Aim for the Target, Not the Trophy: How to Build a Life Around What Matters

Issue 181, August 21, 2026 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

There’s something about transitions that makes us want to figure everything out: I want to know now how things are going to play out!

What should my new routine look like? What should I be doing differently? How am I going to make this work? What do I need to change?

Those are useful questions. But I’ve come to believe there’s a more important question underneath all of them:
 

What am I actually trying to create?

This month, we’ve been talking about transitions and resetting routines. We started by looking at how even difficult or unwanted transitions can create opportunities we couldn’t have anticipated. Then we explored how transitions can change the way we see ourselves (our identity) and help us become more recognizable to ourselves.

Now I want to talk about what happens when we begin building what comes next.

Because one of the things I’ve learned is that it’s very easy to organize your life around what you’re trying to avoid rather than what you actually want. And if you want to live a life on purpose, it makes much more sense to focus on what you want than on what you don’t want. “What are you going toward?” not “What are you going away from?”

When your focus is on what you don’t want

I never realized how much of my life was oriented around what I didn’t want until I got into recovery.

I’d done a ton of personal development work before that, and I’m a very introspective person. But recovery helped me see how much time I spent imagining worst-case scenarios, replaying difficult events from the past, anticipating future problems, and trying to prevent other people from being unhappy with me.

In other words, my attention was constantly going outward.

What is she/he/they thinking? What are all the shitty things that could happen? What are the 50 million things I can do to prevent those things from happening? How do I contort myself so they won’t be disappointed? What can go wrong, how do I prevent it and what do I do if something does go wrong??

I didn’t understand then that you can’t create internal safety by focusing externally.

For much of my life, my “gravitational pull” was outside of me. I was paying far more attention to other people’s feelings, opinions, reactions, expectations, and needs than I was to my own internal experience. In fact, I often wasn’t paying any attention at all to my internal experience.

That’s one reason transitions can be so difficult. They destabilize us. When the familiarity of our lives changes, we often become even more focused on trying to predict and control what’s going to happen next than on the present moment and our internal world.

But uncertainty doesn’t just contain the possibility that something will go wrong.
 

In uncertainty lies hope.

Every good thing that has ever happened to us also came out of a future we couldn’t predict.

So rather than using all our energy trying to prevent an unwanted future, we can start asking what kind of future we want to move toward.

Aim for the target, not the trophy

Years ago, I heard a metaphor from Tad Hargrave of Marketing for Hippies that stayed with me:
 

The archer focuses on the target she wants to hit, not the trophy she’s trying to earn.

Imagine an archer standing there with her bow and arrow, but instead of looking at the target, she’s staring at the trophy sitting off to the side.

She really wants that trophy. But if she’s looking at the trophy instead of the target, she’s probably not going to hit the target.

The trophy is the result. It’s not where you aim.

I can see now how often I used to aim at trophies. I wanted people to like me. I wanted people to think I was a good person. I wanted approval (but I honestly didn’t even realize that’s what was motivating me). I wanted relationships to work out. I wanted other people to be happy with me.

And because those were the outcomes I was focused on, I tried to control them.

I said yes when I really wanted to say no. I pretended things were okay when they weren’t. I did things I didn’t particularly like because somebody else liked them. I morphed myself around other people and then eventually resented them for the shape I’d contorted myself into.

Years after I stopped drinking alcohol, I realized I hadn’t even developed my own preference for what beverages I liked to drink. I drank what the person I was dating drank.

That’s how much of Barb was up for negotiation.

Now I can see that it wasn’t simply that I needed better boundaries – I needed a stronger relationship with myself.

Boundaries helped me find the target

Boundary building was one of the ways I developed that relationship.
For a long time, I thought boundaries were primarily about figuring out what I would and wouldn’t tolerate. But eventually I realized that the way I knew where I needed boundaries was by paying attention to what mattered to me.

If health matters to you, you build your life in ways that support, promote and uphold your value for health. If family matters to you, you make choices about your time that allow you to be present with your family. If creativity matters to you, you need room in your life to create. If rest matters to you, you can’t continually give away every available hour and hope rest somehow happens.

That’s why I’ve often described boundary building as living on purpose.

But I’d like to expand on that now. Living on purpose isn’t only about setting boundaries around what matters. It’s about becoming internally oriented enough to know what matters in the first place.

That means learning to hear yourself clearly. It means noticing what you want, what you need, what you value, what feels right to you, and what doesn’t. It means taking your internal signals seriously instead of automatically overriding them because someone else wants something different.

The boundary is sometimes the action that comes afterward. The deeper work is staying connected to yourself long enough to know what action you want to take.

Transitions give us a chance to choose again

This is one reason transitions can be so valuable.

When our circumstances change, our routines often have to change with them. And while that can be inconvenient or uncomfortable, it also gives us an opportunity we don’t always get when life is running on autopilot.

We get to reconsider what we’re aiming at.

A routine that worked beautifully three years ago may not fit who you are today. Something you once believed you had to do may no longer matter to you. Something you used to tolerate may now feel completely unacceptable. Something you didn’t value enough to make time for may have become one of your highest priorities.

That doesn’t mean the old version of you was wrong. It means you’ve changed.

The temptation during a transition is to recreate stability as quickly as possible. We want to get the new schedule figured out, establish the new routines, and feel settled again.

But before you start rebuilding everything, it may be worth asking:
 

What do I want this next version of my life to support?

Not: How do I make sure nobody is disappointed in me? Or how do I prove I can handle all of this? Or how do I keep everything exactly the way it was before circumstances changed?

And not even: What should my new routine be?

Start with the target: 

Who do I want to be in this season of my life? 
What matters to me now? 
How do I want to feel in my own life? 
What relationships do I want to nurture? 
What do I want more room for? 
What am I no longer willing to sacrifice?

Then you can begin building routines, boundaries, and choices that support those answers.

You don’t have to control the outcome (in fact, you can’t)

There’s another important difference between how I understood this years ago and how I understand it today. Focusing on what you want doesn’t mean that if you think positively enough, you’ll somehow attract exactly what you want into your life. We don’t have that kind of control.

You can aim carefully and still miss. You can communicate clearly and someone can misunderstand you. You can be thoughtful and dependable and someone can dislike you. You can make a wise decision and have an outcome you didn’t anticipate.

The point isn’t to guarantee the trophy. The point is to know where you’re aiming.

If I want healthy relationships, my target isn’t getting someone to stay. My target is showing up honestly, communicating what’s OK and not OK with me, staying connected to myself, and allowing the other person to decide what they’re going to do with that.

If I want a meaningful life, my target isn’t making sure everything works out the way I planned. It’s making choices that are consistent with what matters to me.

If I want internal safety, my target isn’t creating a life in which nobody ever gets upset with me and nothing uncertain ever happens. It’s becoming someone who knows she can have her own back when those things happen.

That distinction has changed everything for me. I’m much less interested these days in controlling the trophy. I want to keep my eyes on the target.

And when life changes, as it inevitably will, I can ask myself again: What matters to me now? What am I trying to create? And what would it look like to build my life around that?

Maybe that’s one of the greatest gifts transitions give us. They interrupt the life we’ve been living long enough for us to decide whether it’s still the life we want to build.

Want to go deeper?

If this brought something up for you, spend a few minutes thinking about the transition you’re in right now, even if it seems relatively small.

Ask yourself:

What am I currently organizing my life around avoiding?

What do I actually want instead?

What matters to me in this season that may not have mattered as much before?

If I stopped focusing on the trophy, what would my target be?

Your answers can tell you a lot about the routines, choices, and boundaries that belong in whatever comes next.