Goals Are Counterproductive When You Make This Common Mistake
One of the best reasons to set goals is to provide you with motivation. However, we all set goals that provide us with little to no motivation. This is a problem. Goals that don’t motivate you are pointless.
If you have this problem, it’s not that you are lazy, careless, or a procrastinator. Instead, your problem is likely with the mindset of expectations you have of yourself. Remember, the idea of a goal is to get some type of reward for achieving it. Conversely, you get nothing for meeting expectations. Think about it, why get a reward for doing something you expect yourself to do? You don’t.
For example, If you set a goal to eat healthy, this means your mindset is that there is no expectation to eat healthy. Correspondingly, your view of eating healthy is that it’s special, extraordinary, and requires going over and beyond. It’s also something you only have to do temporarily since it’s so hard. Therefore, you can reward yourself for eating healthy by eating something unhealthy, can’t you? You can, but that would be counterproductive. Yet, this is exactly what many people do.
While you may think that example is basic, that’s the point. Basic goals are the goals that give people the most problems. Goals that require having discipline, self-control, doing the right thing, or being happy fall into this category… Goals like these should not be part of your goals, these should be expectations.
As soon as you make something that should be an expectation a goal, you begin programming your mind to think the work you must do is temporary. What’s more, once you achieve the goal for some measurement of time what happens? You get your reward and stop doing the difficult work to maintain that goal. On the other hand, expectations have no moment of achievement. Expectations are a way of life.
So, if you want permanent change don’t set a goal. Instead, work on changing your mindset on your expectations of yourself.