Goalsetting

Why do people set goals?

In our culture, setting goals is something we uncritically view as positive and helpful for achievement. I wanted to look more deeply into this topic because I have found it’s not that simple. Setting goals carelessly and unconsciously can actually hinder our ability to achieve them, and can have a negative impact on us overall.

For most of my life, I set big goals which I never achieved. I noticed that I never achieved my goals, but I always thought the reason was that I was not good enough to achieve them. I wasn’t disciplined enough, talented enough, courageous enough, etc. I never considered that there might be a different explanation.

It sounds logical: if I were more disciplined, more talented, more courageous, I could have and would have achieved my goals. And that may be true. But there’s something else that’s true, too: I was unconsciously using these goals, set by myself, as a metric for whether I was “good enough,” and every time I failed to achieve my goal, I collected more evidence that I was, in fact, not good enough. This felt logical, but in reality, whether we achieve our goals or not actually has more to do with the goals we choose to set than with our skillset.

Do higher goals lead to greater achievements?

For anyone who sets goals that they continually fail to achieve, it’s good to look for the unconscious motivation behind this habit. For me, it was somehow preferable to set difficult goals which I never achieved, than to set easier goals which I could achieve. Why? Because I (again, unconsciously) believed that setting easier goals which I could achieve, would make me more of a failure than setting difficult goals which I couldn’t achieve! In other words, it would have been so crushingly disappointing to see the reality of the goals I was capable of achieving (too small for me to accept), that I preferred to set high goals and live under the illusion that I may achieve them. Setting high goals which I never achieved was a way of refusing to face reality.

There’s another reason behind the habit of setting high goals which are never achieved: we rarely achieve anything without having set the goal to do so first, and from this we infer that setting a goal plays a major, even causal role in helping us to achieve it. In fact, that role of setting a goal in achieving that goal is smaller than we think, and only abstractly causal. The underlying belief that setting a goal plays a major role in achieving it leads to this faulty proposition: if we set higher goals, we will achieve greater things.

After years of psychotherapy, I am able to look at my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors from a more neutral, outside perspective, and make these observations about my underlying beliefs and way of functioning.

Is it good to achieve our goals?

I have changed my approach to goalsetting. I set goals, not in order to feel good about myself if I achieve them and bad about myself if I don’t, or because I think setting a goal will help me to achieve that goal, but rather as a guiding idea which helps me remember and focus on what is important to me in any given task or endeaver. Whether I achieve my goals or not does not have any emotional impact on me anymore - not because I don’t care about achieving my goals, but because I know that achieving a goal has more to do with the goal that I chose to set, than with my own performance, skill, or value.