Goals… easy to set, hard to achieve!

What has been your experience with achieving yours? 

Most people seldom achieve their goals. They struggle to stay committed and usually abandon the effort before the calendar even turns to February. 

So, why even bother? If our track record as a species is so woefully poor, why invest so much of ourselves into setting goals if our record of achievement predicts that we won’t do any better this time around? 

Well, hope springs eternal, right? 

The biology of goal setting is pretty interesting. We get a pleasant dopamine rush from merely imagining and setting them. In fact, that phase of the process is much more pleasurable than the grind we experience in our efforts to stay disciplined and work through the inevitable resistance we’ll face in the pursuit of our goals. 

In fact, that rush from the setting of goals is even more pleasurable than the momentary (and sometimes hollow) satisfaction we’ll experience from the attainment of them. 

All of which begs the question, if all the joy is on the front end, why put ourselves through this whole dispiriting process every year? 

And what is it that drives humans to imagine a better, brighter future and then commit themselves (even if fleetingly) to achieving that? 

Achievement goals won’t get the job done.

Without process goals to support them, they’re just pipe dreams. 

You may want to run a 5K, like I’m planning to do in March. That’s a worthy achievement goal. 

But it won’t happen unless I build the structure of process goals around it. 

So, for my goal of completing my first 5K in five years, my process goal is to run twice a week, every week, up to the event. 

More specifically, I’ll do two specific types of runs each week. The first is a moderate pace, Zone 2, steady aerobic session. The other will be speed work at a track. 

It’s this sort of structure that we teach and reinforce in our coaching.

What’s missing from many people’s pursuit of their goals is a regular, scheduled practice of reflection and course correction. 

Without reflection, course correction isn’t possible. We need to know where we are, how far we’ve come, and what has tripped us up in order to correct our course. 

And course correction is inevitable in the pursuit of anything worthwhile.