As leaders, and as individuals, we spend a fair amount of time on the “if only” or “when this happens.” You know what I’m talking about. It’s that goal, that target we put out there. It’s the moment when we will have achieved what we believe we need to achieve to get to whatever it is we see as the next step. We play that game in our personal life. We think “my life will fall into line when . . . and the answer can be anything from the car we drive to the number we see on our bathroom scale. If we can just do that or be that, all will be well—or even perfect. You know the drill, right? I sure do.

We do the same thing professionally. When this new project gets off the ground or the new building is built or the target numbers are all in line, that’s when everything will come together for us. We set out these markers and we believe that, achieving them, will somehow find us in that space of we’ve wanted to be in, that reaching the top of our very own “Mount Everest” will mean that our world is truly and forever changed.

In our rational brain, if we pause and listen to it, we know that reaching that objective, whatever it is, may give us a moment of exhilaration but it is often followed by let down. The world has not shifted on its axis because we reached that target. We made it to the top of Everest but then what? That moment we longed for is fleeting and it ends. The dramatic “parting of the heavens” just did not happen. We did it. It’s done. And now, well, what happens next is the real question.

We can spend a lot of time hanging those new targets out in front of ourselves. I am the first to say that we want to keep moving forward and achieving, learning and growing. But the frame we need to change is the one we put around those targets. Each goal is a step on our journey but not the end in itself. The importance we put on each is not “this will change my life” but, rather, this is a continuation of my path, of my quest.

Where we need to find wholeness is in ourselves, to understand that we are fully enough, now and going forward. We are perfect and imperfect, we are flawed and we are flawless. But we are, with all our strengths and our deficits, truly whole and need to accept ourselves as such. Our growth, our achievement may make us a greater whole, a different whole but we are who we are meant to be. Making peace with that, accepting ourselves, enables us to not just feel whole but to be whole and to bring that truly “whole” self to the world around us.