The Goal Behind the Goal: Getting Honest About What You Actually Want [New Podcast Episode]
- Jun 11
- 16 min read
It’s been one of the pivotal realisations of my life that all the goals I set in the past were masking deeper desires - desires so deep, in fact, that I wasn’t even aware of them.
I spent years chasing after surface level success and numbed out in the process, all when I could have been focusing on what I really wanted - the goal behind the goal - and made actual progress on my wildest success.
If you don't know me, my name is Astra and I’m a personal transformation coach. I help you change your mind so you can evolve into the person you’ve been waiting to become. And one of the areas that comes up with my clients is how they can feel and be more successful in their business and lives.
In this new podcast episode, I explore exactly how to get honest about what you actually want, and discover The Goal Behind The Goal.
Key Points
Why SMART goals only lead to surface level success
What your soul is actually trying to say
The Why Game
Owning the uncomfortable truth
Three steps to learn the goal behind your goal and reorient yourself in the right direction
Links In This Episode
The Soul-Driven Goals Workshop
What's Really Stopping You? Diagnostic Tool
Watch On YouTube
Listen On Spotify
Transcript
It has been one of the pivotal and painful realisations in my life that all of the goals I set in the past, all of the things that I thought would make me successful, were not actually the things I really wanted. These goals were masking deeper desires, desires and yearnings so deep I was totally unaware of them. Instead I spent years, years, nearly decades chasing after success that was just on the surface level.
I numbed out and I burnt out in the process when I could have just been focussing on the thing I really wanted, what I call the goal behind the goal. If you're new to me, my name is Astra, I'm a personal transformation coach. I help you change your mind essentially and transform into the person you've really been waiting to become.
And one of the areas that comes up with my clients over and over again is how they can feel and be more successful in their professional and in their personal lives. And in today's podcast episode, we're going to look at the idea of the goal behind the goal so that you can get really honest about what's driving you, get really honest about what you actually want and not do what I did, waste years or even decades chasing the wrong thing but instead focus on the goals and the success that's going to bring your soul to life while you're here on the planet. So let's dive in.
So let's start by talking about different types of goal. So this idea of surface level success tends to come from goals that are built in this material world, the material reality, the practical, the corporate world, the one that's focused on money and job titles and practical things. You've probably actually set these goals for yourself using something like the SMART goal methodology.
If you haven't heard of this, just to recap, it's a process of setting goals. SMART is an acronym. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Now, I have never ever found SMART goals to be useful, ever, but I know they work for some people in very specific circumstances because they are about the material world. But they're also apparently in a material world where you're in control of every single variable. They only really work for surface level success because that's what they're trying to work on, this very specific and measurable and achievable, like linear time-bound world that we think we exist in.
The problem with SMART goals and these types of things is they actually hide what you truly want. They don't mean to. It's not a methodology that sets out to do that, but it takes a really, really big dream that you've got and it puts it into a very, very small box.
So lots of things get missed out and it hides, it masks what you truly want. Other types of goals as well are kind of the more general ones that we would throw out as something that, oh, I want to do that this year. Something like, oh, I want to build a business.
I want to find a partner. I want to lose weight or something like that. They're so general.
They're so vague. This is why SMART goals were developed, to be specific and avoid that vagueness. But those vague things, you can still do them and you still might get them.
You might get that surface level success of building a business, but so what? What's that goal actually about? These sorts of goals, surface level success in general, it's like a lot of the time when we or if you've tried to set these sorts of goals or try to actually more specifically take action on SMART goals or the more general sort of goals, it's mostly overwhelming. It's normally overwhelming and it's normally quite dry and boring. You're trying to control every variable.
You're trying to do this massive thing in tiny step-by-steps that are really almost like control freakery level of sorting everything out and making sure it gets done on a certain time. It's the Gantt chart of dreaming. And the whole point of dreaming is that it is free, it's flexible and it's open.
So these methods are okay for surface level success. But I know that you are the sort of person who doesn't just want surface level success. You want a feeling, a deep feeling of rich and abundant success.
Not only, yes, in the material world, if that's what caused you, but actually on a real true meaningful soul level. You want success that is about your feeling of purpose and meaning here on the planet in this lifetime. The problem with surface level goals and surface level success is that very often they're not actually yours.
They're coming from elsewhere. You've kind of inherited them, whether that's from your parents who told you that you needed to get a good job or you've inherited them from our media culture that tells you you need to be thin and white and blonde and rich to be successful, to feel like a good person. Or even something like comparison with your peer group or with friends or like people who are in your company or people doing similar things to you.
These goals are surface level because there's so much about it is inherited from the external. And you'll know if your goal that you've currently got is actually yours or not, because if it is not yours, it will always feel like an uphill struggle when you're working on it. It will always feel like an uphill struggle.
It's very exhausting trying to achieve something that isn't really yours. It's kind of like in the morning when you remember when we went to school, we had to wear school uniform, right? And you get up in the morning and you're like, oh, I'm putting on a uniform for a school. I'm not this uniform.
This isn't me. And so you do little things like you make your tie shorter or longer or you'll wear your earrings or your skirt higher or lower or like different badges or whatever to try and make the uniform yours. But ultimately, it's not who you are.
It's not a true expression of who you are. And that's what these surface level goals are. You've inherited them from another framework, another formula, and you're desperately trying to fit yourself into them and make them yours.
But they aren't. And that's why it's exhausting. That's why it feels like an uphill struggle.
I know this because I did it. Like I chased that success, the inherited ideas of what it meant to be successful, to be, to have a good job, to run a good business, to be a good partner. Like I chased that.
Like the story I tell is that before I was 30, a couple years before I was 30, I made this like massive, on a big bit of paper, this like massive five year plan of everything that I was going to achieve, right? All of these things I was going to do. And because I am a recovering type A, I still, I love, I'm very active and I'm very motivated, but I was doing it from a very bad, a very poor and unhealthy place before. Made this massive plan.
And because I was overachieving and pushing myself in this struggle, I pushed and I pushed and I pushed. I actually achieved probably about 80% of that five year plan in 12 months. I just felt nothing.
I was just totally numbed out. And when I look back, it's because so much of that plan was not actually what I truly wanted. I thought I wanted it.
I thought I wanted some of these like descriptions and roles and kind of technical material things in the world, right? But so much of it, all of it, I think, in fact, was like surface level. I hadn't really looked at what I truly wanted, what the goal behind the goal. And so it just felt like this uphill struggle all the time.
I'm not saying that these things weren't relevant in some way, that they didn't have meaning for me. And I don't want you to think that goals you've set or achieved in the past are irrelevant or pointless, but rather that there's always something behind a goal that's actually what you want, is deeper than the surface level that we think it is. Because the goal behind the goal is what your soul, your spiritual being is actually craving, is what you're truly yearning for.
I see it as like this deeper invitation behind a genuine goal, not a goal that is from somebody else, not a goal that you've inherited, but an intrinsic goal that feels like compelling to you. There's like a deeper invitation that is more than the practical, it's more than the mundane or material human thing you're trying to achieve. When someone says to me, as many clients have done, I want to build my business or I want to turn my hobby into something I do all the time, or I want to have a family, any of these things, the traditional coaching mentality is not to question the goal, right? It's to say, cool, you've got a goal, I will help you get there.
I'm not that sort of coach, because I'm here to help you transform. And part of the transformation is questioning why. Why do you want to build a business? Why do you want to have a family? Why do you want to turn this hobby into something you do full-time? What is behind this? What is the driving force, the driving feeling behind what you are acting or what you think you want to do? And the way I position it is this, that goals are our mind's way of justifying the soul's desire to simply play and grow.
Goals are the mind's way of justifying the soul's desire to play and grow. Our mind needs a puzzle. It needs objectives, it needs destinations, it needs structure, it needs things to avoid, it needs things to look out for.
It can't just play, it can't just expand, but that is what our soul wants. As a spiritual being having a human experience, you are here simply to expand and grow. So your goal is your mind's way of interpreting all of that information and justifying that information that's coming through.
So the purpose, what you want to do is to listen carefully to your soul, find out the goal behind the goal and work on that. Your soul will have direction, it will give you nudges, it will give you information and not every person is here to do the same thing. Not all of us are here to expand and grow in the same way.
We're not here to play in the same way. We don't all want to play the same games as souls. So you want to listen carefully to that and work on it.
That is how you get truly deep, wild, unfiltered success because you're coming from the source of why you're here. I'm doing this reaching down into understanding what your soul truly wants, the goal behind the goal, was something that I realised I needed to do and it's what I built my entire goal setting method around nearly 10 years ago now. I built my whole goal setting and planning method around it that I use and have used for that decade and I teach to my clients, I teach in my workshops as well.
I call it soul driven goals because it's exactly what it says on the tin. It's goal setting and planning driven by your soul's desires. In the next part of the podcast I'm actually going to touch on a key exercise from the soul driven goals method.
You can use that method today to help you get to the goal behind the goal but there's actually so much more in the method because our current way of setting goals, things like SMART goals or even those general ones are just so linear, they're so competitive, they aren't designed for that true deep spiritual success, they're designed for surface level success. So the soul driven goals method has much more in it, these exercises to totally transform and change your mind about goal setting. So it's methods for keeping your motivation, like my rules, my 10 rules for wild success, like how do I actually write a goal that I care about, that isn't a boring new year's resolution, right? So it's all in this method.
So if you, from listening to this podcast, if this feels like something that you really want to transform in yourself, you want to change your mind around this this month, then I want you to check out the whole soul driven goals workshop. I teach the whole method in it, it's available on my website on demand, the link's in the episode description. So let's talk about one of those exercises that's in the soul driven goals method and it's called very simply the why game.
So I want you to imagine you're a toddler for this because we all know they love asking why. We find out the goal behind the goal by the why game. This is step two in my soul driven goals method.
And it's actually based on a, like a variation of multiple games or ideas around why originally pioneered by Taichi Ono, whose father kind of seen as the father of the Toyota production system. So it comes from a very like technical systems background. It's been then adapted and kind of, you might've heard of like the five whys as a self-development tool.
Don't worry if you haven't, you don't need to. And it's a variation of this method because it's slightly more advanced and it's slightly more focused on spiritual progression, right? So the way it works is to play the why game. I want you to think of your goal, whatever it is at the moment, doesn't matter what it is, just think of it.
And I want you to ask yourself, just like a toddler would ask you as many times as you need to. Why? Why? So if your goal is to build a business, why? And then whatever the answer is, ask yourself why again? And then whatever the answer is, keep asking yourself why? And you're going to keep asking yourself why until you get to the goal behind the goal. Do not just stop at five whys.
You might go on for quite a long time. I want you to keep going until you've reached what I call the uncomfortable or the ugly truth beneath the goal, the goal behind the goal. And you will know when you've reached the real thing, you'll know when you've reached it because it does feel uncomfortable.
It feels very real. It feels very resonant. It feels like uncomfortably truthful.
It's almost like you will recognise it as being very accurate, perhaps in a way that you don't like. And that's what we need to get to because there's something there, there's some information there that's the start of this process. So that's part one of the why game is take your goal, ask yourself why as many times as you need to, until you get to that point where you're like, oh, okay, that is why.
That's why I want this thing. That's accurate. I recognise that.
But we're not going to stop there. Part two is you then take that uncomfortable, perhaps ugly truth, and you turn it into something beautiful. You turn it into something to build a new goal around.
This is the goal behind the goal. This is you making conscious decision and ownership of that goal. Because once you name that desire, once you name the thing you truly want, you can reframe it into something that you're going to move towards.
In one of my other podcast episodes, I talk about this more in depth. The podcast episode is called why your goals are running out of steam. That if you only have something that you're running away from, you're not going to have a lot of momentum.
It's not going to sustain you. You've got to have something you're running towards. So the way we work it out is we have the goal, we ask ourselves why to get to the truth, and then we flip it to give ourselves something to run towards.
This is an exercise you can do now. As I said, I explain it in a lot more detail and we go into lots of examples in the Soul Driven Goals method at the workshop. But if you know the truth, if you know the truth of it and flip the words, it's about focussing on what is desired, not what you detest.
And I want you to think of it as this. If you have a goal right now that feels difficult and uncomfortable and challenging and an uphill struggle, there's a lot of friction and resistance there. And by asking yourself why and flipping it, you're going to find a lot more relief and ease.
Because instead of talking about the surface level thing that you think is the important thing to have, it's important to have a good job or important to have a family or blah, blah, blah, you're actually going to look at what's truly important for you. And I'll give you an example from my own life. For me, for so long, I had this goal of earning a good salary, which is so vague, that is so unhelpful, it's so vague.
That was an inherited goal that came from my parents, 100%. It's not something that I thought about very much. I just assumed, yeah, I want to make a good salary, that's really important for me.
So all of my activity was about, okay, let's make a good salary. But when I really asked myself why, as many times as I needed, the thing I got to was why do I want to make a good salary is because I'm afraid of not having any money. The goal was not the pleasure of having financial independence, the pleasure of being able to pay for my friends for things or go on holiday.
It was I was afraid of not having enough money. So I wanted to make a good salary because I didn't want to not have any money or not enough money. And when I actually looked at that and could flip it to say, I want to feel confident with my income, or I want to feel comfortable financially, or I want to feel neutral about my salary, which is a really, I would say is more powerful than any other goal.
Then I had something to work towards, something positive. So I had the goal, it was surface level. I identified it because it felt like an uphill struggle.
I asked myself why, and I got to the ugly truth that I could then flip into something truly desirable, and then it made life so much easier. And of course, that's when I started to actually magnetise the opportunities and the money that I really enjoyed and could have a life that I felt really positive about. So we're going from friction and resistance, the surface level success, the surface level irritation, to a deeper feeling of relief and ease.
And you can practise playing that why game in those two parts to help you do that. It's a very, very powerful exercise. It doesn't have to take that long, but it's going to reveal a lot about yourself, and it's going to very specifically reveal the goal behind the goal, the thing that your soul is truly yearning for.
So you can focus your effort in actually the right place instead of wasting loads of time on something that's not really what you want. So three key takeaways, three little exercises to add to this why game or perhaps incorporate in the why game. So the first one to do is you take your current goals and to audit them to understand which of them where you might be aiming for surface level success.
Which of them are actually about, I've inherited this from somebody else, I'm just operating on this very surface level material plane. Just audit them. There's no judgement here, we're human beings.
The point is to have a human experience, right? Not just to like waft about in the ether. No shame there, but just audit them to recognise which ones are in there about this surface level success. And I want you to take one of those current goals, this is the second takeaway, take one of those current goals and play the Y game with it.
Play the Y game until you reach something that feels uncomfortably true. You will recognise it, you will feel it in your body. Often I have it and it's almost like I feel quite almost a bit sick because I recognise it in myself.
And it's something that I didn't want to see. And then the third key takeaway is to take that uncomfortable truth and do part two of the why game. Write the opposite, rewrite it so that it's focused on the desire, the relief, the ease, the powerful thing that you actually want to experience.
This is such a great exercise and as I said, it forms a key part, step two of my Soul Driven Goals method. If you really want to transform yourself this month, if you have resonated with what we've talked about on the podcast today, you want to start experiencing that deep success, then I really want you to check out the Soul Driven Goals workshop. I teach this whole goal setting method in it.
I've been using the method as I said for nearly 10 years. I've taught it in workshops, with one-to-one clients. It really took me from feeling very numbed out and focused on what other people wanted to living and breathing and celebrating and focused on my unique version of success, my wildest dreams coming true in ways that I wouldn't have believed was possible before I expanded my mind in this way, before I changed my mind in this way.
So the workshop is available on my website. I've put the link in the episode description. It's on demand, about two hours long.
Have a look at the link or you can just search for online, search for Higher Love Soul Driven Goals and it will be one of the first results that you get. So do check that out if this is something that you're very focused on and you want to transform yourself this month. I want you to have a look and enrol in that workshop.
If this episode has resonated but you're maybe not quite in the place where you want to invest in that workshop, it's only two hours, do you know what I mean? But I get it, maybe you're not quite ready. I want you to try something else instead. It's a great diagnostic tool that I've created.
You're going to visit go.higherlove.co/goalquiz and right there you're going to find my assessment tool, which is called What's Really Stopping You? It's quite a powerful one. It's about 10 questions in it. You're going to answer those questions and it will give you a personalised result of the one thing that you need right now, that you need most right now, to help you start feeling successful and taking more action on your goal.
Because often like, once we know what the problem is, right, we solve it. We're very good at that. We've got great minds for doing that.
The issue is that we don't know what's really happening. We don't know what's wrong. We don't know what the hurdle is and that's what this diagnostic tool is here to help you with.
You'll get the quiz result and then you're going to get a short series of emails from me that pick up on key philosophies and practises from the Soul Driven Goals method so that you can start putting into action some of these ideas and putting into action this one thing that you need. I've put the link to the assessment tool also in the episode description or again the URL is go.higherlove.co/goalquiz. Thank you so much for listening and I'll speak to you next time.
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