The Downside of Goal Setting
by Vic Wiens
If you have been reading my articles over the last few months, you will know that I am an avid fan of goal setting. Today I would like to caution you, as I caution myself, of a downside to goal setting. Taken to an extreme, and used out of balance, goal setting can harm your health or even kill you! There is a balance between pursuing our God-given potential and recognizing our finiteness.
Eight years ago I faced my finiteness when my health collapsed. You can read some tips from my own experience in my Long-Term Impact article. Here I want to focus on setting the right goals and the right size of goals.
In his book, Succeed Without Burnout, Ben Kubassek makes the following observation:
“By the time I reached twenty-seven years of age, I had achieved a net worth of over one million dollars. I had also already re-set my financial goals to earn a million dollars a year, a goal that I well exceeded by the time I was thirty years old. Having achieved the million dollars a year of personal income, I still did not feel as if I had reached my full earning potential. It was then that I set a goal to give away a million dollars in one year. Selfish goal setting and goal achievement were both losing their appeal.
“You may think “WOW”, what super-success in reaching goals. In reality, I never did feel a sense of victory because, whenever I was getting within view of a goal, I would re-set it to a level that was out of sight. To me a goal within reach was no goal at all. So I set unrealistic goals for every area of my life that was important to me at the time. Unfortunately, the only area of my life important to me at that time was the financial area.
“The key to preventing yourself from setting unrealistic goals is to maintain a balance between what is realistic and what presents us with an exciting challenge.
“The real reason for my unrealistic goal setting was the fact I was a perfectionist. I didn’t just strive for excellence; I was striving for perfection.”
Fritz Ridenour explains the difference between excellence and perfectionism in his book, The Traveler’s Guide to Life at Warp Speed. Here are a few of the contrasts he makes:
- Perfectionism sets impossible goals. Excellence sets high standards within reach.
- Perfectionism values “what I do”, excellence values “who I am.”
- Perfectionism dwells on mistakes and excellence learns from them.
- Perfectionism says “I’ve got to be number one,” and excellence says “I did my best and I am satisfied.”
One way we can tell when we have set the right sized goals is that they stress us the right amount. Stress is not necessarily a bad thing. We all have an optimum stress level that makes us productive without harming us. Too little stress is not a good thing. Too much stress is also not a good thing.
My dad had a simple method of determining his upper healthy stress limit as he approached the end of his working career. If he was re-energized after a weekend of rest, he was operating within his healthy stress range. He believed strongly that we were not created to work 7 days a week. God gave us both a daily and weekly rest rhythm. When our goals are the right size, a weekend of rest will re-energize us.
Part of our rest rhythm needs to be sleep, but part of it is balance. There is a saying that “A change is as good as a rest.” This saying is correct if the change engages us in one of our other dimensions.
We are four dimensional beings. We have physical, social/emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions that need to be kept in balance. When our goals are set too high in one area of our lives, the biggest problem is often not one of too much stress as much as too much stress focused in one area of our being. One indicator of right sized goals is that they allow us to also pursue goals in the other dimensions of our lives.
I was first introduced to the concept of setting goals in each dimension of my life about ten years ago. While I have made significant progress I know it will require a lifetime pursuit to achieve real balance. There are a number of good books written on this topic which I hope to survey in future articles.
Are you serious about pursuing balance in your goal setting and about setting the right sized goals? Your health and your productivity depend on it. Our personal mentoring program at Vic Wiens Consulting will help you get started on the right track.
