The Rhinoceros And The Unicorn (Revisiting Goals And Personal Responsibility)

The other day, Mary at A Merry Life wrote a blog post about having realistic expectations. She included this cartoon.

My heart broke for that little rhino. I related to him.

He will never be a unicorn, not because he doesn’t try, but because unicorns don’t even exist. And yet he hopes for a miracle transformation. On the surface, his goal seems lofty and ambitious, something for which he should be admired.

It is symbolic of the place in which I’ve been stuck over the past many months: “Who I am will never be good enough.”

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In the training I am taking, there’s discussion about goals. Yup. That big scary word from which I shy away. But here’s what I am learning: when it comes to goals, I had it all wrong.

The way I understood it, you set a goal and then you work towards achieving it. Sounds simple, right? Well, then why do I resist it with all my being? Why is it that the second I set a goal, I do the opposite of what’s needed to achieve it? Am I really that contrary and rebellious? Am I really that scared? Or was it that I was setting the wrong goals? Going after what I thought I should because other people do?

Well yes and no.

What I didn’t know is that there’s a important distinction when it comes to goals: big and small.

The goals that I think of as “big and hard and scary” (for example, losing weight and keeping it off forever, having buns of steel, or making a shit ton of money), are not big goals at all. Those are small goals.

If you’re like me, you’re thinking, WTF…if those are small goals I don’t even want to know what the big goals are. As it turns out, big goals are scary too, but they also excite and intrigue me in a way that the small goals do not.

Big goals = self-confidence, being able to trust myself, being able to express myself, having what I do be in alignment with who I am, being powerful in my own life so that I can give of myself powerfully, and so on.

The theory continues: when you work towards and achieve the big goals, you will achieve the small goals by default. In other words: personal power = metabolic power.

And here’s the thing: I already knew that. I’ve lived it.

But too many times (like right now) I’ve gotten caught up in thinking that the big goals are not possible until I reach the small ones, and I resist the small ones, so I might as well forget about the big ones and just shrink into obscurity.

So why have I been shying away from my personal power? On some level, even though I know it’s not true, there’s still a part of me that thinks (and we all know that thoughts become reality) I don’t deserve it and that it’s easier to shrink and not to shine.

The reasons behind this are certainly important and require acknowledgement, understanding, and compassion. I’ve been reading an excellent book about a family-related issue I’ve been grappling with for years. There are three parts: the first part describes the characteristics of the family issue and the various ways it plays out, the second part describes the impact of being raised in a family with this issue, and the third part is about how to heal and recover.

It wasn’t until I got to the third part that I realized that on some level I either wasn’t ready, or didn’t want to heal and move on…I was leaving out a crucial element of the process:

I conveniently forgot that I am the one who is telling my story, and that, ultimately, I am the one who gets to decide how it plays out, what it means, and how I feel about it.

This post isn’t going to end with me setting goals. This isn’t about fixing myself. It’s about moving on from here with the knowledge that there’s power in being a rhinoceros, in acknowledging reality and not in wishing I were a unicorn. And yes, there’s a much deeper meaning to this than what’s on the surface…it has nothing (much) to do with how I look on the outside.

My heart is not broken any more. I am not broken.