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APPROPRIATE GOAL SETTING FOR RECOVERING HIGH-FFS
But have we got the right goals? This remains a core concern for those with a high fear of failure. While keen to avoid near-peg under-achieving, High-FFs have a flawed capacity to differentiate genuine long-term objectives (which we may still be formulating) from inappropriate fear of failure “reach for the stars” long-peg dreams that may be an elaborate form of avoidance. And this can lead to serious errors.
In his book Destructive Goal Pursuit (2006), behaviourist D. Christopher Kayes examines inappropriate goal setting by recounting the story of the 1996 Mount Everest expedition that ended with eight people dead and with others requiring amputations. Kayes’s claim is that the expedition was flawed from the start due to its goals, which involved expert mountaineers leading a group of mixed-ability adventurers that had paid up to US$65,000 to climb the world’s highest mountain. The commercial status of the expedition changed the dynamic of the climb, he states, because many of the climbers believed they were hiring experts that would ensure they achieved their dream of conquering the mountain.
Kayes blamed the disaster on the relentless pursuit of the goal to conquer the summit even after the experienced team leaders could have heeded warning signs that they were running out of time for a safe descent – a phenomenon Kayes called “goalodicy” (i.e. the pursuit of idiotic goals).
Goalodicy has six key characteristics, states Kayes, all of which those with fear of failure will have to navigate:
“Goalodicy works by allowing teams to put off the reality of the present in the hope that achieving a future goal will eliminate current obstacles,” writes Kayes.
Once a team sets a goal, persuading it otherwise can be difficult, states Kayes. And it can be the same for individuals. Goals pull people through and offer a sense of purpose. Yet setting goals that are way too ambitious or ill-considered against what is actually achievable, may inspire more risk taking and make us feel justified in going beyond accepted norms, which can lead to dangerous and even unethical behaviour.
With respect to the Everest climbers, this led to an inability to learn and change as the facts changed around them (their ascent was delayed by bottlenecks and bad weather, which restricted their scope for a safe descent). Their goal was too tight and they were too dependent on one aspect of the pursuit: their leaders, who the followers depended upon as the only people capable of making knowledge-based decisions on whether it was safe to continue.
So what can be learnt from Christopher Kayes’s excellent recounting of this fated Everest expedition? A key lesson has to be that the team set the wrong goal, despite the fact the goal appeared obvious. That US$65,000 fee was not for an ascent to the summit of Everest. It was for reaching the summit and making it down again – alive! It may have been that crucial narrowing of the goal that led to the disaster because it clouded the judgement of the team leaders, who may have become overly concerned about the implicit promises within the fee. And if this sounds unrealistic – that the revised goal is too wide – compare it to the Apollo moon landings, which had getting the astronauts home as an equal and integral objective (just ask Gene Kranz).
An important point here is that progress for its own sake is not progress, despite the fact it may temporarily energize us. If you are working towards the wrong goal, you are simply setting yourself a trap, which – as in the case of the Everest climbers – can lead to a fatal reckoning. At the very least you are simply wasting your time.
Setting the right goals requires you to return to Your Constitution. For instance, my goal of a Norfolk farm and a rare breed of sheep looks pretty hollow without my commitments as a father and husband (or as a farmer, which was absent – suggesting it may not even be my goal). If I fail to include my family, a lonely farm in the middle of nowhere is probably the last place I’d like to end up.
You have to make sure that your goals are in balance with the rest of your life. As Julie Starr (2003) states, if you want a job with lots of travel and you have a young family, you need to think through the consequences of achieving that goal. If you are prepared to pay that price, fine. But goal setting based on achievement motivation needs to maintain us through a timeframe that looks well beyond desperate short-term wins that require such an acute level of sacrifice we end up spending the rest of our lives rueing the day we achieved them. That 10-year time horizon is there for a reason.
Money is a particular problem when trying to set appropriate goals. Wealth is an obvious objective but perspective is required. In Living the 80/20 Way (2005) entrepreneur Richard Koch writes that most people over estimate the return they will receive from earning more. Studies show that poverty makes us unhappy, writes Koch, but once we’re moderately well off, adding even more money doesn’t make us happier and can even add stresses that get in the way of happiness.
Money-based goals also bring other problems – not dissimilar to those faced on Everest. If your goal is to be a millionaire by the time you are 30, what price are you prepared to pay to achieve it? Perhaps you’ll sacrifice a social life and put off any relationship or family commitments. You may even be prepared to be a bit of a toady in the office. But are you prepared to shaft the guy in the next cubicle? You are? OK, what about commit fraud? Really – blimey! So where does it end? Robbery, murder, genocide?
Is there no limit to what you’d do to reach that goal? This is the extreme end of High-FF behaviour – the land of the megalomaniac who is so afraid of failure they are willing to go way beyond inappropriate goal setting. Such extremists will find their own Constitution, if written honestly, a document dripping with clenched hatred and perceived injustice (Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a classic example).
Anthony Robbins (1992) warns against abusing ourselves in the pursuit of a single goal – tying our entire level of personal happiness to our ability to achieve goals that may be beyond our control. It is not just achieving the objective that matters but the quality of life we experience along the way, he says, which is why Our Constitution needs to be our grounding document and contain our values across the spectrum or our life.
Robbins is convinced that many of us go through life putting off our happiness in order to achieve that next goal. “Someday” seems to be the goal of the permanently unhappy, he says. Yet we should decide to be happy now. Goal setting is not some form of delayed gratification. It is about setting our “compass” – as Covey would say – and being uplifted as we start to walk in the right direction, knowing where we are heading and with the faith to deal with the bends in the road along the way.
“Remember the direction we are heading is more important than the individual results,” says Robbins.
Another core component of this is in having goals beyond our goals. One of the key reasons I failed at both investment banking and as a writer is that I had no idea what to do once I’d “made it.” I’d not thought about the next stage at all, meaning that I floundered within both roles without any of the focus and drive that won me the opportunities in the first place.
“Never give up setting goals,” says Robbins. “Achieving our goals can be a curse unless we have already set higher goals before reaching the first.”
The idea of “outrunning” our dreams, as I found out at the bank, can lead to an “is that all” deflation, albeit in a better setting. Lindsey Agness (2008) quotes John Grinder (the co-founder of NLP) stating that the biggest factor stopping goal achievement is often the failure to set goals beyond our initial goal. With no higher level to aim for we can end up sabotaging ourselves the minute the original goal is achieved – exactly what happened to me with both banking and writing.
Hopefully, setting 10-year goals that complement Your Constitution – including short-term milestones – should help overcome this problem. Your Constitution should create a framework for both your short-term objectives and long-term ambitions. For instance, Julie Starr’s parent wanting energy to play sport with her kids would soon find the badminton sessions losing their appeal unless she could take it to the next stage. Perhaps her real objective was to “stay connected and relevant to my children as they move from childhood to adulthood.” As a part of Her Constitution it would make the badminton sessions just one part of a programme with a clearly defined, long-term, objective that also contains flexibility and a measurable result.
Importantly, such a statement also avoids being a hostage-to-fortune – such as becoming a millionaire by 30 or summiting Everest at the first attempt. Of those that perished on Everest, surely a better objective would have been “to become an accomplished mountaineer” or even the more constitutional “to maintain my sense of physical adventure throughout my life.”
Another way of checking whether we are heading in the right direction is to adopt another one of Julie Starr’s methodologies from The Coaching Manual. If you could have your goal now, she asks, would you take it? If there are any caveats to prevent you immediately and whole-heartedly shouting “YES,” you may need to examine why this is the case.
If, for instance, you visualized yourself running a company of 100 people and – offered the opportunity to do so – hesitate or even panic at the thought, it may be that such a goal is no more than a fantasy (perhaps given to you by someone else or by conditioning). Maybe a goal more tailored to your well-being would be running a smaller team of, say, five, but in a collegiate studio setting, maybe in a town with a more human scale.
Of course, the 100 person company may well be appropriate as a 10-year goal after a good baptism of fire involving a company with fewer employees. Having said this, your terror at the thought of running such a company now should also have an impact on your 10, five or two-year goals, and even on Your Constitution.
We need to concentrate on being who we are. Most of the Everest climbers were not professional mountaineers – many were disastrously ill-prepared for climbing a mountain that was climbed for the first time ever only in 1953 (at least officially).
“If you have a lemon, make lemonade,” wrote Dale Carnegie (1948), meaning we should look at what we have and what we can do with it.
This is not advocating that changes in direction are ill-advised. It is simply stating that aiming to become a mathematics professor when it is obvious we are more of the creative-writer type will massively increase our chances of failure and further disappointment. And that will reinforce rather than counter our negative self-beliefs.
A final element that can scupper the progress we make from goal setting is in becoming so caught up in the process of goal achievement that we fail to observe how far we have come. Progress can creep up on us to the point where we ignore it, which means we maintain the negative feelings we had before we started and fail to look at past achievements as building blocks for the future. This is a crucial failing of the High-FF and can result in our progress towards our goals having no impact on our general well-being. In some respects this is inevitable – we are who we are. Those neural hijackings are not going to disappear.
However, just as we can learn to refute the hijackings more and more quickly, so we can learn – over time – that the feelings we have are false and that those tiny steps of progress towards our goals should start to build our confidence and reduce our fears. Keeping a diary helps – not least because it means we have to rewrite our 10-year objectives annually, allowing us to monitor progress and record the achieved milestones (perhaps with a big tick). And the annually renewed 10-year horizon means we never “outrun” our goals.
Importantly, a diary also allows you to annually renew Your Constitution. This is not a contradiction in terms. Your Constitution is far from carved in stone. Like the U.S. Constitution (which has 26 amendments) Your Constitution is a working document that, to remain relevant, has to reflect your current values and absorb new realities (getting married, changed mine for instance). Of course, the hurdles for change should be high or you may have no intention of living by the values you state. Yet that transfer moment to a new diary allows you some room for thought and some gentle recrafting, although wholesale rewritings are unadvisable (simply because new values may quickly fade).