The Magic of Goals
Goals are one of the neatest tricks humans ever devised. Just thinking about goals changes actions like few other tools, making people work harder, longer, and even enjoying their efforts more.
All of this sounds like a magic wand, which seems to be why some people write so breathlessly about goals, comparing them to prescription-level medicine. Goals really are a little bit of magic, but anyone who has watched enough movies or cartoons knows, magic often has side-effects.
Targets & Standards
One of those side-effects comes from using different types of goals. Some goals are positive, something to strive for that you don’t already have. Those targets might be landing a few fish or a few clients, or finishing a race or a project that little bit quicker. It feels good to achieve targets, especially when they’re new.
Other goals are more negative, things that you try to avoid losing. Those goals are often called standards, including grooming, punctuation, and quality standards. Targets draw people forward, but standards get people avoiding going backwards.
And there’s the problem. For many people, targets are energising and creative, bringing something new into existence. Standards get people protective of what they have, which is why for many people standards are anxiety-provoking.
Forwards
You can see this by comparing people who mostly focus on targets with those who fixate upon standards. Target-focused people are more optimistic, partly because any target assumes you can make things better. Just asking people to set optimistic targets makes them more optimistic, one of the few tricks the champions of positive-thinking people get right.
Mostly, setting goals only affects the things that are relevant to the goal. That’s why exercise goals usually don’t help your diet or anything else you’d like to improve. Despite that, people who chronically pursue targets tend to do better with everything, even helping colleagues or coming up with new ideas. They even feel more satisfied with their jobs.
Target-focused people rock.
On the other side…
& Backwards
Everyone needs to maintain standards, from hygiene to ethics. The world would quickly become a far worse place if people abandoned basic standards like respecting property rights or even the rules of the road (imagine what driving would be like if no-one accepted the standard of which side of the road to drive!)
Standards are essential but they carry a load, simply because they are so negative. Avoiding things has long been associated with anxiety and depression, which makes sense: if the only way is down, moods will tend to follow.
On the plus side, standards-focused people are better at recognising what’s going on but unfortunately, that’s because they’re thinking about all the things that could go wrong. When approaching a target, there are a few things to get right, but there are any number of ways to fail a standard: too much or too little, too this or too that, and very few ways to get things in the Goldilocks zone of just right.
That awareness of what’s going on seems to be what makes standards-focused people slower to make decisions, which is a little bit ironic: if things are really bad, like in a disaster, people need to make decisions quickly.
And it gets worse. Standards-focused people can be a pain to work with because their avoidance makes them less flexible, constantly avoiding reasonable risks. That makes them safer than others and less likely to move to another job, but that’s probably because they focus on the downsides of any move and struggle to see the benefits of opportunities.
Standards-focused people often insist that others ‘do the right thing’, often acting as the office police. It may be explicit reminders of policies or more subtle things like a frown or a murmur, each of which can be wearying when you’re on the receiving end. Surprisingly, standards-focused people are often likely to break rules themselves, perhaps because they figure that their righteousness entitles them to some misbehaviour.
& A Little Bit of Both
Like most things, there’s a twist in the tale, one that emerges over time. As people age, they become more standards-focused. It’s not just your imagination that your parents have become stuffier or more rigid with age (and you may be becoming more conservative too!).
Yet unlike younger people who tend to be less happy when they are more standards-focused, older people are happier the more standards-focused they become. The trick seems to be this: as most people get older, they accumulate resources — not just financial but also social and spiritual resources, while their physical resources are never going to get any better. For those older people blessed with the good things in life, standards get them focused on what they have, not what they might lose.
That little trick of twisting a negative into a positive works in other ways. When standards start bringing you or your staff down, try finding the positives that will counter the negatives. It may be as simple as figuring out what you need to do to maintain the standard, the specific actions you’ll take if things go wrong. Doing that gives you a target (the actions) and prepares you for the worst, letting your brain know that if something bad happens, you’ve got this under control.
We all need both targets and standards. Bringing them together brings out the best in both, creating that magic that only happens in real life.
