Figure 7.1 The Reticular Activating System
7
LANGUAGE AND BEHAVIOUR
The point of all this goal-setting activity is, of course, to generate proactivity. And a key element of proactive behaviour is proactive language.
“The right words can have a galvanizing effect, generating enthusiasm, energy, momentum and more, while the wrong words can undermine the best intentions and kill initiative on the spot, stone dead,” writes leadership guru Stephen Denning in The Secret Language of Leadership (2007).
Whether it is Your Constitution, your goal-setting, your diary, or simply your thoughts and speech, you need to adopt the right tone and vocabulary.
Covey (1989) points out that reactive language is based on absolving us – “that’s just the way I am,” “there’s nothing I can do” and so on. It is saying “I’m not responsible,” “I was born this way.”
But you are responsible. You were not born this way. You became this way through your own responses and behaviours, whatever the external root causes. In fact you became this way partly because of the language you used. Reactive or defeatist language is – like fear itself – self-fulfilling.
Luckily we have a major opportunity to put this right. Having been through the goal-setting visualization exercises you now need to write them down. And while writing them down is an opportunity to re-evaluate your goals and ensure they make sense – that the one year is connected to the two-year and so on up to the 10-year summit – they are also an opportunity to adopt the right tone and language.
This is not rocket science. For instance, you should write the goals in present-tense language. Lindsey Agness (2008) states that we should behave as if we are already there – that our goals have already been achieved – which also holds true for the language we use when writing our goals. For instance, if we make the journey as certain as a train ride we are compelled to take the steps that propel us forward.
“We arrive at Manchester Piccadilly Station at 16:45,” says the announcer on the Virgin train.
“Year 10: we are living in a self-built six-bedroom house in Norfolk with three horses, two dogs and a rare breed of sheep.”
Are we? Wow – have we named all the sheep yet?
Goals need to be that specific, involving – according to Julie Starr, MD of Starr Counselling in The Coaching Manual (2002) – the what, where, when and whom.
“I want more energy,” is too vague, she states, and therefore less motivating than “I want more energy to be able to play sports with my kids after work.”
Add the timescale (each week), venue (at the new leisure centre) and the sport (badminton) and the objective is just one phone call and a quick trip to a sports shop (probably located within the leisure centre) from being converted into sustainable action.
The process of “behaving as if you are already there” and using language that supports this contention is an important one because it produces new more positive neural pathways in the brain. And these are built upon with each positive step in the right direction. We cannot aim at achievement motivation and continue to behave in ways dictated by our fear of failure. If necessary, we have to “fake it til we make it” to use the expression of many self-help writers, most notably Tom Bay and David Macpherson in Change Your Attitude (1998).
If you want to be promoted, they suggest, you have to act as if you already have been – taking on the airs of the seniors, adopting their seriousness and dropping the office clown persona that may have been a mask for your disappointments. Over time this will become an unconscious habit and will become noticed by those in the hierarchy above you.
Obviously there may be limits to this. The Norfolk farm in year-10 is a strong goal but turning up to work in our green wellies may raise a few eyebrows. Spending the weekend in wellies scouring Norfolk for the perfect location, on the other hand, is fine – especially if, like Conrad Hilton, we then keep a photo of it on our desk.
Having said this, your goal-centred behaviours are necessarily different from your behaviours as a High-FF. You may find that the behavioural traits that chained you to the floor (such as clowning) are the very traits that made you popular with particular people (often fellow High-FFs). These traits have to change, for sure – but there is no need to change your friends. You could instead add to Your Constitution “to radiate positivity.”
Negative self-talk also has to go, to be replaced with positive self-talk.
According to John Caunt (2003) you should cut yourselves some slack – questioning negative thoughts and opinions and recognizing instead your positive qualities, even writing down (in the usual place) strong statements of support that help recast your set beliefs and reframe your outlook using “half full” rather than “half empty” language.
In Change Your Attitude, Bay and Macpherson implore us to overcome the negative self-talk, stating that everyone has inbuilt negative self-talk tapes they need to destroy. Instead, we should learn to compliment ourselves, they state, which is true at every level – even if you are simply recording those small but accumulating achievements in your diary.
And goals should be stated in positive terms, moving towards what you want rather than avoiding what you don’t want. Aims such as “I don’t want to be poor” are meaningless, they state, and should be replaced with positive and more specific statements such as “I want to be able to afford the four bedroom house in that leafy neighbourhood I’ve always coveted.” Explore why you want that house, and you’re probably getting closer still to a more constitutional assessment of what really motivates you.
Yet all this positive talk must not lead you into a false paradigm. The words used have to be authentically yours or you will be fooling yourself. How can you tell? Not easy, especially in the early days when our “natural state” seems to come with such a negative dialogue. Injecting positive language into such a pessimistic outlook feels like walking back into a stadium as the fans pour out after the final whistle.
Wait a little longer, however, and the crowds are gone. Go back into the stadium and you can shout what you like and it will echo off the rafters. And by writing down your goals you are giving yourself that space to turn around your thinking, as well as change your language from negative to positive. You are deliberately no longer part of the crowd and you can adopt what language you like.
However, positive next steps that are written and then ignored perhaps need to be examined. Is there a reason you have not enrolled onto that language or accountancy course? Maybe your desire to learn Japanese or qualify as an accountant is something that has been fed to you from elsewhere. Maybe it was never your goal in the first place, and an art foundation course or small business enterprise scheme would be far more motivating.
Goal-setting is harder work than it first appears and requires time and soul searching, although there are many pre-visualization exercises you can try if you are struggling to set appropriate goals.
One comes from Jim Cairo in Motivation and Goal Setting (1998), who states that the importance of setting goals that are consistent with your true identity is vital as these goals will sustain your motivation over time. And if you are struggling with determining your true self (a common problem for those with fear of failure) Cairo suggests ranking the following attributes 1-to-10 in importance:
What are the highest-ranking attributes? These should get 80 per cent of your time and form a basis for your goal setting, says Cairo. And they can feed into Your Constitution, which remains your key grounding document for goal-setting.
And there are post goal-setting exercises we can employ to ensure we are on the right path. Lindsey Agness (2008) quotes well-known success guru Paul J. Meyer who recommends the mnemonic SMART when assessing our goal-setting.
According to Meyer, our objectives should be:
Yet care is needed with measurable objectives – especially those that are time-related. If your aim is to be CEO within a year, changing course on day 365 may be self-defeating. As Anthony Robbins states, many people give up their goals having passed a time-related deadline without realizing they were within days of achieving their objective. Certainly, being too strict with time horizons can be self-defeating.
What is not necessary at this stage is any consideration regarding how our goals will be achieved. Mike Dooley “dream fulfilment” guru and author of Notes from the Universe (2007), calls these the “dreaded hows.” His view is that there are a million ways to achieve something, so it is crazy to establish now the how for a goal three years hence. Only for the next milestone should there be any consideration for the “how.”
The secret to “manifesting change,” he states, is not focusing on the how but on the desired end result. This seems to chime with just about everybody else I’ve read on this, although a key additional point he makes is that once we are truly focused on our desired end result “the universe will conspire on our behalf.”
In fact, it’s not the universe that conspires in our favour once we have cleared the path in front of us to focus on our goals: it is us. Our Reticular Activating System (RAS) does the work. This is the area of the brain responsible for regulating arousal and is composed of several neuronal circuits connecting the brainstem to the cortex.
No, this didn’t mean much to me either – at least not until I realized the RAS is what I used to call “my antennae” – the element of my consciousness that seems to notice things I am currently focused on. For instance, I was given a Burberry scarf for Christmas. It was lovely, and I have worn it every day so far this winter. Yet since Christmas I have noticed these scarves everywhere on the streets of London – on professionals walking to work, students going to college, day-trippers in Oxford Street.
Why had I not noticed these scarves before? Because my RAS was only alerted to them on Christmas Day when I opened my mother’s gift. Only since then has it bothered to draw my attention to just how many of these scarves are out there. Previously my brain had filtered out the scarves, like 99.9 per cent of the information it receives, because it meant nothing to me.
Yet for those with a high fear of failure, our RAS has picked up mostly negative stimuli until now. For instance, if we assume there is prejudice against us, the RAS seeks it out (and inevitably finds it). If, however, we focus on our goals – especially ones with the next steps laid out in front of us – anything relevant that passes our senses, sticks. And that’s a lot of information. I’ve often heard people be amazed at the right solution or the right person or the right idea appearing as if from nowhere at exactly the right moment. Yet they hadn’t appeared from nowhere. Our RAS found them when they had previously gone unnoticed.
Figure 7.1 The Reticular Activating System
One last point on this. The more I read about our RAS the more it occurs to me that it may also have an impact on luck – that key ingredient that those with high achievement motivation seem to have in abundance and us High-FFs seem to lack. Certainly, I have always considered myself unlucky – to the point where I would joke about the “Kelsey Effect” on any company, car, girlfriend, house, street, city or country I alighted upon. Bad things would immediately and unexpectedly start happening to them. And my wife likes to joke about the “Kelsey Cloud” that always seems to follow us on our summer holidays (we even had rain on our trip to the Sahara Desert!).
Yet I noticed that my “luck” seemed to change when I became focused on a particular goal, at least with respect to that goal. Opportunities would appear at the right moment and obstacles disappear. And this I now realize was not luck at all: it was my RAS.
There are also positives to feeling unlucky. I have always hated gambling because of my poor “luck,” but now consider this a blessing. To me, gambling is the “winner’s curse” – the arrogance of the “lucky” making them over-estimate purely mathematical probabilities. More-often-than-not gambling results in the most rapid levelling of the “lucky” and the “unlucky” known to man. Thank heavens – and my own High-FF status – that I’ve avoided that fate.
This extends even to the lottery, which I have never “played” and would beg any recovering High-FF to avoid. Not only is it a “tax on the stupid” as one clever friend described it, the lottery offers an excuse for inaction when there is no excuse for inaction.
“When I win the lottery,” makes me cringe every time I hear it.
It’s not the lottery that will change your life. It’s you.
Assuming poor luck has also led me towards a hatred of “winging it” in meetings and presentations. I am consistently the best briefed and prepped, precisely because I assumed I had to make amends for my poor luck.
Certainly, I have assumed the odds were stacked against me in just about any walk of life, which has, over the years, led to things working out more and more in my favour. As a young person the cocky assurance of those with high achievement motivation is an obvious advantage when it comes to winning the girl/boy or convincing employers to give them that first break. But life is a marathon, not a sprint, and luck will inevitably go against those relying on that most ephemeral of qualities. Meanwhile, I assumed poor luck from the start, which has prepared me well for the inevitable puddles – many of which I can now deftly sidestep.