How to achieve your goals: Don’t focus on them

If you focus on your goal, you won’t achieve your goal

We set goals for ourselves, but we tend to forget that achieving goals is outside our control, argued motivational speaker, Reggie Rivers, during a TEDx talk on goal setting. Whatever your goal is (e.g., if you are a student and you want to get an A in a class), this is outside your control (because there is a teacher who is going to grade these papers).

Goals require you to have the participation of other people, therefore, they are outside of your control. So, if you spend too much time focusing on your goals, you’ll never achieve them. Behaviors, by contrast, are things that you alone can do,

…he stressed.

On the other hand, behaviors are the areas exclusively under your control. If we want to see change, we must become the change we want to see. So, for example, you cannot control what your kids do and if they are going to receive a high grade or if they hang out with the right people, etc. However, what you can control is your reaction to your kids, you control rewards, you control consequences, and you control your consistency on these consequences.

“So, when I set a goal, I say, “What can I do today that is going to help me to get closer to that goal? What can I do tomorrow that is going to help me to get closer to that goal? And what can I do this week that is going to get me closer to that goal?” Today, tomorrow, and this week. I write things down in those three categories and plan out how I’m going to go after the goals that I have in my life. And that keeps me focused on my behaviors, and I know that if I focus on my behaviors day after day, I keep myself motivated day after day, I feel good about what I’ve done,

…he advised.

If you want to achieve your goals, don’t focus on them. If you want to achieve your goals, you have to focus on the behaviors that are the building blocks that get you to your goals.

Inspiration in achieving goals: The role of great leaders

When we are talking about business goals, finding the right stimuli from effective leadership has a great role to play. “People don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it,” argued author and motivational speaker, Simon Sinek, in another TEDx talk. The goal, he explained, is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.

As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it’s Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act, and communicate the exact same way. And it’s the complete opposite to everyone else,

…he stressed.

“Because there are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us. Whether they are individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves.”

The puzzle of motivation: What are the right incentives?

In his TEDx talk, career analyst, Dan Pink, provided scientific evidence to prove how some incentives really popular in business, like bonuses, can actually have the opposite results by impeding motivation and lowering performance. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored, he stressed.

“And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science,

…he said.

As an example, Pink presented a model called the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), created by two American consultants. The model describes a situation where people do not have schedules, show up whenever they want and don’t have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional. What is the result? Almost across the board, there is an increase in productivity, worker engagement and worker satisfaction.

Evidently, he argued, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Here is what science knows:

1. Those 20th-century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.
2. Those “if-then” rewards often destroy creativity.
3. The secret to high performance is not rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive; the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things because they matter.

“And here’s the best part. We already know this. Science confirms what we know in our hearts.”