The Magic of Goals

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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.

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.

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…

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. 

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. 

Goals are one of the most useful tools we ever use, at once energising and helpful. At the same time, goals cause many, many problems, often producing the precise opposite of what’s intended.

For example, think about riding a bicycle. Apart from balance, the biggest challenge in bike-riding is steering to avoid obstacles. That seems easy — after all, anyone who gets on a bike has been avoiding obstacles for years, no matter how young they are — yet learner-riders commonly steer straight into obstacles. It’s as if that tree, wall, or fence had a magnetic pull upon the bike.

It’s weird and frustrating for the learner, while anyone with a slightly mean sense of humour is bound to find it hilarious, as some child rides straight into another bush. Or a tree. Or a flower-bed. 

What the … ?!

While it can be amusing, it’s also bemusing because surely if you can see the tree, you must be able to ride around it! So, what is happening?

The reason for this odd behaviour is that learner-riders focus on the right goals in the wrong way.

The goal of every learner-rider is to follow the path. Everyone who has been taught English knows that ‘following the path’ is the same as ‘not leaving the path’ because ‘not leaving the path’ is a double-negative (i.e., not going where the path is not). Your English teacher probably told you that a double-negative is the same as a positive, so those two goals are the same. And not leaving the path is the same as avoiding obstacles and especially not hitting the tree.

Everyone knows that.

Everyone, except your brain.

That’s because inside your brain, a double-negative goal is never the same as a positive. Instead, your brain focuses on the basic concept, so when your brain hears ‘not the tree’ it still focuses mostly on the basic concept of ‘tree’, not the ‘not.’

How Goals Work. Or Not.

That focus is crucial because focus is central to how goals work.

Goals only work by focusing your attention, prompting your brain to call upon whatever skills and knowledge it has that are relevant to that goal. So, a goal of buying a car will prompt your knowledge of cars and where to find cars for sale, along with any skills you have in searching, advice-seeking, negotiating, etc., so you can achieve the goal of buying a car. If instead your goal is to beat your competitor to the finish line, your goal prompts you to greater effort while taking your focus away from your sore and weary muscles.

That works great when you have a positive goal, which will continue to guide your attention. If your goal is stay on the path, that will guide you along the path. But if you switch to the logically equivalent negative goal of avoiding obstacles, your brain will still focus on the basic concept, which in that case are the obstacles. Unfortunately, the more you focus on the obstacles, the more they will guide your actions. So, focusing on the obstacle leads you directly to the obstacle and not away from it. Looking at the tree guides the learner-rider to a collision with the tree; looking at the wall leads them directly to the bruises and scrapes most of us remember far too well.

That is why my sons repeatedly rode bicycles into trees and as long as they focused on the negative goal, those collisions continued. I solved that by teaching them to change their focus, to ignore the trees and focus instead on the gap between the trees. Once they began focusing on where they wanted to go, they were able to keep themselves, their bikes, and the trees undamaged.

It felt pretty good to be the wise Dad whose clever advice solved his sons’ problems. Years later, I didn’t feel quite so wise when I experienced pretty-much the same thing while learning to ride a motorbike.

Riding a motorbike in a straight line down a highway is easy. Far more difficult is the learning how to turn that lump of metal around. Whether it’s a carpark corner or a u-turn, every motor biker needs to learn how to manoeuvre in tight spaces. So of course I practised, and practice is supposed to make perfect, yet somehow I got worse and worse, struggling to stop the motorbike from falling over.

The reason was depressingly simple in hindsight even though I struggled to recognise it. It starts with the context. I had given myself a 50th birthday present of learn-to-ride course. Being 50 years old meant I had middle-aged bones. Middle-aged bones break easily, my bones break more easily than most so I very much wanted to avoid falling on the road. Consequently, I focused on the road when attempting those tight turns and the more I practised, the more I focused on the road.

In other words, I was doing the same thing my sons had been doing years beforehand, except I was looking at the road while they were transfixed by the trees. Like them, instead of looking where I wanted to go, I focused on a negative goal. That switch in focus was enough to repeatedly throw me off-balance, which meant I was repeatedly having to put my foot on the ground to avoid totally toppling.

Eventually, my instructor helmed me to recognise what I should have been doing, by giving me the same lesson I had taught my sons years before. Like my sons, I needed to focus on the path ahead, the positive goal of steering a new course, and not the negative goal of not falling on to the road.

Negativity & Fear

This isn’t just a story about the problems with teaching old dogs: instead, it’s a story about the problem with negative goals, which are only made worse by strong emotions like fear. Few things focus attention more effectively than fear, and I was afraid of falling because my weak bones are fragile. Those fears focused me on the road surface, which required a lot of training to overcome.

While riding bicycles and motorbikes are physical skills, the same thing can happen with any goal. That’s because every positive goal implies a negative goal of avoiding failure, which is anything short of the goal. The bigger the gap between where you are and where you want to be, the bigger the potential failure and the more you will be inclined to focus on avoiding failure. In turn, that means you are less likely to achieve your goal.

Surprisingly, some of the best advice for goal-setting amplifies these problems. For example, most people have encountered the SMART acronym for goals, the idea that goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. This is excellent advice when people stay focused on a positive goal but if they shift to negatives, SMART goals become dreadful. That’s because SMART-er goals provide a clearer image of the gap between the current situation and the desired outcome, revealing a full-colour picture of the failure people want to avoid. SMART goals can be as powerful as fear for focusing attention on failure, with all the bad feelings that produces.

This may sound weird if you’ve ever been to a goal-setting workshop, yet most people have experienced the downsides of SMART goals. For example, if you hated mathematics at school, it is probably because every mathematics question your teacher gave you included a SMART goal: it had a Specific and Measurable standard (there’s always a specific answer and your answer was either right or wrong), that was Achievable and Realistic (after all, your teacher taught you what you needed to know), and Time-bound (you had to finish on time). In other words, every school-level mathematics question told you precisely how wrong you were going to be.

What this means is SMART goals are not always motivating — if they were, everyone would be queuing up for mathematics classes instead of cringing about calculus. Instead, SMART goals discourage students and others, making them increasingly aware of their failures, and every failure teaches students to hate mathematics or convince them they are either generally stupid or just don’t have a brain for numbers.

The same is true for any clear, detailed goal, and any task that tells you precisely what failure looks like, whether it involves simple things like arithmetic and household repairs, or complex things like finding a job. Perhaps the worst of these goals is that depressingly clear desire to find that special someone. In each case, the clearer the goal, the easier it becomes to recognise and then focus on failure, producing greater fear and eventually, worse consequences for your well-being.

Managing the Shadow-Side

If all this is true, why is goal-setting so popular in personal, professional, and organisational development? Why is every performance management system rife with goals? Why do we hear people advocating ‘big, hairy, audacious goals’? The reason is simply that goal-setting works most of the time. In any case goal-setting itself is not the real problem: it’s the shift from positive to negative goals that does the damage.

But if every goal has its shadow, how can you fend off that negative focus?

The three most useful tricks for staying focused on positive goals all manage your mindset, but in different ways. If you are someone who habitually finds the negative in everything, you need to change your thought habits so my article on Failure Sucks: Seeing Goals Clearly will help. If you often procrastinate or feel overwhelmed by what you need to achieve, check out out Chunking to Conquer. And when the dark side of goals has you in in its group and you simply can’t focus away from the obstacles in your path, Making Fear Your Super-Power is for you.

  We all know failing sucks, bigtime, but imagine a world where your every effort meant failure, every achievement made you a bigger failure, and even thinking about success felt like failure.

It would suck so much it would become a great, big, black hole of failure.

Welcome to the world of goal-setting. At least, that’s what goal-setting becomes when used unwisely.

That’s because failure is like a computer virus, hitch-hiking into your mind on the back of every goal. While goals are profoundly useful for guiding your efforts, they also clarify how far short you are from achieving your desires. The clearer the goal, the clearer distance between you and the goal, which is the same as knowing how much you are failing right now. In other words, every goal says you are failing until the goal has been achieved.

That negative focus oozes out everywhere. Every person who competes at the Olympics is extraordinary, and every medallist is even more extraordinary, yet everyone knows that every silver medal is a reminder that someone failed to get the gold medal. And every gold medal is tarnished by all the other medals the victor didn’t win, including the fact that they will miss the gold medal next time, and if not then they’ll fail the time after that. and the failure to yet win the next time. Failure seeps in, no matter how great the success.

Failure is toxic. Not toxic like cyanide, which kills you instantly; more like lead, gradually building up in your system while it slowly debilitates and destroys you.

That may seem over-dramatic, but it’s not. Constantly focusing on failures is a clear pathway to anxiety and depression with all their physical consequences including, ultimately, death. If all this focus on failure doesn’t depress you, you’re not paying attention. Which is probably a good thing.

Bonjour Tristesse

I have a friend who is well-known for his negative approach to life, someone who introduced me to the French expression, Bonjour tristesse (Hello sadness). As a fellow university teacher, we would at times discuss the evaluations given by our students, even though these are one of worst ways of assessing the quality of teaching. But somehow, the evaluations would catch us, especially my friend who focused on the negatives regardless of how positive the overall evaluation. Instead of thinking of how many students were satisfied he would always wonder about the student who gave the worst score and what he might have done that could have changed their view. Each success was ignored and each failure focused upon because his goal was to satisfy all his students.

No wonder he joked about starting each day by saying Bonjour tristesse.

But if goals carry all this negativity, how come they work?

And goals really do work — they are one of the few tools that genuinely improve performance, along with feedback, reflecting on experience, resourcing, training and practice.

The biggest failure with goals is we often fail to see them clearly. This is ironic because the entire point of a goal is to focus your attention to prompt action — nothing more, nor less. But in prompting actions, goals remind us of the things we want to do, which are simultaneously the things we haven’t yet done. Until we’ve done those things we have failed to do them, and if there are enough of those things yet to be done, enough failures, we start wanting to avoid doing anything.

Changing Perspective

To avoid that, you need to focus on where you are going and less upon what you have yet to do. That means your ultimate achievement needs to seem bigger and more attention-grabbing than whatever tasks required to achieve it.

Some tricks for doing that are discussed in my other articles, especially Chunking to Conquer: Overcome Procrastination (Now!) and Make Fear Your Super-Power. But the principle behind all those tricks is the same: shifting your perspective so you can see goals clearly without being distracted by failure.

Shifting perspective can seem like a Jedi-mind trick, which is appropriate because it is just as magical. It’s a lot like how people approach a half-full glass of water: focusing on what’s in the glass makes it seem bigger than what’s missing, creating a positive mindset; focusing on what’s missing makes the lack of water seem bigger than the water in the glass, producing negativity.  

A similar trick works for goals, with positivity flowing from focusing on outcomes rather than what remains unfinished. And it is always easier to focus on things that seem bigger, which can be achieved with goals in a couple of ways: either make goals seem bigger by combining them with other goals or, paradoxically, by removing other goals from view.

Goals & Rewards

A common way of making goals more attention-grabbing is by combining by attaching rewards. Rewards are their own goals, something you can enjoy once your primary goal has been achieved. It matters little if the reward is money, food, or relaxation, because the whole point is merely to help you stay focused on achievement rather than how far you are from completion.

But rewards can be tricky, especially when they loom large enough to dominate the goals they are meant to support. When that happens, people look for shortcuts to get the reward without achieving the original goal. Many children learn to lie so they can get rewards without effort, but it also happens every time a politician acts corruptly by taking bribes rather than doing their duty. Even people who use chocolates to reward themselves eventually start eating chocolates before reaching their goals — either that or they eat more chocolates than they’d promised.

It’s usually better to choose rewards that are less compelling in their own right, so the rewards don’t overwhelm the initial goal. For example, try taking time to stop and self-consciously consider what you’ve achieved. I personally make a list at the end of the day of things I’ve done, tasks I’ve completed and goals I’ve satisfied. Some people work better with personal praise, so if you’re a leader find ways to thank people to let them know you about what they’ve achieved. More exuberant people use a victory dance or shout. So find the calorie-free rewards that work for you and your team and make sure to reward success.

Clearing Mental Clutter

A different way of making goals appear bigger is by providing lots of reminders. Some people do that by posting sticky-notes, which provide little prompts that bring goals back to focus, while business often use slogans or posters for the same reason. Surprisingly, measurement works the same way, by repeatedly reminding people to focus on their goals so they take a bigger place in your mind. It’s not the whole story but it’s a big part of the reason why ‘What gets measured, gets done’.

On the other hand, you can make goals seem bigger and more attention-grabbing by removing other goals from the picture. This is one of the magical principles underlying David Allen’s classic book, Getting Things Done. David Allen’s systems are brilliant for removing distractions from your workspace, which helps build and maintain a clear focus on your goals removing all goals from your mind other than the one you currently want to focus upon. For example, one of the techniques in that book gets people to maintain reliable lists of tasks so that whenever another goal sneaks into your mind, it can be placed into one of those lists where it won’t be forgotten and it won’t steal focus from your current goal.

From Thoughts of Failure to Joy

While these simple techniques work well, life often gets more complicated. A major complication is the distance you need to travel to reach your goal — if that’s large enough it will make your goal disappear behind a mountain of effort. I discuss techniques for managing this problem in Chunking to Conquer: Overcome Procrastination (Now!) and Make Fear Your Super-Power, but for now, it’s enough to remember that every achievement rests on seeing goals clearly and remaining focused on them.

If you get that right, you’ll eventually replace Bonjour tristesse with Bonjour gaieté (Hello cheerfulness). Personally, I feel more comfortable with simply saying, Enjoy or Have Fun!  

Many of the deadlines in my life have prompted something close to terror, with every other concern overwhelmed by that point on the clock indicating when doom descends. And if you’re a perennial procrastinator, you know precisely how that feels and, like me, envy people like Douglas Adams who wrote, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly by.”  

Well, maybe not that much envy. I suspect that Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was far less composed in the face of deadlines. But while I don’t know about him, I know I don’t experience that level of sang-froid.

Instead, I’m one of those people who have been regularly surprised by how much can be done in the last few minutes. Somehow, there is focus and energy to burn just before assignments are submitted, projects completed, or contracts signed.

Although I know this well, it’s not hard to see how weird it is. Procrastinators are clearly capable of working extremely hard in the face of deadlines, yet they avoid beginning until they are so scared of failure they can think of little else. As deadlines approach that fear is somewhat transformed into excitement, although never completely — fear of failure remains a constant companion.

Why Do People Procrastinate?

People whose lives are less-dominated by deadlines find procrastination difficult to comprehend. I recall many conversations with well-meaning friends who were puzzled by why I repeatedly put myself through this. And it’s not only the during the final push that procrastination is unpleasant. Before finally committing to action, every reminder of the deadline is like a poke in the eye with a burnt stick, something from which I would instantly recoil and start looking for relief, usually in the form of distractions. No wonder my friends would ask, how come you don’t just start earlier?

I often tried this but somehow, it was more of a struggle to start earlier, so for most of my life I remained wondering why I couldn’t find a better way that avoided the ongoing pain of procrastination.

Procrastination & Distraction

One solution I tried was dealing with distractions. Distractions go hand-in-hand with procrastination, which is why people often think distractions cause procrastination. That idea has prompted any number of parents to try banning games or screens from procrastinating children, while an entire industry exists to produce tools for removing distractions from computers and phones.

I’ve tried many of these anti-distraction tools and they rarely work at all and never work for long. In hindsight, those failures are predictable because their logic is backwards. Instead of distractions causing procrastination, it’s procrastination that causes distraction. The reason is because paradoxically, deadlines make distractions seem attractive.  

This works like an optical illusion. Goals and associated deadlines appear small when they’re far away, while the tasks required to meet those deadlines loom large. Worse still, those incomplete tasks feel like failure because they are all the things you have not done. This is the procrastinators’ problem: instead of thinking about their goals or tasks, procrastinators see their current failure to achieve, which looms far larger than any outcomes they desire.

That makes every incomplete task feel like a failure and a punishment, something to be avoided and even feared rather than pursued on the path to a goal. This is unpleasant and even painful, which is why procrastinators habitually recoil from useful tasks. Anything seems better, which is what makes distractions become so attractive, even things that would rarely occur to me at other times. For example, I’ve been distracted by tidying forgotten areas of my office, arranging cutlery drawers, even checking for bits of fluff on my clothes or furniture. Those distraction monitors sitting on my computer that prevent internet-surfing are no help in fending off the strange allure of dusting when deadlines appear on the horizon. Instead, anything becomes a distraction if it stops me experiencing the discomfort of unfinished tasks with no goal in sight.

As they approach, deadlines loom larger until they can no longer be ignored, at which point my anxious hunt for distractions is overwhelmed by terror at failing the deadline. In response to that terror, a ferocious energy consumes me until stuff gets done. That can be fun while it lasts, in the same way that addictive drugs can be fun, but each is ultimately self-destructive.

That procrastination process has happened to me throughout my life, more often than I dare think of (except when procrastinating). Yet, like every other chronic procrastinator, the only thing that experience ever taught me was how terrifying deadlines can be and how much you can achieve in very little time.

Little of this makes sense to anyone who is not a procrastinator (they do exist — I’ve met and envied more than a few). For them, a deadline is nothing more than a reminder, a guide for what needs doing now, well in advance of the completion time.

Goals Cause Procrastination

Although simple, that never worked for me until I discovered how I was tripping myself up, luring myself into self-destructive procrastinating habits. And the solution was recognising another paradox: goals are the root cause of procrastination.

For many people, that last statement is heretical. Goals and goal-setting are widely-recognised as one of the most useful tools for improving performance. I know this well and have read the research. Goals really help.

Until they don’t.

For half a century, management by objectives (MBO), key performance indicators (KPIs), and their slightly more humane incarnation as objectives and key results (OKR) have dominated performance management in business. Each of these, like every form of project management (including Agile) is rife with goals because goals work.

Until they don’t.

One of the points at which goals cease to work underlies the procrastinators’ paradox. What people often forget about goals is they always have two sides: achievement and failure. Achievement is what you experience once the goal is completed while failure is everything else. In other words, until you’ve achieved a goal, you’ve failed. The point at which procrastination becomes almost inevitable is when people shift focus from achievement to failure. For procrastinators, that happens as soon as they’ve been given the deadline — quietly at first, then louder and louder until it screams, find a distraction.

Non-procrastinators avoid this, instead remaining focused on what needs doing to reach their goals. For procrastinators, failure remains ever-present, which is why people like me start searching for distractions even while recognising they are literally useless. Worse still, every reminder that distractions represent wasted time merely heightens that sense of failure, bringing increasingly pointless activities into play until the fear of failure can be ignored no more. At that point, fear produces focus and the extraordinary energy non-procrastinators neither know nor envy.

So, what can procrastinators do?

Some people try to manage procrastination by tying goals to rewards, while others think they should punish failures to make people less likely to repeat them. Neither works well and never for long, because both effectively add a goal on to that big, fear-inducing goal, making it even scarier. Punishment is at least honest about trying to scare people but a moment’s reflection makes it clear that is simply going to make things worse.

Others get hooked on the rush produced by running out of time and look for jobs where they are constantly confronted with deadlines as a way of avoiding the wait before goal-focus arrives. Newsrooms and production companies are full of these deadline-lovers, as are emergency-service organisations. There are few areas where deadlines are more compelling than publication houses, fire response, or health emergencies, which gives these occupations a magnetic attraction for thrill-seekers.  

Yet the thrill eventually wears off, leading to burnout and/or career-change. In any case, thrill-seekers are often undesirable in emergencies, where systematic approaches usually provide better outcomes. For example, airline pilots are among the most boring people to sit beside at dinner parties because their methodical approach to life makes them ideal for managing the occasional mind-numbingly huge crisis. Likewise, rather than indulging deadline-dependence, it is usually better for procrastinators to find systematic ways to manage the downsides of goals.

Calming Distractions

There are two key skills that limit the power of procrastination, the first of which is subtle and takes time. Procrastinators need to learn to be comfortable with the thought of failure, especially the thought of their failure to yet achieve their goals. Consciously, repeatedly, procrastinators need to mindfully recognise the anxiety produced by goals, especially when reaching for that distraction. This mindful acceptance is the start of the process of curing procrastination.

So, when you notice yourself getting anxious or reaching for a distraction, stop and do something different. Instead of submitting to the distraction or refocusing on your goal, mindfully refocus on the discomfort itself, the anxiety emerging from your current failure to achieve or even progress your goal. Once you’ve refocused, let yourself sit with that discomfort for however long it takes to subside. You may need to slow your breath but over time, the anxiety produced by failure to achieve (or even commence working towards) your goals will reduce. As anxiety abates, distractions become less compelling.

This is not always easy and it can require a lot of practice (I know that it took me a long time), but it’s often surprising how quickly that goal-induced anxiety will subside. Even when I started, it often took no more than a few seconds for my feelings of discomfort to melt away. I still have times when it takes longer but even when I began it rarely took more than a few minutes for calmness to return. I still occasionally have longer bouts of goal-induced anxiety and I suspect I always will, but I know I can mostly outlast the anxiety. And the same is true for you — you can do this and it does make a difference.

And yes, there are times it doesn’t work, either because I’m too tired or the anxiety is just too big. At those times, I need to do something else, like write in my journal or talk with a mentor or coach or counsellor. Regardless, mindful acceptance of goal-induced anxiety is one of the most powerful tools for overcoming procrastination.

Cutting Failure Down to Size

There’s a second skill for managing procrastination that works in a very different way: change the size of your failure so that it is less distressing. Every failure is the same size as the goal you haven’t achieved so the easiest way to diminish a failure is by changing the size of your goal.

The straightforward way to achieve that is simply choosing a new, smaller goal. For example, instead of cleaning the house you might choose to clean the hallway; instead of completing a report you might focus on writing the introduction. Smaller goals are much easier to face and produce far less anxiety, making it easier to remain focused on achievement instead of failure.

That’s not always an option — your housemates may not accept a clean hallway in place of a clean house, and your teacher or manager will probably insist on the entire report. Even then, you can cut goals down to size by chunking.

Chunking means splitting the big goal into small, easy-to-finish chunks. The first time I consciously used that strategy was in the early months of my Ph.D. Most people who do a Ph.D. will never complete a larger project on their own, because it has to be the student’s own work, requires large amounts of reading, data collection and writing multiple drafts and reviews, and takes years. A Ph.D. is highly intimidating and when I recognised how large it was, I was tempted to do more than just get distracted. Instead, I wanted to quit.  

It was then that an old proverb sprang to mind: the only way to eat an elephant is one mouthful at a time. While I like eating meat, I don’t want to eat even a mouthful of an elephant, yet I recognised the wisdom in that proverb. To complete the Ph.D., I needed to find a way to consume it one mouthful or chunk at a time. In other words, I needed to split that huge project into bite-sized chunks, the size that I could complete in a month, a week, a day, or even less. Once I began chunking it down to size, the Ph.D. became far less intimidating. Instead, it became part of my daily and weekly routine, something no more anxiety-provoking than writing an email or reading an article.

Rising Above Your Fears

In other words, chunking is the perfect match for mindful acceptance of goal-induced anxiety. Each time I mindfully accepted my anxiety, I was able to mindfully refocus on the next activity, the next bit of reading, writing, and analysis. It wasn’t until I’d submitted that sucker that its size came back into view, at which point I noticed my feet were no longer touching the ground — instead of recovering from terror, I was floating with pleasure at my achievement.

You can do the same, regardless of how much a procrastinator you are. Cut your big goals down to size to reduce anxiety, while recognising that at some point you’re still likely to get anxious. When you notice that is happening, Stop. Take a breath or two and accept your anxiety, and acknowledge that anxiety makes you distractible. Then Stop, again. Stay stopped long enough time to calm yourself, letting the anxiety diminish or dissolve. Once you’ve calmed, you can refocus back on a little goal, a chunk of the big goal, something you can achieve today, or this morning, or this minute.

That’s how you can chunk to conquer both procrastination and any goals within your grasp.

Do you remember sitting, wondering should you make that call? It may have been a call to a possible customer or business partner, a potential friend or lover, asking for a favour or giving an apology. Do you remember that tension between what might be and what might not?

And do you remember how many times you never made that call? The times it felt too difficult, complicated, or downright scary to get in touch, ask that question, pursue that goal?

For most of us, the calls we never made hugely outnumber those we did, the risks we never took overwhelm those moments of bravery.

Why do we avoid those calls?

For that matter, why are so many afraid to join that group or start that business?

Perhaps most painful of all, why do so many never contact that special person?

Why do so few people pursue their dreams? Why are we so afraid?  

At one level, the answer is simple. Each of those calls represents a dream, a possible future, and every dream is a goal, something to be achieved. Goals are truly powerful but as I explain in What’s Wrong with Goal-Setting, every goal is a two-edged sword that often cuts down more sharply than up. While achieving goals expands our world, every goal has a shadow, a dark side that binds you and keeps your world small.

It’s the dark side of goals that blocks our efforts and prevents us pursuing our dreams.

Or building that business.

Or contacting that special someone.

You don’t have to be an anxious person to know the dark side of goals. Susan Jeffers in her awesome book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, tells multiple stories of people who appeared brave to others while they remained privately terrified. Whether private or not, fears are intimately linked with every goal. That’s because the flipside of every goal is failure. The bigger your goal, the bigger the potential failure, while the more specific your goal, the more precisely you can see what failure looks like.

If that seems surprising, it may help to recall childhood experiences of learning. In Failure Sucks: Seeing Goals Clearly, I explained how it is easy to switch from focusing on what you want to what you don’t want. When you wanted to learn to ride a bike, you also wanted to avoid falling over or riding into obstacles. When you were learning arithmetic, you were also pursuing the negative goal of learning to avoid the wrong answers. Just as every person has a shadow, every goal carries its own version of failure. And the bigger the goal, bigger the failure, and the more reason to be afraid.

There are many paths to success in the face of fear, including the techniques outlined in Failure Sucks: Seeing Goals Clearly, and Chunking to Conquer: Overcoming Procrastination (Now!). Paradoxically, one of the most powerful focuses on fear itself, which is why it is often called Fear-Setting.

Also known as Implementation Intentions, Fear-Setting helps people achieve goals by deeply exploring their fears. The earliest versions of Fear-Setting are ancient but this is not one of those traditional cures that ignore science — instead, Fear-Setting is strongly supported by current research. That research shows Fear-Setting leads to far greater success with goals, ranging from changing bad habits to organisational innovations.

One of the reasons Fear-Setting works is it shifts your point of comparison. Where goals get you thinking about the gap between where you are and where you want to be, consciously focusing on fears highlights everything that is better than the worst-case. In other words, if you use Fear-Setting, almost anything that happens will feel like a bit of a win, not a loss. And when combined with Goal-Setting, Fear-Setting becomes a powerful method for achieving what you want while managing your emotions.

What do you mean by “Fear-Setting”?

Both Goal-Setting and Fear-Setting ask you to be very specific about your possible future, but where Goal-Setting emphasises what you hope for if things go right, with Fear-Setting, you focus on everything that could possibly go wrong. With Goal-Setting, people are told to write SMART goals that are:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Realistic &

Time-bound.

Like Goal-Setting, Fear-Setting works better when you are more thorough and specific, including listing fears that seem silly and unlikely, including the worst possible thing that might happen. It even helps to list other people’s fears with regards to your goal, so if Mum and Dad are worried you are throwing your life away, list that as well. To help you be thorough, try listing your WORST fears, those that are:

Worst-case outcomes: what might happen if everything goes wrong

Other people’s fears: all those scary things people have said or might say

Reasonable fears: the things you were likely to prepare for, anyway

Silly fears: your most neurotic fears, like ‘everyone will think I’m stupid’

Tensions & anxieties: those vague, general feelings that something will go wrong

Recording these fears is the first step in confronting them, without which they will keep lurking in the back of your mind like the dark shadows they are. This suggestion is a lot like Dave Allen’s advice in Getting Things Done, where he tells people to record things so they no longer keep them in their minds.   

Once you’ve recorded your WORST fears, revise them using as much detail as possible. So, if your worst-case scenario is ‘everyone will think I’m stupid’, list the people you fear will think you’re stupid and what it will mean for you if they do. And don’t tread lightly — Fear-Setting works best when your fears are at their worst.

After revising your fears, it’s time to do a thorough analysis. This is where a spreadsheet or some type of table can be useful, but many people are happier with simply writing the analysis after the fear. To analyse each fear, you need to consider the following points.

1. Likelihood: What is the probability of the fear becoming true, from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (certain to occur)

2. Prevention: What practical steps can be taken to prevent the fear becoming true

3. Repair: If the fear becomes true, what practical steps will fix or at least partly repair things. These repairs should be written as “If … (insert the feared event here) … , I/We will … (insert the practical repair steps here) … . For example, ‘If Mum says I was stupid, I’ll remind myself that’s just her opinion and tell her I’m glad I tried something new.’

4. Worst-case benefits: Describe in detail the benefits you will get even if the worst possible situation arises (e.g., a failed project often produces great learning)

5. Costs of inaction: What are the consequences of not trying? It’s worth considering short, medium, and long-term consequences of doing nothing.

Once you’ve analysed each fear, it’s time to revise your goals and plans. Make sure to record the prevention and repair steps someplace they will be readily noticed when working towards the goal, and regularly review these and, if necessary, revise them. That way, you’ll be ready if your fears come true.

Of course, sometimes you’ll list a fear that is truly dreadful and likely enough that it cannot be ignored. For example, some actions may risk serious injury or someone’s survival, either literally or financially. In those cases, Fear-Setting is especially helpful because it will make clear your fears are reasonable and the goal is not worth pursuing. At least it’s not worth pursuing without making things safe for yourself and others.

Can Fear be a Super-Power?

Fear is usually associated with the three F’s: fighting, fleeing, or freezing. In other words, fear usually reduces our options to the simplest, most immediate response, the quickest way to remove whatever makes us afraid. Fighting happens when fear becomes anger, which arises when we think we can overwhelm what we fear, while fleeing handles fear by removing ourselves from whatever might harm us. Freezing (also known as being petrified) is what we do when can neither fight nor flee, instead hoping that by keeping still we will remain unnoticed, and the fearful event will pass us by.

Each of the three F’s are a reaction to something nasty, an attempt to avoid losing or experiencing something, so each of them come from a position of potential powerlessness. Like the three F’s, Fear-Setting manages our fears but does so by transforming the fears themselves into positive actions, things we can do to create a future rather than avoid one. That’s how Fear-Setting makes fear a super-power, something that reveals opportunities for actions we can take to make a better world for ourselves and those around us.

The biggest downside with Fear-Setting is that it can take a lot of time, so it is often used only for your biggest, most important goals. You may find it especially useful when deciding if and how you will pursue big opportunities, like a new career, a new business, or a new life-partner. But there are alternative ways of using Fear-Setting, including ignoring the goals and focusing on one of your fears at a time. So, you might use Fear-Setting on your financial fears this week, before reviewing your fears of personal rejection next week. In effect, that’s a way of using Fear-Setting on Fear-Setting itself by addressing the fear it may consume too much time.

Whichever way you use it, Fear-Setting is one of the most profoundly useful tools available for any person, team, or organisation in the face of an uncertain future. Many people have found that Fear-Setting is lifechanging. If you want an example, watch Tim Ferris talk about how he learnt to use this ancient yet modern technique.