When Goals Aren't the Answer: Why Philosophical Guidance Offers What Coaching Cannot

Oct 22

When Achievement Becomes a Prison

Have you ever hit every target, checked every box, reached every goal—and still felt like something essential was missing? Perhaps you've worked with coaches who helped you clarify objectives, create action plans, and achieve measurable outcomes. You became more productive, more successful, more accomplished. Yet here you are, reading this, because despite all that forward momentum, you're still searching for something deeper.

What if the problem isn't that you haven't achieved enough? What if the relentless pursuit of goals and outcomes is actually preventing you from discovering what your soul is truly calling for?

If this resonates with you, you're not alone. You're experiencing what happens when we try to solve existential questions with strategic solutions—when we treat the soul's yearning for meaning as a productivity problem to be optimized. The confusion you feel isn't a sign that you need better goals or more accountability. It's your deeper intelligence signaling that it's time for a fundamentally different approach.

A Different Path Through Ancient Wisdom

I understand this struggle intimately. After fourteen years as a successful trial attorney and entrepreneur, I had mastered the art of achieving outcomes. I knew how to set goals, execute strategies, and win cases. I had the external markers of success that coaching promises to deliver. Yet I found myself profoundly disconnected from what actually mattered.

That crisis led me away from the modern fixation on goals and optimization toward ancient philosophical practices that have guided humans for thousands of years. Through my training as a certified philosophical counselor and my ongoing practice of these ancient methods, I've discovered a profound truth: sometimes the answer isn't to achieve more—it's to discover who you are beneath all the achieving.

At Useful Frames, we offer something fundamentally different from coaching. While coaches are often excellent at what they do, philosophical guidance addresses questions that goal-setting simply cannot reach.

Four Essential Differences Between Coaching and Philosophical Guidance

1. Present-Moment Discovery vs. Future-Focused Achievement

Coaching typically operates from a future-oriented framework. You identify where you want to be, create a roadmap to get there, and work systematically toward that predetermined destination. It's like planning a trip with a specific endpoint in mind—efficient, measurable, strategic. Coaches excel at helping you clarify goals, overcome obstacles, and maintain accountability. They're your strategic partners in achievement.

Philosophical guidance works differently. Instead of starting with where you want to go, we begin with where you actually are—right here, right now, in this moment. We explore what's presenting itself in your immediate experience, like examining the water you're currently swimming in rather than focusing on the distant shore.

Consider this: when you predetermine a destination, you're using your current understanding—which may be limited by the very patterns you're trying to transcend—to decide your future. It's like putting on red-tinted glasses and then choosing your path based on a world that appears entirely red. But what if removing those glasses reveals possibilities you couldn't even imagine from your current vantage point?

In our dialogues at Useful Frames, we practice what you might call "following without destination," i.e. listening in the moment and discovering together what wants to emerge. We trust that when you gain clarity about what's actually here now—your patterns, your assumptions, your deeper intelligence—the next steps reveal themselves organically. This isn't passive; it's profoundly active engagement with reality as it's actually unfolding rather than as we think it should unfold.

2. Exploring the Soul vs. Optimizing Performance

Coaching generally focuses on helping you perform better in various life domains—career, relationships, health, productivity. It's concerned with effectiveness, with helping you become a more successful version of who you already think you are. The underlying assumption is that you know what you want; you just need help getting there. This can be tremendously valuable when the issue really is execution.

Philosophical guidance recognizes that sometimes the problem isn't how to get what you want—it's that what you think you want may not be what your soul is actually calling for. We're not trying to make you a more efficient achiever; we're helping you discover whether achievement itself is the right medicine for what ails you.

Think about it this way: if you've spent your life climbing a ladder, coaching helps you climb faster and more efficiently. But philosophical guidance asks whether the ladder is even leaning against the right wall—or whether climbing ladders is what you're meant to be doing at all.

Through ancient practices adapted for modern life, we explore questions coaching rarely touches: Who are you when you're not achieving? What wants to emerge when you stop demanding predetermined outcomes? What is your soul trying to communicate through your dissatisfaction with success? These aren't problems to be solved but mysteries to be lived into.

3. Wisdom Traditions vs. Success Strategies

Coaching draws primarily from modern psychology, business theory, and success literature—valuable resources developed mostly in the last century. Coaches offer tools, frameworks, and strategies that have been proven to enhance performance and achievement in our contemporary context. They're experts in the science of success.

Philosophical guidance draws from wisdom traditions that have been refined over thousands of years—Socratic dialogue, Platonic inquiry, Stoic practices, Buddhist contemplation, Taoist philosophy. These aren't just old ideas; they're time-tested methods for human flourishing that address the perennial questions of existence: What does it mean to live well? How do we find meaning? Who are we beneath our roles and achievements?

When you engage in philosophical guidance at Useful Frames, you're not getting someone's latest productivity hack or achievement strategy. You're entering into practices that Socrates used in ancient Athens, that Marcus Aurelius employed while running an empire, that countless humans have turned to when success wasn't enough. These practices have endured because they address something fundamental in human nature—the soul's need for meaning, truth, and authentic expression.

4. Creating Space for Not-Knowing vs. Having the Answers

Coaching often positions the coach as someone who has answers, strategies, and solutions. They've walked the path and can show you the way. Many coaches brand themselves around their specific methodology or their own success story. This can be inspiring and helpful when what you need is guidance from someone who's achieved what you're seeking.

Philosophical guidance operates from a fundamentally different stance: the guide doesn't have your answers because the only answers worth anything are the ones you arrive at yourself. As a philosophical guide, I'm not removed from you like a strategic advisor; I'm involved in the dialogue as a fellow traveler, equally engaged in the mystery of existence.

This isn't passive listening—it's active participation in what I call the living mirror of dialogue. Like Socrates, who claimed to know nothing except that he knew nothing, a philosophical guide creates space for genuine discovery by not imposing predetermined solutions. We hold space for confusion, for not-knowing, for the pregnant pause before insight emerges.

In our work together, I won't tell you what your life means or what you should do next. Instead, through careful questioning and present-moment inquiry, I'll help you discover what you already know but have forgotten, what your deeper intelligence is trying to communicate, what wants to emerge when you stop forcing outcomes.

What's Lost When We Mistake the Medicine

Here's what's at stake: if you continue treating existential questions as achievement problems, the emptiness you feel will only deepen. You might hit more targets, optimize more systems, achieve more goals—but that hollow feeling, that sense that you're living someone else's life, will persist and grow.

Without addressing the soul's actual needs, you risk looking back with regret at a life lived for everything except what actually mattered to you. You might succeed brilliantly at climbing the wrong mountain. You could optimize yourself into a more efficient version of who you never wanted to be.

The confusion and disconnection you feel aren't failures of achievement—they're invitations to a different kind of exploration entirely. But if you keep taking the wrong medicine, the real ailment will remain untreated.

Your Soul Is Calling

If reading this has stirred something in you—a recognition, a longing, a sense that perhaps there's another way—then maybe it's time to try a different approach. Not because coaching is wrong, but because what you're experiencing might require a different kind of medicine altogether.

Schedule a free discovery call with Useful Frames. In this call, we'll explore whether philosophical guidance is right for where you are now. We won't set goals or create action plans. Instead, we'll engage in genuine dialogue about what's actually calling to you beneath the noise of achievement and expectation.

The Life That Emerges from Clarity

Imagine what becomes possible when you stop forcing yourself toward predetermined outcomes and instead learn to follow what wants to naturally emerge. Picture yourself making decisions not from conditioned patterns or external expectations, but from deep alignment with who you actually are.

This isn't about becoming less successful—it's about discovering what success means when it's rooted in your authentic self rather than borrowed definitions. It's about finding the courage to live from your deepest values, even when that path looks different from what anyone expected.

When you gain clarity about who you are beneath the roles and achievements, when you learn to trust your deeper intelligence rather than just your strategic mind, life becomes something more than a series of goals to accomplish. It becomes a creative unfolding, a dialogue with reality itself, a journey of discovering not just what you can achieve, but who you can become when you stop demanding that you be anything other than what you truly are.

Your bounty awaits you—not at some future destination, but here, now, in the willingness to explore what your soul has been trying to tell you all along.

Ready to explore the difference philosophical guidance can make? Schedule your free discovery call at Useful Frames today and discover what becomes possible when you approach your life with genuine curiosity about who you are beneath the achievement.

James McKenzie