Pressure of Goals: 5 Honest Views from Women in Leadership
Goals guide your focus, help you sustain momentum and trigger beneficial and new behaviours. Goals can also be a source of stress, induced by mistrust in our capabilities, capacity and resilience to progress. We have a tendency to then wrestle with our inner monologue, inadvertently putting pressure on ourselves to be more than we are right now. Curious about the pressure of goals, I asked 5 clients for their views; I posed an open-ended question; what does setting goals evoke in you? Here’s what they shared;
5 Honest Views on Goals
Intentions Not Goals: “At some point, I stopped setting myself goals. Maybe I never set them…? I always have an intention or a direction I want to be travelling in and eventually get there. Maybe that is the point of goals you reach them more quickly, but I can’t see what I would do differently. I am moving forward …always, but sometimes sideways and backwards and then I go under for a while and then get going again and move forward…are you regretting asking me this now [Laugh].”
Multi-Tasking Goals: “My group of friends have no children and I have two, our ambitions are the same, but time! [big sigh]….I feel really sad to say that. I don’t ever feel I have enough to cope with my own ambitions. I’m constantly supporting my children to move forward towards what school wants and what they want, and so constantly working to achieve what work needs from us each month and we hit targets, we just about say congrats and the next target is set…treadmill [laugh]”
Time is running out for me; “I haven't been crushed, but I have been more disappointed than is normal…maybe even healthy, no its more I have had a lack of focus on what I want in life. It is the guilt maybe? Or even the shame of feeling like I haven't done enough [silence] …actually it's more over the past 6 months I hear myself say ‘I haven’t done enough with my life’ double blow [laugh]...it almost feels like time is running out for me when I hear that and I don’t think I have considered I thought that before.”
Achievement exhaustion: ”I spend my whole life working with overachievers. I am supposed to be an overachiever. That is what I was at school and at Uni. But I am not interested in setting goals. I am tired of competing [Huff] I’m ***ing sick of others talking about how great they are on LinkedIn. I just want to tell them they sound like a bunch of ****s. I think that is because I am tired right now, ask me again in a few weeks after I have had a holiday [laugh].”
Goal Cycles: “...as we move from quarter to quarter, we go through the same cycle; start with high hopes, gets some success, some blows and then scramble for the later part of the quarter to catch up. It finishes with me dreading telling the same story at board meetings, I feel like I say the same things at these quarterly meetings. I do need this structure in my life though…”
What Can We Learn?
What emerged within all of these answers is pressure; Pressure time running out. Pressure others' achievements are greater than ours. Pressure to compete with others' achievements, these pressures enforce an excessive demand on our lives and our self worth. What these comments highlight is the pressure is neither motivational or positive - however pressure come hand in hand goals.
What Can We Do?
Exploring the reality of goals….
Productivity V Self-Worth: I discuss with clients to explore the idea of goals as productivity related: Rather than a structure for measuring self-worth, simply a work-rate framework or a structure for progress to attract our attention with the goal holding key information that is relevant and useful.
Unhealthy Measures: We then identify how we tend to use goals; a measure to judge our choices, our behaviours and emotions and how disappointed or angry we become at ourselves, the emotional side of goals emerges.
Healthy Focus: We spend time exploring how goals could give rise to us focusing on tasks and actions; Asking how could goals be used differently"? Written in a different way, used as part of weekly planning, post-it notes on the fridge, fishbone exersize, milestones in the calendar, roadmapping, intentions not goals, visualisations…
Emotional Check-In: We identify the emotions that need to be noticed and supported; when anger, guilt, shame, frustration, sadness appear, we know we are feeling pressured and it is time to give ourselves reassurance.
Experiment : To figure out if how we reframed our newly found healthy focus I encourage experiments; find out what works, what doesn’t work, what was unhealthy…. almost what levers create progress, move towards achievement and what detracts.
Honest Evaluation: We then ask what else is going on? What is stopping us progressing and what get’s prioritised over our goals…we dig deeper into the challenges
“ I have used [goals] against myself in a way that totally diminishes my value, I regularly tell myself I’m useless”
- Managing Partner
Separating goals from emotional pressures is a great ways to liberate ourselves from regularly beating yourself up. The shift in perspective is the starting place to improving our relationship with goals. What may help is a remember the goal is a device developed to increase productivity in the workforce. It is factual. It has no context as to what is else is happening, what else is competing for your time and energy and how committed you actually are to the goal (because if you don’t care enough, you are never going to find the motivation to progress it)
