#also in short a lot of tarot 'rules' you run into are bullshit

[starryandthetarot]

I've seen an influx of people asking this over on tarot reddit

But in short there's nothing wrong with buying your first tarot deck yourself the whole 'you must be gifted it' superstition is a fairly modern invention and means nothing

Also please do not steal your first deck as I've seen people claim thats a thing and just don't

[hillbillyoracle]

Pre-Goal/Anti-Goal Planning

So in preparation for the New Year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make next year go a little better than last. After a lot of journaling and note taking I eventually came up with 3 rules, 3 roles, and 3 values that I want to run any goals or projects through before taking them on. I realized this year that I set a lot of goals that didn’t really get me closer to anything meaningful. It just sounded nice to have done them. And I think that can work in a lot of cases, but I needed something more.

Alexandria asked me to write about how I came up with them so she could try. So I asked if I could make it a shareable post and here we are.

I hope this makes sense to other people. Right now it just seems like some vague thing in my head that might only resonate with me but I want to put it out in case it helps someone else. Just know it’s a little convoluted and more of an exercise in showing my work than a complete system.

I made a worksheet if you want to follow along because of course I did.

Here are my notes (sorry for potato quality):

What are you searching for?

I started with this question and sat with it for a while. I felt like I’d been spinning my wheels this year and not getting very far and it wasn’t for lack of vision. I realized a big part of why I felt so stuck is because I was using other people’s measuring sticks and I had no clue what one tailored to me would even look like.

So I wrote down what I was looking for – “How to accomplish more and be successful by my own standards?���

What are you looking for?

I like the solution focused question that gets used a lot for this – if you woke up tomorrow and the main thing you’re struggling with was fixed, how would you know? What would be different about your life?

For me, I realized I would feel less anxious about my self-worth, have work that I both enjoy doing and feels meaningful, and know how to do it.

What are my standards?

This made me realize I had no internal sense of what my standards of meaningfulness were despite clearly feeling like something wasn’t going as I wanted. So I took time to jot down notes from the sources of self-reflection and self-knowledge I’ve been working with lately – the Enneagram, Sidereal Astrology, and Meyers-Briggs.

I was specifically looking for similarities but also differences – conflicting desires are a bitch to resolve.

Other sources might be tarot readings, other forms of divination, notes from therapy, asking your friends what they think your greatest strengths and weaknesses are, etc. Whatever data you’ve got here, throw it in the pile.

I want to have a life that is…

Here I just jotted down what I felt like I was most craving in my life at the moment. I wrote down “interesting, spiritual, rich/full, and growing”

This was interesting for me because I realized I keep setting goals that don’t bring me closer to those things. I keep setting goals to like run a half marathon or going hiking more or finish my degree and get a real job but none of those things actually gives me what I’m craving.

The gap between my cravings and my goals was very eye opening here.

Values and Roles

This is the section where I really wanted to dig in and make it more actionable. I started by listing my greatest values and what I want to embody – courageous, creative, curious, and caring.

I then translated those into archetypal roles – what role do I fill when I embody this value fully?

And then I answered the question - what does a person in this role do?

So it became:

Courageous – The Challenger – to unblock

Creative – The Dreamer – to elevate

Curious – The Analyst – to discover

Caring – The Teacher – to share

I later shrunk this down to three roles and values because I felt like there was a lot of overlap between creative and curious for me personally. I also think my courage comes from caring deeply. The way I think of the roles is that they are my higher self in a language I can better understand. I have this internal sense of that higher self, but I need to have a language for it if I’m going to apply it more practically. I’ve often thought of my higher self as a warrior engineer or a warrior healer. Parsing it out like this is more helpful for some reason though.

Mission

This helped me come up with a short mission statement – they’re cheesy I know – to succinctly describe all the thinking I’d been doing so I could come back to it later.

“My mission is to discover new methods and ideas, unblock barriers to access, and to elevate the everyday.”

I also wrote down ideas for what I would do if I were trying to fulfill each part of it:

Discover – read widely, learn, experiment

Unblock – teach for free

Elevate – create what I want to see in the world

Rules

I don’t really have good notes on how I came up with the rules. For me they seemed like a natural extension. I wanted some sort of contract with myself that would bring me closer to what I’m craving in my life but leave room open to interpretation.

What I came up with were

1)     Don’t be boring

2)     Write the book you want to read

3)     Live in the yellow

All of these are pretty personal and are tied to memories with strong emotions that I think will help me implement them.

For this section I would just say, what are three ways you don’t want to let yourself down?

Be realistic and don’t let your inner critic in on the conversation here if you can help it.

Okay but why do all this? Why not goals?

I wanted to know why I was setting goals before I went to set goals. I’ve been relying too heavily on other people’s ideas of success and because of my disability and just where I am in life I realized that I need to majorly confront those ideas before setting the same dusty old able-bodied neurotypical goals.

But I also wanted something where if I didn’t check anything off my goal list - I’d still feel good about this year, in case it gets really intense like 2018 did. In that way, it’s kind of anti-goals. The goals are really just here to inspire me this way. 

Every goal that even makes it on my list will get filtered through the values, roles, and rules – in that order. They will need to align with my values, fulfill the functions of my roles, and abide by my rules.

Every goal I set this year will get filed into a system based on priority. It’s inspired partially by Caitlin Scott’s ideas about picking 5 things that if you got them done you’d look back on and go hey that was a good year. It’s also inspired by something amending-death introduced me to – Esme Wang’s productivity journaling with limitations, her 1-3-6 list in particular – which they describe as follows:

So while I still need to work my way through the author’s writings on this system, I want to sort my goals into a similar system. I will have my one goal that I will put most of my energy into and the rest will follow. Where I put them will depend on how well they line up with what would make me look back on this year and go “that was a good year”.

Here are some I’ve brainstormed in the last few days and the finished Values/Roles/Rules reference.

Conclusion

I hope this was at least interesting to folks.

Let me know if any parts of this were particularly helpful and if you know of anyone’s work that’s similar to this please connect me. I would love to read more in this vein that isn’t steeped in capitalist productivity cult bullshit.

Here’s the worksheet link again.

As always, take what is useful and leave the rest!

All the best!