If you’re a coach (or a manager, the coaches of the business world) let me ask you if the following scenario sounds familiar to you. You sit down at the outset of a year with one of your charges, and you’ve asked them to present you with a list of goals. Perhaps, to take it to the next step, they’ve also given some thought to the process that they will use to try and achieve those outcomes.
While you listen, you can’t shake a certain sensation; that what they’re presenting to you is not an honest distillation of their future vision for themselves. Instead, they are placating your, perhaps even patronizing you. They’re not telling you what they want, they’re telling you what they think you want to here. Or what someone else wants for them.
Recently, in the course of continuing to compete into my 40s, I’m viewing my own goals through a new lens. I don’t think I ever quite understood how much social pressure I felt with goal setting. It has been consistently a challenge to separate what I want from what I think I’m supposed to want.
And so, I’m proposing a simple yet challenging thesis. Your goals are for you. They’re not for your coach, your parents, your peers or anyone else. They’re for you. I want to explore what that actually means and how you can work to cleave your actual goals off from the expectations you imply the world is giving you.
Publicize For Accountability
One thing that had a real moment in the popular perception of goal setting was the idea that you should shout your goal from the rooftops. The theory went that by doing so, you would create a system of public accountability. By having told other people what you aim to achieve, you would be more likely to follow through on the steps to make that possibility fact.
I’m not here to tell you whether or not publicizing your goals will work. What I will say, is that there is a very particular factor in whether or not it is likely to have the effect you want it to have, and it has to do with how you perceive accountability.
Many people, myself included all too frequently, view accountability as a very black and white matter. To be accountable is to absolutely ensure an outcome in this reading. Or, put in other words, accountability means you NEED to do it.
Now I’ve discussed ad nauseam in other blogs (and presentations) the motivational difference between needing to do something and wanting to do something, so I’ll be quick. Need creates urgency, and behind that urgency is fear.
So this is where many people end up when they publicize their goals. They actually create an even bigger feeling of urgency, of fear for themselves than previously existed. Fear based motivational systems can “work” in the very near term but inevitably collapse in on themselves in the long term.
Your success with publicizing what you want to achieve will then, in my opinion, be largely determined by whether that system of accountability is black or white or shades of gray. If its black or white, I think you’ll find yourself collapsing sooner than later.
If you’re into the gray, which I’ll describe in a moment, I think you may be helping yourself. If your idea of accountability is that you want to give yourself a better chance at achievement, that you believe other people knowing what you’re trying to do will help you, then I think you’re in the gray.
Goals enhance
I’ve had the same goal in swimming for the last 21 years. My junior year in college I swam a 1:00.8 in the 100 yard breaststroke. Any person in swimming knows what my goal the next year was: to go under 1:00.
The closest I’ve come in the last decade was a year ago, when I swam 1:03.55 at USMS Nationals. So, even at my current level, I have a way to go. Most of the time for swimmers past 40 (heck even 30) times only go in one direction.
I’m holding onto my goal because I’ve realized that having it for me is very motivating, and I put less and less emotional weight into whether I actually do it and more into how it leads me to act. Having that ambitious goal gets me up six days a week to put in work, whether it’s in my home gym, the pool or out on the roads surrounding my house.
So I would never say that it “doesn’t matter” whether I achieve it or not. Of course I actually WANT to do the thing I set out to do. It’s just that I know that I can do some really amazing things and not achieve it, and I can also probably do some self-destructive things and achieve it. If you ask to me to choose, I’d rather do the former.
So what matters truly is not the achievement but the way that having the goal changes my thinking and then the resulting behavior from that thinking. So I guess what I mean to say is that goals are meant to enhance your processes, not further your over-focus on outcomes.
Ultimately, your goals are for you. I have goals that, if I probably think about (or pay attention) many of my peers think are silly. “Chris, why are you still trying to break a minute in your 40s? Move on!” they might say. But my goals are not for THEM, they’re for me. And that’s all that matters.