrealistic goals, they're not the winner - complacency is. Unrealistic goals set us up for failure and more struggle. They're mighty convenient that way. They keep us playing small. They keep us from living into our greatness and being abundant.

Could you benefit from a little reality in your goal setting?

Truly abundant goals are realistic goals. What does that mean? To implement goals and get the results we want, we have to first carefully consider what we want. A realistic goal is based on who we are -- not who our boss, parents, spouse or any other external driver thinks we are. The most successful goals are based on intentions that are in alignment with our values, our vision, and our capacity. I may have a big audacious goal to be a millionaire by the end of 2006. However, if I am not even making $20,000 and I'm not taking specific, actionable steps to change my reality, this is an unrealistic goal.

Perhaps the single biggest gift you can give yourself is permission to let go. Let go of all the goals you should have. Let go of who people think you should be and what you should do. As Loretta Larouche says, “stop shoulding on yourself”. Struggling to make an old, outdated goal work is like jumping on a Slip ‘n Slide without the water.

Begin living who you are.

In the moment.

Right now.

Abundantly.

Kim George is the founder of The Abundance Intelligence™ Institute and the author of Coaching Into Greatness: 4 Steps to Success in Business and Life. For more information, visit www.CoachingIntoGreatness.com.