[Warning: There's some religion in this post. If you don't want to read any of that, skip this. It's not mostly religious, but I'd hate for you to wade into some unawares if you're strongly opposed to it.]
Debate on Facebook about goal setting, reposting here with additional commentary because Facebook isn’t really a good forum for this kind of discussion.
I have a problem with goal setting. Not that I don’t set them; I do. Occasionally I even reach the goals I set, though that’s far from common. No, my problem is figuring out whether or not I should set them.
Here’s my dilemma. I am an intensely religious person, and I believe that God through His son Jesus Christ is my model for how to behave (a model I do not reach, let it be said). God didn’t set a goal to create the world in seven days. What God purposes, He does. Now, it is true that God is omnipotent, so He can do all He means to do, and I am not, so sometimes I fail. But if Christ is the model, and He didn’t set any goals, then what is it that I am to take from this?
I’ve been instructed by my religious leaders, as well as good men and women that I respect, to set goals. The general instruction is to set goals that will require me to stretch, to improve, in order to reach them. That means they are, almost by definition, goals I am not sure I can reach. If I were sure I could reach them, they wouldn’t be a stretch. I might think I can reach them, they might be projectably feasible based on past performance, but if I know for sure I can reach the goal, then I’m not stretching.
There is, however, one category of goal that this does not apply to. These are goals that are commandments from God. All of those are reachable by definition. God cannot and would not give commands to His children for them to do things that they cannot do. So if my goal is to draw closer to Christ, I can do that. If my goal is to deepen my spiritual commitment, I can do it. I know what I have to do to make those things happen.
But if my goal is to lose 10 pounds, there’s hardly a guarantee that I can do it. Perhaps I can, perhaps I can’t. Ultimately, obviously, I can lose the 10 pounds by having surgery to remove a kidney, but that brings in another difficulty for me, and that is, should I be setting conditional goals? As in, should I set a goal that I’m going to lose 10 pounds, but only if I decide that I really want to more than I want to do something else? That doesn’t sound effective to me.
So I guess I have several problems. One is that I hate to lose. Not reaching a goal sucks, and it sucks more than reaching it feels good. Two is that I’m not sure that setting a goal in the first place is a good thing for me to do. I find no great satisfaction in doing so. Three is probably semantic – I do make long lists of things to do every day, and I guess you could call that a goal, but what I’m mostly trying to do is remember all the stuff I promised I’d get done, not set any specific target. Would I perform better if I did put some targets on there? Four is that I don’t think much of setting goals over things I can’t control. Setting a goal to run a 5 minute mile is great, but even if I train all day every day under the tutelage of Sebastian Coe I might still not be able to get there. It reminds me of setting a goal to have three straight days without rain. Five is that setting a goal makes that goal disproportionately important to me, meaning that sometimes my priorities get out of wack. Six is that if I insist on my priorities in the face of the goals I’ve set, I am by default saying that I have a goal to do thus and so, but only if I really want to.
And yet, I still set goals. I don’t set many, but I do set some, and I hate myself if I don’t reach them. That, at least, I recognize as a character flaw, and that if I’m unhappy only I am to blame for that.
But I’d still like some help. What do you do? What strategies do you use that help you become a better person? Do you reward yourself? How do you do that? Are your goals 1-0 (yes I got it/no I didn’t), or scalable (got most of the way there)? How do you deal with losing?
Posted on Wednesday, 2nd September 2009 by chrisjones
Posted in Blog & News, General | Comments (2)
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:01 pm
I should note that I’m not really a “goal-setter” in the traditional sense. If I have something I believe I should be doing, I pretty much just say “Hey, I should be doing this. How soon can I get to doing that?” and usually decide on a generalized timeframe. This happens at work a lot, and I do that mostly for the benefit of my team, so they know what I and in effect, we are working toward.
The one goal I keep setting which I keep finding completely unrealistic is “I will get my software done by such-and-such month.” It’s an idea that’s simply meant to fail on some subconcious level. When I do so, I simply lose all drive to accomplish the goal because the task is so daunting that I end up fearing accomplishing the goal. Ridiculous, perhaps, but still true.
What I have found better are more goals for the universe and I to work on. Things like “I think I should be making X amount per year, and I think I should be doing that by Y time.” I have yet to fail such a goal. It’s only happened 3 times I can think of off the top of my head, but that’s the kind of goal setter I am.
Your mileage may vary.
Oh, and I don’t reward myself. I mostly just deny myself my guilty pleasures like watching a movie or something until I get it done. When I don’t reach said goal, it’s pretty much just a matter of self-analyzing with some self-deprecation and adjustment. I feel bad, but I think about why and I adjust from there.
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:12 am
Interesting. I haven’t really thought of goals as… well, goals in a while. I have things I’d like to do, things I’m going to do regardless and things I plan to do but the plan inevitably gets changed or messed up or just scrapped altogether. I guess I opt more for moving in a certain direction than setting an actual goal.
Although now that I think about it, my plan to get straight A’s this semester is probably technically a goal rather than a reality (yet) but I prefer to think of it as something that just IS and then I almost don’t dare not reach it.
Another thought going with your religious train of thought is that if you’re focusing on the most important things then you can’t really help but reach your other goals. (Or can you? And if you do does that mean that they shouldn’t have been goals at all anyway?) Hmmmm…