What if the answer is not the outcome, the outcome is only the product of the journey we follow?

Think of the thing you most wanted to achieve this week. Imagine all the effort you’ve put in to achieve it. What has it taken for you to get to where you want to be? How does it feel to get to that outcome? 

Now imagine the thing you were aiming for was an Olympic gold medal. The culmination of working towards weekly, monthly, and yearly milestones and targets.

This week you’ve won that medal. Right now you’re on the podium, the weight of the gold disc hanging around your neck, yours, forever, as the anthem plays. Your anthem, the anthem of the winner, the gold medallist, echoing around the stadium as all your loved ones are watching you, sharing this moment, the product of years of effort from you, years of support from others, years of personal sacrifice. 

Tears come to your eyes at this moment, the culmination of so much. For this moment is a moment you’ve been working towards for so long.

What would it feel like to be on your podium, reaching the pinnacle of your aspirations? 

What if those tears were in fact tears of sadness?

Sadness that it isn’t what you had expected. 

There is no elation - maybe a bit of relief -  but mainly the overwhelming feeling is the underwhelming thought that: ‘this is it’. This is what all the effort and struggle and sacrifice were for. Just this. 

Quickly that thought begins to ask ‘and what next?’ 

The outcome and the journey there

This is a similar story that struck me listening to high-performance psychologist Dr Michael Gervais on the ‘I am’ podcast. An athlete he was coaching, came to him, having shed tears through the anthems, the gold medal gleaming around their neck. Yet the tears were because they thought it would be different, and still they are the same person, with the same struggles. 

While the product of more than a week, the story highlights how easily our sights can be set on a destination not only at all cost but as the answer. Everything will be how I want it to be when I get there.

Yet, as the example shows the answer is never the outcome, the outcome is only the product of the process we follow.

Without a sense of the quality of the outcome and so the quality and approach we need to take in the process, it can be incredibly easy to get stuck on just getting there. In doing so we not only miss the experience of the journey, but there probably wont even be where we want to be. 

The outcome as the answer is like a squirrel stock-piling nuts never to really be full or nourished. They can show you their vast nut store but there will still be something missing for them, something that one more nut will never solve. 

Exploring the journey rather than the outcome

If we were to return to the thing you wanted to achieve, or put ourselves back on the podium, in an ideal world how would you like the process of reaching that milestone to be? 

What are the qualities you want to cultivate on the way? 

What are you really trying to achieve? 

How does that differ from what it often feels like week to week when you reach an outcome? 

Now consider what you want to achieve this month, this year, and this decade. What will it be like based on what it typically feels like week to week compared to how you’d like it to feel?

It may be cliche to say the destination is the journey but there is real truth to this. 

If we step back and consider the achievements we’re aiming for they are always stepping stones, points in time. What happens after we’ve won that gold medal, gained that promotion or just sent this one last email? What next? Where next? We’re still the same person.

If we take this to its end point, the only ultimate, set destination (as far as we know) is death. In this context Carl Rogers’ framing of death as the culmination of life is really powerful. It is the only destination on a much longer journey, the achievements and personal milestones are merely pit stops on the way.

As we climb that final podium, what would we like that culmination to feel like? 

Best bets are that it isn’t tears of disappointment. 

So what would we like working towards what we want to feel like today, tomorrow, everyday? 

What can we alter in our approach - how we go about things - that will more likely bring about those qualities we want to experience when we reach those personal pinnacles? 

For if we don’t ever reach those outcomes, which we can never fully control anyway, we always have the experience of the journey we have travelled. 

What will that journey bring us that the outcome may never give us?

And when our focus is on the journey, what are the things we are willing to try where our fear of not reaching the outcome no longer matters?

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References

I Am podcast with Johnny Wilkinson, I Am... Dr Michael Gervais on the Mind and Human Performance

Carl Rogers, Ways of Being