GOALS CAN FREAK YOU OUT

             "Make each day your masterpiece."
                                          ---John Wooden

   Here is a photo of our little Pineapple Princess (see earlier blog post) in a pumpkin patch enjoying life as it comes. She had no expectations prior to arriving at the patch. She just showed up and enjoyed life. No goals for her.

   Goals are great when used in their proper and highly limited way. But they can only do so much. And if you focus too much on the OUTCOME goal you want to achieve, that goal can turn on you ... like a former beloved house pet who has become a vicious, rabid dog.

    Soon the optimistic prospect of hitting that goal turns to fear ... fear of not achieving it. Soon the very sight of the goal becomes a downer---it reminds you that you are a failure, because you're so far away from achieving what you really want.

     And fear is not a good place to come from. I wrote a book about that recently, a book about how people can actually become fearless. But there is nothing in that book about doing it through the setting of huge outcome goals.

     Fear shuts down all playful, creative activity. Intuition disappears. We contract into a small self, like the trembling heart of a captive bird.

     So if you choose to set goals, use them wisely. Use them as game-setters, defining a winning score. But once you have done that, drop them. Like the booster rockets on the moon shot were dropped into the ocean. You don't take those rockets all the way to the moon, if you tried, you would die. Let your goals fall into the sea.

     Here's another way to look at it. Embrace the concept of process versus outcome. Process goals are all doable throughout your day. Like sending out three business proposals today, or doing 20 pushups. They are action items. You can ALWAYS achieve them, and feel the satisfaction and fulfillment of having done so. (And, paradoxically, they will get you to your OUTCOME faster than outcome goals will. Outcome goals push your outcome away from you.)

     If my outcome goal is to weigh 175 pounds by September 1, 2009, then I will want to go immediately to process. The outcome exists only to boost and inform the process.  What might my daily process goals be? To log 10,000 steps a day on my pedometer? To keep my caloric intake at a certain number in my food journal. To avoid all flour and sugar, just for today? To weigh myself daily? (What gets measured in life gets done.) All of this is process.

     Anyone can work a process. Anyone can do this for a day, and this day is all I have anyway, it's the only leverage point I can EVER operate from, if I am going to weigh 175 it will be because of something I do today. This is good news. The long-tern vision is intimidating. Today is not intimidating.

     This is a different version of what we have been talking about here before. Expectation versus agreement. Outcome goals set up expectations, which are nervous disorders in the human system. But process goals are simple agreements I make with myself. I've made a new CD-MP3 about this if you prefer AUDIO to reading, you can get Expectation versus Agreement here:  http://www.stevechandler.com/eBooks.html.

   

Comments

[Kyungwon]

Since you probably have no fucknig clue what 11 legitimate tournaments I'm talking about .I'll list them out for you. 1976 Canada Cup Canada won, 1980 CC CCCP won, 1984 CC Canada won, 1987 CC Canada won, 1991 World Cup Canada won, 1996 World Cup USA won, 1998 Olympics Czech won, 2002 Olympics Canada won, 2004 World Cup Canada won, 2006 Olympics Sweden won, 2010 Olympics Canada won. I think you got it backwards .Canada rape your hockey to dumb fuck.

[Sanjin]

This had to be said finally, and I'm glad you were the one who said it, Steve! Throughout the "self-help" genre this goal-setting thing has been treated so "mechanically"... It's a thin line between a commitment and obsession, and this is one of the subtleties I'm learning from your writings. It's impossible to become successful if one's not at ease with the very process of becoming successful.

[David]

In your book 100 ways to motivate, I recall you talking about setting big goals -- like Arnold Schwarzenegger did when he set about to be number 1 at the box office. How do you reconcile that with what you are saying here about goals freaking you out? Thanks