It’s 2 a.m. and you’re lying in bed. Everything around is quiet and calm yet here you are awake staring at the ceiling. Your heart is beating fast, your mouth feels dry, your pupils are so dilated you can literally see in the dark, your skin feels cool and a bit sweaty and your body is tense and ready to spring… You’re experiencing a saber-tooth attack.
You see there are 2 types of goals: the “What’s not working?” goal that leaves you mildly excited (and most comfortable) and the “What if I knew I could do anything?” goal that wakes the saber-tooth and keeps you awake at 2 a.m.
#1 The “What’s not working?” goals
The guiding question when setting this type of goal is “what’s not working for us?” followed by “What do we need to fix if we want to improve?”. The logic being that if we can understand what wasn’t working for us in the past, and fix it, we can create the future we’re looking for.
The upside of past driven goals setting, and the reason why this is the most popular type of goal is that drawing on the past, and our known patterns, keeps us in our “familiar” zone, reduces the perceived risk and comforts us that we “know what we’re doing”… Which is why we call it the comfort zone.
The downside though is that the questions we ask create reality and if your guiding questions are past/problem-oriented you can’t expect the future to be much different than the past. The best outcome we can expect is an improved version of the present. When you think of the past you end up fixing problems based on existing thought patterns, when you look at the future you end up with transformation.
Sir John Whitmore (the creator of the GROW model) said it beautifully “Goals based on current reality alone are liable to be negative, a response to a problem, limited by past performance, lacking in creativity due to simple extrapolation… My experience with goal setting [] is that teams invariably set goals based on what has been done before rather than on what can be done in the future.”
#2 The “What if I knew I could do anything?” goals
The second type of goal setting starts with the question: “If I could do anything and if I knew I couldn’t fail what would be the ideal future I would create?” followed by questions like “What worked for us in the past that we can build on?” and “Which strengths and resources do we already have that would help us create that future?”.
The answers to this type of future/positive questions ingrain a “version” of reality in us that is limitless and inspiring. It draws on the past for inspiration and courage but it assumes that to build the future you’re dreaming about you’ll have to venture beyond the known and familiar.
The upside of this type of goals is that they come with the incredible advantage of driving us to do the impossible and installing in us the belief and courage we can achieve them.
The downside though, and the reason most people don’t set this type of goals, is that they tend to wake the saber-tooth… and there is nothing we fear more than these creatures.
Waking the saber-tooth
We can’t help it. We are biologically programmed to fear change, failure and most of all the unknown. Our brains developed in times of extream scarcity and constant fear of survival. Back in the day failure often meant death and constant threat hid in every corner outside of our protected zone. One wrong step, one lapse of concentration and you’re gone.
With the cost of a mistake being so high, and with the need to react in a split second, it’s not surprising we developed a bias toward the known and the familiar, a preference toward “what worked for us in the past”. Our brain would do everything in its power to prevent us from venturing to the unknown. After all the saber-tooths are out there.
Nowadays saber-tooths are gone but our biological systems are still intact. Failure is today’s saber-tooth and regardless of what our rational brain tells us we still experiecne the threat of failure as an existential threat, we lie in our beds and our body is in full fight or flight mode as if we’re standing on the open plains, gazing at the endless horizon and a saber-tooth can come at us any second.
A reminder to myself
There is not much we can do apart from reminding ourselves that saber-tooths are gone and then do the exact thing that scares us 🙂 So today when I was lying in my bed at 2 a.m. feeling the saber-tooth coming at me I decided to drag myself out of bed and write this post. I did it as a reminder to myself that all it means is that I’m probably setting the right type of goals for myself and that I’m on track to building the future I want.
(No saber-tooths were harmed writing this post :-))