Almost everyone arrives with a goal. Make the decision. Steady the confidence that keeps leaking. Start the chapter that won't start. The goal is real, and we take it seriously — it is the reason you came.
But here is what I've watched happen, again and again. As your awareness grows, the goal quietly changes shape. It turns out to have been a doorway, not a destination — the way in to something larger that was waiting behind it.
A man once came to me wanting to motivate his team. We followed that goal inward, and on the other side of it he found the real ground of his growth: learning to say "no" in a close relationship without losing it — something he had struggled with his whole life, at home and at work. One conversation. The goal hadn't been wrong; it had been the door. Once it opened, the larger room was obvious.
This is what presence does. A goal is something the mind reaches for — out ahead, in the future, where the one I call Exploity loves to live. Presence brings you back to what is actually here, now, in the body — and from here you can see the whole room the goal was only the entrance to. You stop chasing the goal and start meeting the life it was pointing at.
This is the heart of why I built Somatic Thinking. Not to help you reach a target faster — plenty of methods do that — but to raise your awareness until you can see past the edges of your own goal. A goal achieved leaves you exactly where you aimed. A goal understood opens a door you didn't know was there.
There is a deeper reason I hold goals this way, and it comes from my faith. In Islam we believe a person is made to strive — the striving is ours to give — but the results are not finally ours; they are God's to grant, a provision already written. It is easy to decide our goal is the best outcome we could reach, to clasp it tightly, and to grieve as if we had failed when it doesn't arrive. Yet the Qur'an teaches us that we may dislike a thing that is good for us, and love a thing that is not. So often the good truly meant for us sits just outside the goal we set — because we only ever aim at what we already know to want. Striving with presence doesn't cling to the goal; it uses our aim as a starting point, and then — present with what is actually unfolding — we often find that what is meant for us lies in another direction, and we change course, and change the goal. You don't have to share my faith to feel this; but it is where the idea is rooted for me, and I won't pretend otherwise.
And notice: nothing is added to you in this. The larger thing was already yours. We don't install a better goal; we widen the frame until you see what you were really after. You do the knowing.
So bring your goal — by all means, bring it. Just hold it a little more loosely than usual. In Somatic Thinking, the goal is where we begin, never where we stop. It is a doorway to enter, not a destination to arrive at.
When you're ready, the door is open.
Where to next?
- Read on: The Perceptual Spheres →
- Experience it: book a session →
- Become the coach: Somatic Thinking Coaching Education (STCE) →
Somatic Thinking was created by Samer Hassan and first set down in Coaching Presence (Dr. Tünde Erdős, Open University Press / McGraw-Hill, 2021) — a book built on Dr. Erdős's pioneering doctoral research into coaching presence.
