In NLP there are four conditions for well-formed goals:
- Goals need to be stated positively, i.e. you have to figure out what you want rather than what you don’t want.
- You need to know what you feel, hear, see, smell and/or taste when you reach your goal. Otherwise you might achieve your goal without knowing it.
- You need to be able to achieve your goal yourself.
- Your goal needs to be okay for you, your loved ones and your environment.
‘Nothing too much!’ – How often the individual is advised to set himself a goal that he cannot reach and is beyond his strength, so that he will at least reach that which his strength is capable of when put to the farthest stretch! But is this really so desirable? Must even the best performers who live according to this teaching, and their best performances, not acquire something exaggerated and distorted precisely because there is too much tension in them? And when as a result one sees nothing but struggling athletes, tremendous efforts, and nowhere a laurel-crowned and triumphant victor, does that not envelop the world in a grey veil of failure?
Daybreak paragraph 559
It is a mistake to think that NLP is about peak experience. NLP is about feeling good for most of the time.
It is not the strength, but the duration of high feelings that makes great men.
Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 72
Lofty Moods. — It seems to me that most men do not believe in lofty moods, unless it be for the moment, or at the most for a quarter of an hour, — except the few who know by experience a longer duration of high feeling. But to be absolutely a man with a single lofty feeling, the incarnation of a single lofty mood — that has hitherto been only a dream and an enchanting possibility: history does not yet give us any trustworthy example of it. Nevertheless one might also some day produce such men — when a multitude of favorable conditions have been created and established, which at present even the happiest chance is unable to throw together. Perhaps that very state which has hitherto entered into our soul as an exception, felt with horror now and then, may be the usual condition of those future souls: a continuous movement between high and low, and the feeling of high and low, a constant state of mounting as on steps, and at the same time reposing as on clouds.
Gay Science paragraph 288
Having much joy. – He who has much joy in his life must be a good man: but he is perhaps not the cleverest, even though he has attained precisely that which the cleverest man strives after with all his cleverness.
Human, All Too Human, part 2, paragraph 48