Forget your goals

Goal-setting works for some, but could ditching it boost your overall wellbeing? Siobhan Norton tells you why you should forget your goals.

“All my life I’ve had one dream, to achieve my many goals.” -Homer Simpson

In the 1960s, Ford was presented with a very precise goal: build a car that weighs less than 2,000 pounds and costs less than $2,000 by 1970. The result was the Ford Pinto, which killed 53 people as a result of gas tank explosions in rear-end collisions. Employees and designers had overlooked safety testing in their haste to adhere to the goal.

Goal-setting has been heralded over the last few years as the ultimate path to success. Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret is completely based on the premise of visualisation – focusing on your goals and imagining yourself achieving them to actually make all your dreams come true. The book has been translated into 48 languages and sold 19 million copies worldwide, so there must be a decent success rate.

However, author and life coach Sarah Alexander says you should trust your intuition, rather than set goals, if you want to be happier, more successful and less stressed. We all begin the year planning to improve ourselves – read more books, kickstart our careers, get fit, lose weight. In fact, we’re often urged to set fairly precise goals: read a book a fortnight, get a £5,000 pay rise; run a half marathon; lose a stone. Is it any wonder, then, that most of us end up despondent if we fail to reach that goal, even if we have had some moderate success – say, started running a few times a week, or had a positive evaluation in work. Our self-esteem – and thus motivation – take a bashing every time we ‘fail’.

In 2009, an academic report entitled Goals Gone Wild used the explosive example of the Ford Pinto to make its case for why goal-setting doesn’t work. ‘Rather than dispensing goal-setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for students of management,’ the study concluded, ‘experts need to conceptualise goal-setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision. Given the sway of goal-setting on intellectual pursuits in management, we call for a more self-critical and less self-congratulatory approach to the study of goal-setting.’ It advised less of a ‘spreading the peanut butter’ approach, applying the same goals across the board, and instead a more holistic, targeted attitude to different employees and sectors to get the best results.

Alexander, author of Spiritual Intelligence in Leadership: From Manager to Leader in Your Own Life, gives three reasons for moving our focus to our ‘inner wisdom,’ or gut feeling:

1 In our lives, we can only see what our small-minded perspective and narrow focus can show us. We look at our lives from this tunnelled viewpoint and think ‘this is what I’m going to do in 2015.’ In contrast, our inner wisdom can see the bigger picture of our lives individually and people’s lives collectively and how we best fit into that larger whole. It can nudge us specifically in every situation to the best outcome for all concerned… if we allow it.

2 Our inner senses can see much further ahead than our logical minds. They know where we’re headed ultimately and can guide us, with precision, to our perfect future. And, this wisdom only has our good at its heart. We can rest assured in that knowledge as we release tight control of our lives and depend on this font of inspiration for direction.

3 We all have psychological blind spots as well as restricting beliefs hidden below our radar that often negate our ambitions and goals soon after we’ve started. They act as self-fulfilling prophecies that continuously prevent us from achieving what we believe we desire. However as we follow the one-step-at-a-time intuitive guidance, we’re guided to situations that are inherently right for us. Sometimes these circumstances are challenging, yet once we’ve experienced them and let our limited thinking go, we’re free to move forward to a bigger future.

Alexander advises that the best way to focus outside of goal-setting is to try to still our busy minds – we have more than 50,000 thoughts a day, so not an easy task. Mindfulness or yoga can help with this. Mindfulness experts say even taking a ‘pause’ during the day can help you to reset and regather. Alexander’s tip is to focus on your breathing, even if just for three deep breaths at a time. This brings us back into our body, and prevents the mind from racing ahead. Once we’ve cleared out the cacophany of thoughts, she says, it can clear room for other worldly wisdom.

“As we develop this practice of asking for guidance,  listening for the answers and then acting on that clarity, we naturally feel happier, more fulfilled and have greater peace of mind, knowing we’re setting ourselves up to be luckier!”