3 Ways We Sabotage Our Goals (And How to Stop)

Summary.   Goals can be a helpful way to enhance our performance, keep us moving in the right direction, and increase our happiness and well-being. However, we won’t reap any of those benefits if we don’t set them the right way. Here are three ways we tend to go wrong when setting goals, and what to do instead this time around.

At the start of every new year, we set goals — both professional and personal. You may wish to be promoted to management, maximize your sales, run a marathon, or find a life partner. But come December, many of those goals remain unmet. In fact, one survey found that the average New Year’s resolution lasts just three months.

Why does this continue to happen?

When pursuing a goal, we sometimes focus solely on the desired outcome — say, hitting a 1 million mark in sales — while neglecting to clarify the process we’ll use to achieve our aims. Interestingly, this can make us less likely to reach our objective. Other times, we lose sight of why we’re pursuing the goal in the first place and end up getting lost in the weeds.

While goals can be a helpful way to enhance our performance, keep us moving in the right direction, and increase our happiness and well-being — we won’t reap any of those benefits if we don’t set them the right way.

Here are three ways we tend to go wrong when setting goals, and what to do instead this time around.

1. WE SET ONLY PERFORMANCE GOALS.

The first mistake many of us make is setting performance goals (how well we want to do something) at the exclusion of learning goals (the knowledge and skills we need to acquire to achieve the performance goals).

We do this for several reasons:

First, our brains overvalue the present and undervalue the future. This phenomenon is called “present bias” and one reason it happens is that our brains want to do what’s easiest right now. Focusing on what feels good in the present is more immediately rewarding than having the discipline to act in ways that will help us reach our goals in the future. For instance, the present bias may cause us to rely on our current skills to reach a goal even when developing new ones would be more beneficial in the long term.

Second, the academic systems many of us grew up in tend to focus on performing over learning. While we are taught lessons in school, we are too frequently measured on how well we can demonstrate our knowledge on quizzes and exams. The constant rewards (scores) for performance can become engrained in us as adults, making us value proving how much we know over working on what we don’t know so that we can grow and achieve greater things.

Third, and most importantly, few of us have been taught how to learn. School tends to teach the “what” (what knowledge we acquire) rather than also the “how” (how to acquire knowledge). Because of this, many of us believe we simply need to work harder if we want to acquire new knowledge or reach a goal. But the process of learning is much more nuanced than that.

Research indicates that athletes don’t improve significantly merely by competing in games. They advance by engaging in improvement-focused practice. Take the example of Serena and Venus Williams. In the years leading to turning pro, they became world class despite not participating in tournaments. They focused on improvement rather than performance. Their family moved from Compton, California, to Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, so that the sisters could train with renowned coach Rick Macci at his tennis academy. Going against common practice and at their father’s insistence, Serena and Venus abstained from participating in competitions. Upon turning professional, they were relatively unknown, but they quickly demonstrated the exceptional abilities they had developed.

This principle holds true across professions. Salespeople, typists, and physicians don’t improve just by executing their day-to-day tasks. Instead, progress comes from identifying areas of improvement, seeking feedback, observing others, experimenting with new approaches, practicing specific subskills, and reflecting on mistakes.

How do you apply this to your own goals?

Say you’ve set a performance goal to become a manager within two years. Pursuing this goal simply by working hard at your current job to the best of your abilities doesn’t guarantee that you’ll reach it. In order to succeed, you must identify which skills you need to learn to excel to the next level, and how to acquire them.

Share your aspiration with your supervisor and ask which abilities you need to develop to be qualified to lead others. Many companies maintain a list of competencies they expect from employees at different levels within the organization. Rather than trying to learn everything all at once, choose one skill to work on first and research strategies others have found effective for its development.

Pursuing learning goals doesn’t necessarily involve taking courses or dedicating large blocks of time to studying (although these can be helpful). Given the time constraints many of us have in work and in life, it’s often more effective to build learning into your daily routine. Think about ways you can practice the skills you want to develop while also accomplishing the tasks you are responsible for. For example, if you’re trying to develop stronger leadership skills, ask a colleague or your boss whether they could observe you in work meetings and share feedback with you afterwards about how you could better lead.

2. WE GET TRAPPED IN LOW-LEVEL GOALS.

Higher-level goals often represent our primary aims — the reasons behind our actions. In contrast, lower-level goals are often the methods or steps we use to achieve those primary aims. We can identify our higher-level goals by asking “Why do I want this?” and our lower-level goals by asking “How can I achieve this?”

We often get stuck in low-level goals because our actions are driven mostly by unconscious habits. It takes mental energy to pause, identify our higher aims, and consider better approaches to pursue them.

Take the example of Traca Savadogo — currently a speaker and relationship strategist. When Traca was in college, she participated in many extracurricular activities and worked two part-time jobs. She struggled to get enough sleep. During her early morning shifts as a Starbucks barista, she kept needing to ask other baristas to remind her what customers had ordered, frustrating them. She frequently made mistakes, leading to long customer wait times.

Finally, after repeatedly failing to remember orders. Traca stopped to ask herself why she was expected to remember orders: to serve customers promptly and deliver what people expected. This was her higher-level goal.

When Traca shifted her focus from the lower-level goal of remembering orders to the higher-level goal of serving customers, she came up with an innovative idea. If the cashier wrote each order on the side of the cup, the baristas wouldn’t need to keep the orders in their heads. As an added benefit, they wouldn’t need to shout to each other above the noise of the brewing machines and could focus instead on being more present with customers.

Traca’s colleagues loved the new approach. After it proved successful, she submitted the idea to Starbucks headquarters and the practice went on to become a global standard.

Instead of remaining fixated on the way you’re currently pursuing your goals, consider alternative strategies that could prove more effective. Here’s how:

Pause and reflect on why you’re doing what you’re doing (i.e. clarify your higher-level goals). Then, consider how you might better go about pursuing those higher aims. For example, let’s say your goal is to prepare a powerful slide deck. Before you begin, ask yourself why you’re making a slide deck and identify your higher-level objective. It could be to get buy-in for a project. Then, ask how you can go about getting buy-in. You might remember a persuasive presentation your colleague delivered and decide to emulate it by starting with a story rather than slides or use your colleague’s slide deck as a template.

Tap into expertise. Seek advice from others who have traveled similar paths or who might offer fresh perspectives on how to pursue your higher aims. Requesting assistance is also a way to connect, engage in dialogue, and provide others with an opportunity to contribute. While it’s essential to respect others’ time, give people the chance to put their expertise to good use. If they say no, don’t take it personally.

3. WE START THINKING TOO NARROWLY.

A single-minded focus on a goal can cause you to miss out on inspirations from unrelated areas that could spark novel ways to achieve that goal, help you develop new ways of thinking, and catalyze important contributions.

While there’s value to deep expertise, staying within the confines of your discipline can also limit your problem-solving skills. Many of the most innovative breakthroughs involve connecting ideas from unrelated disciplines. When you feel stuck or are unsure how to overcome an obstacle blocking you from your goal, take a pause. Consider exploring areas outside your expertise to gain inspiration. It will give you a better understanding of how the world works and how things are interconnected. Equipped with a better grasp of how your field or skills relate to others, you may just see more ways to pursue opportunities and tackle challenges that are getting in the way of you reaching your goals.

Robert J. Lang wanted to pursue a meaningful and fulfilling career. He began working as a physicist on lasers and optoelectronics, but he also nurtured a childhood interest in origami. Blending the two worlds, Lang became interested in how principles from the ancient art could be applied to folding components in new technologies. Through collaboration with other experts, Lang’s interdisciplinary expertise has led to important breakthroughs in air-bag design, space telescopes, and minimally invasive surgery and implants. Ultimately, it was his involvements outside physics that led him to a more meaningful and fulfilling career than if he had stayed narrowly focused within one domain.

The power of Lang’s cross-disciplinary approach is not an anomaly. Nobel Prize-winning scientists are more than 20 times more likely than other scientists to have hobbies in the performing arts. They understand that focusing too narrowly on a goal can get in the way of achieving it.

However big or small your goal may be, expanding the breadth of your knowledge and tinkering in new domains can help you find more creative ways to achieve it. Watching documentaries, visiting museums, reading books, listening to podcasts, or speaking with professionals in other spheres can expose you to intriguing topics, while a new hobby may help you develop a fresh way of thinking and acting.

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Don’t let your goals limit you. Include learning goals in your aims, regularly reflect on your highest aspirations and what strategies can help you get there, and build habits that take you beyond your confines to trigger new discoveries and breakthroughs. That way, you’ll be positioned to feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment rather than dismay and regret when looking back at your yearly goals.

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Eduardo Briceño, author of The Performance Paradox [Ballantine; September 5, 2023], is a global keynote speaker and facilitator who guides many of the world’s leading companies in developing cultures of learning and high performance.