Last night I opened a fortune cookie that said, “Your goals will have you achieve them.” I assumed it was a bad translation. Then I read it again. Not you will achieve your goals. Your goals will have you achieve them. That stopped me.
I have always been able to lead. Give me a problem and I will make a plan, organize the plan, improve the plan and, if necessary, reorganize everyone standing near the plan. I know how to push. I know how to work. I know how to go after something. Which is probably why the fortune cookie annoyed me before it delighted me.
We are taught that this is how goals work. Decide what you want. Write it down. Visualize it. Affirm it. Make a plan. Work harder. Stay focused. Never give up. All perfectly reasonable. But every one of these practices assumes essentially the same thing: I am the active force. The goal is sitting somewhere waiting for me to get it. I act upon the world. The world, apparently, has been instructed to remain still. That is the part I no longer believe.
The irritating thing is that I had already written about this in my novel Bad Girl Pie. I simply hadn’t understood what I understood.
Dorothy Sherlock, the main character, is trying to learn Argentine tango. She loves the dance but has trouble following. She thinks the problem is technical. It isn’t. Her real problem is that she doesn’t trust the connection enough to feel what is happening, so she tries to figure out what the leader wants her to do. She guesses. Anyone who has spent a lifetime trying to control things will recognize the technique.
Later, Dorothy’s tango teacher, Tomas, explains something that changes her understanding of the dance. The follower has an equally difficult job because she has to interpret what the leader is suggesting and, most importantly, support him while he supports her. Dorothy is astonished. The follower was supposed to help the leader dance? Tomas had just changed her whole definition of partnership.
In tango there is a leader and a follower, and our culture immediately knows which one is more important. We are terribly impressed by leaders. They initiate. They decide. They get books written about them. But a tango leader cannot lead someone he cannot feel. He proposes a movement. The follower responds. Her response tells him where she is, how balanced she is, whether the movement is working and what is possible next. He feels that information and adjusts. She responds to the adjustment. The dance is not being done by one person to another. It is being created between them.
This is true of every real relationship. A parent changes a child, but a child also changes a parent. A teacher affects a student, but anyone who has taught for more than five minutes knows that students change the teacher. A writer affects a reader, and readers eventually tell the writer what she wrote, sometimes with considerable confidence. Relationship is reciprocal. So why have we decided that our relationship with a goal should work in only one direction?
We choose something we want and immediately begin attacking reality with a strategy. We push, organize, schedule, visualize and persist. If something isn’t working, we assume we haven’t pushed hard enough. It rarely occurs to us that while we are busy affecting the world, the world is affecting us.
A goal starts changing things the minute you seriously commit to it. Information that meant nothing before suddenly becomes relevant. You meet someone you would not have noticed. A conversation gives you an idea. Something fails and sends you in a direction you had never considered. An opportunity appears that looks nothing like the one you ordered. We call these circumstances. Maybe they are responses.
In Bad Girl Pie, Dorothy says that she believes in a “responsive universe.” She doesn’t mean a universe that sits around granting wishes. You make a move and something comes back. Then you have to notice it and respond. The response is the next step, not following an old pattern and guessing. That is receiving.
Receiving is usually made to sound passive, which may be why achievement-oriented people aren’t particularly interested in it. It sounds like waiting around for something to happen. But receiving is not waiting. It means paying attention to what comes back. You speak and listen. You make an offer and watch what happens. You move toward something and remain sufficiently connected to notice that the situation has changed.
That can be harder than pushing. Pushing lets you maintain the pleasant illusion that you are in control, that you’re “doing something.” Receiving means admitting that there are other forces at work: people, timing, opportunity, luck, other people’s choices, and whatever larger force you happen to believe is operating underneath. You are participating with all of it. A relationship cannot exist if one side is doing all the talking.
This may be why some people can work relentlessly toward a goal and still never get there. It isn’t necessarily that they didn’t try hard enough. They may have become so committed to pursuing the goal that they lost their ability to receive information from it. They stopped dancing and started executing steps. In tango, that’s fatal. You cannot memorize your way into connection. You have to feel the other person.
This doesn’t mean giving up leadership or becoming passive. A good follower is not passive. Dorothy finally realizes that she can be powerful and follow at the same time. We have confused power with control. Power includes both the ability to act and the ability to respond.
So now I return to my badly translated fortune cookie. “Your goals will have you achieve them.” Maybe that wasn’t bad English. Maybe there can be wisdom in a fortune cookie.
You choose a goal. Then the goal begins choosing things for you by directing where you place your attention. It changes what you notice. It changes what frightens you. It exposes what you don’t know. It forces decisions you would otherwise avoid. It attracts certain relationships and makes others impossible to maintain. Eventually, if the goal is important enough, it changes who you are.
We think we are working on the goal, but the goal is working on us. That doesn’t require magical thinking. It requires paying attention. I move. Something responds. I receive that response, and my next movement changes because of it. That is tango. It is also life.
I have spent most of my life assuming that if I wanted something, my job was to lead. Now I think that was only half the dance. The other half is following: paying attention to what comes back and responding.