My job as a mental trainer would not be possible without the notion of goals. The ability to set and achieve new goals, as much as opposable thumbs and upright posture, is what makes us human. Of course, some of us do a better job than others. That’s what we’ll focus on in this stage of your Hell Week preparation—learning how to create goals that are rooted in your value system and aimed at your highest levels of need.
To begin, let me share one of my favorite lessons from philosophy class.
The professor stood before his students with various objects on the desk in front of him. Without saying a word, he lifted up a large, empty mayonnaise jar and filled it to the brim with golf balls.
“Is the jar full?” he asked. The class answered yes.
Next, the professor lifted a canister containing pebbles and poured them into the mayonnaise jar. He shook the jar lightly, and the pebbles rolled down into the spaces between the golf balls.
Again he asked if the jar was now full. Again, his students replied that it was.
The professor picked up a container of sand and poured it into the jar. The grains of sand filled the remaining spaces in the jar. He asked if the jar was now full, and the students gave an unequivocal yes.
The professor now fetched a large cup of coffee from underneath the desk and poured the contents into the jar with the sand. The coffee filled the spaces around the grains of sand. The students laughed.
“Now,” said the professor, “I want you to consider that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things—family, friends, health, your greatest passions—all the things that, even if you lost everything else, would nevertheless make life worthwhile. The pebbles represent all the other things that mean something in life—your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else—the favorite pair of shoes, the TV show you love to watch on Sunday night.”
The professor went on: “If you pour the sand into the jar first, you will not have room for the pebbles and the golf balls. That’s how it is in life as well. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have time for the things that are really meaningful to you. So pay attention to the things that are essential for your own happiness. Play with your children. Attend your regular health checkups. Take your spouse to a romantic dinner. You will always have time to buy new clothes or watch TV. Be clear about your priorities, because all the rest is only sand.”
One of the students put up his hand and asked what the coffee represented. The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked that question,” he said. “It shows quite clearly that no matter how crowded and hectic your life appears, there is always room for a cup of coffee with a friend.”
I love this story because the mayonnaise jar captures the incredibly multifaceted nature of modern life, with all its golf balls, pebbles, and grains of sand. And it points to the imperative for priorities. If you don’t devise a strategy for organizing your goals, you will almost certainly run into a state of paralysis. This is such a common human condition. Despite our innate capacity for change and self-improvement, all too often we don’t realize what’s possible because we’re frozen with fear and indecision. The only way to break out of this is to think long and hard about the aspects of your life that matter most, and separate out the distractions. This is very active thinking that I’m asking you to do—whatever you need to do to access that level of deep, meditative concentration. Some people actually meditate, while others go for long walks or sit down at a café with a pen and pad. There’s no right or wrong method, but you do have to commit.
I often talk of the process in terms of “cracking your code” with my clients. I get them to conduct a self-assessment to increase their self-awareness and determine where they are in relation to where they want to be in life. Many of them haven’t taken a step back from their lives in years, if not decades, so the process enables them to put their lives into perspective in surprisingly quick fashion.
From there they can start to draw a map of their life, identifying goals that intersect with their true values. Consider the CEOs who lament not spending enough time with their children. Walking away from their company and their career probably isn’t an option (though I suppose it does happen on occasion). That leaves them with two basic options: either they learn methods for coping with their guilty conscience or they develop strategies for setting aside more time for their family.
It’s important to think both short and long term. Tennis great Andre Agassi said he never thought of grand slams or his next big match when he woke up in the morning. What he thought instead was, When I go to bed in the evening, I am going to be proud of myself. He was—and still is, I’m sure—conscious of this every day, and as a result he’s someone who always goes to bed, if not happy, at least satisfied. And of course he’s had his share of victories throughout his storied career.
The novelist Lars Saabye Christensen talks similarly about his writing process. When you’re in the thick of a big, complex novel, he says, it’s no use thinking of the whole of the novel each time you sit down to write: “It’s not feasible, neither physically nor mentally. That’s why I always set up small goals for myself. I don’t think to myself that I’ll sit here for three years and write four hundred pages. I would be paralyzed. But I tell myself, now my main character is getting up, and I have to pick out clothes for him, then he will descend the stairs and walk out into the street, maybe he meets someone there.” Completing the novel is the ultimate goal, but along the way he sets smaller benchmarks.
Make your goal as concise and concrete as possible. I had a client, a high-powered lawyer in his midforties with a beautiful family—the kind of guy who seems to have it all. And yet, something was missing. I started our first session by asking him the usual questions about his life. There really wasn’t anything wrong that he could point to, just a general malaise that so many of us experience.
Then I asked him to tell me about the last time he could remember being truly happy. He thought for a few seconds and then told me that he was last happy when he was first starting out at the law firm where he was now partner.
“How would you describe your life at that time?” I asked him.
He talked about the long hours and the difficulty of absorbing so much new information and other stuff that didn’t actually sound so pleasant. I pointed this out to him. “Yeah, but it was great being in the trenches with the other associates,” he said. “Plus I had such a clear goal,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
“Exactly,” I said. He looked at me and the lightbulb went off, and we went on to work together on creating a new set of goals for him to work toward, using the techniques that follow.
Be as specific as possible. It’s one thing to say you want to make a lot of money. It’s another to say you want to be worth X million dollars by the time you reach a certain age. The more specific the goal, the more likely you are to reach it, because you’ll be able to formulate a concrete strategy. To use a simpler example than making a lot of money—which usually requires years of effort—let’s take the example of physical fitness. Declaring that you want to get in shape is unlikely to yield meaningful results. But if you say you want in six months to lose twenty pounds or run a 10K race, you’ll be able to create a plan for hitting those targets. It’s always a good idea to put your goals in writing so they become a kind of contract with yourself.
Dare to dream. In due course, it’s important that your goals feel realistic, that they’re actually within the limits of your capabilities. But to start off, I don’t want you to worry too much about this, because you may not actually be the best judge of what’s possible. I see this with people all the time. They set their sights too low, either because they lack confidence or because they haven’t taken the time to truly investigate all the possibilities available to them. As we work through the process, goals that they thought were well beyond their reach start to seem attainable. Don’t be afraid to think big in the beginning.
Create a time frame. Goals should always be grounded in some kind of time frame. Otherwise, there won’t be any sense of urgency or accountability, and you’ll find that weeks or months slip by without any action. To use the fitness example, if you give yourself six months to lose those twenty pounds, you’ll be able to monitor your progress and reinforce the goal with each pound you shed.
Break it up. It’s important to create concrete criteria for measuring progress toward your goal. Think of the football players moving down the field toward the end zone. With every first down they reach, the chains move forward, and their confidence builds. Building subtargets into your goal will make it seem more attainable and provide that sense of forward progress.
I once worked with a sales executive who wanted to start a business and be his own boss. But he had a wife and kids, a mortgage and car payments—all the usual trappings—so the prospect of quitting his stable, well-paying, benefits-rich job was more than he could stomach. Instead of his taking that one giant step, we worked out a strategy where he would first launch a smaller version of the business on the side, while still holding down his current job. That enabled him to take small steps toward the goal—launching the website, coming up with a marketing plan, building a customer base, etc. Slowly but surely, the side business grew until it could support him and his family, at which point it became his full-time occupation. Today it’s a thriving business and he’s achieved his goal of self-employment. But he never would have gotten there if he hadn’t broken the goal into bite-sized chunks.
Share your vision. This isn’t the first time in this book that I advocate sharing, and it won’t be the last either. Very few people can live their best possible life in a vacuum. And I assure you that no one ever completed Hell Week, be it the military or civilian version, by themselves. When it comes to goals, making yourself accountable to colleagues, family, or friends is a great motivator. As you reach subtargets, they’ll cheer you along, and if you experience setbacks, they’ll be there to provide encouragement or that much-needed shot in the arm.
Be willing to sacrifice. A truly worthy goal will compel you to give something up. You have to be willing to accept the consequences. If you want to become a leader in your field, the time and energy needed to achieve that goal are going to have to come from some other aspect of your life. This process turns into a kind of virtuous cycle. The more sacrifices you make and the more of yourself you invest, the more motivation you feel to reach the next milestone toward your ultimate goal.
Stay the course. Ultimately, you are the only person who can make your goals happen. There will be setbacks and bumps in the road. Remember to embrace adversity and recognize that it is part of the larger journey. More than talent or intelligence or people skills, your willingness to persevere will determine whether you reach your goals or not.
In addition to staying the course, you need to go all out, from start to finish. This is a tall order for people, and not just because of the discipline required. There’s also the fear that if you give all of yourself and come up short, you’re left with nothing. Athletes make this mistake all the time. They give only 80 or 90 percent, so that if they do lose, they can tell themselves, “Well, I didn’t go all out.” Don’t make this mistake. Even if you don’t meet your goal, as long as you gave everything you had to give, you will have reached a new milestone in your journey.