Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘goal setting’

There is a beautiful story about 2 sales people of a shoe company sent to a deserted African country to examine business potential. The whiner calls his boss and says, “People here walk barefoot. They do not wear shoes at all. Our sales potential is zero”. The winner calls his boss and says, “People here walk barefoot. They do not wear shoes at all. We have no competition. The whole market is ours for the taking”.

Every success involves risk. It may sound funny, but the greater the risk, the greater the achievement. Poor people consider risk takers foolish, but those who excel will tell you that no achievement is ever accomplished by staying in your comfort zone.

The “comfort zone” is a very dangerous place, because it repels creativity and success. The comfort zone is the place where you welcome your fears with open arms and keep them company. There is nothing wrong with relaxing from time to time and resting before climbing the next mountain, but when we get too comfortable, out choices are eventually limited to getting up or drowning.

Luck has nothing to do with success and all the successful people will tell you that most of their success did not fall from the sky but there was some opportunity they were able to recognize. Developing the attitude to recognize opportunities is mistaken for some mystical luck similar to winning the lottery.

When my son was preparing for a competition, I told him the lottery story. This story is a ticket out of poverty. Take every opportunity to use it.

Every Friday, the archangel Gabriel went down to the Wailing Wall to pick up the notes of requests people stuck on the wall during the week. Every week, he read all the notes and organized them before presenting them to God.

One day, Gabriel want to God and said, “Dear God, there is this old man who comes here every week, rain or shine, for 25 years. Every week, he begs you to let him win the lottery. He is a good, religious man and never asks for anything else. Please God, I have read his requests every week for 25 years and it breaks my heart. Can you please grant the poor man his wish?”

God said, “I would do it gladly, if only he bought a ticket”.

The difficulty kids have with goal setting is their short life experience. Without knowing enough about cause and effect, kids focus on having fun right now. Spending any amount of effort on a reward they may or may not get in the future is just not something they do.

In the famous 1972 “Stanford marshmallow experiment”, psychologist Walter Mischel put kids in an empty room and put a treat next to them. He told them they could eat their treat, but if they waited 15 minutes, he would give them another. Of 600 children, a third waited long enough for their reward, some snatched the treat and ate it as soon as he left the room and most of the kids did their best to avoid eating the treat by distracting themselves (moving, playing with their hair, etc).

Mischel’s original conclusion was that older kids can wait longer and deferred gratification is related to age. However, years later, he followed up with some of the children in his experiment and discovered that those who waited longer were also more successful in life.

In 1988, Mischel found that “preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent”. In 1990, he found a correlation between the ability to delay gratification and higher Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores.

This is where we (parents) come in. If we teach our kids to set goals and achieve them, their life will be so much better. So how do we do it?

In the eyes of the average person, there is something snobby in striving for excellence. For some people, possibly for most, excellence is pure luck, almost a luxurious state of living that you are either born with or not. It is no coincidence that those who think this way do not excel at many things in life.

There is a paradox in the search for excellence, because it is the result of an attitude, a habit you need to have in the first place in order to achieve it. There is something frustrating in understating what T. Alan Armstrong said, “Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it. The victorious performance itself is merely the demonstration of their championship act”. It is frustrating, because it makes you think that excelling is hard work.

Excellence goes together with extraordinary success that is higher than all standards. It is frustrating because you cannot reach excellence without succeeding big time.

Beliefs can cause all our problems in life. Luckily for us, beliefs are also the most powerful weapon we have against them. It just depends what kind of beliefs we have.

For the most part, beliefs are created in our minds without our consent. Most of the beliefs you have today were not formed through a process of conscious choice. Things that have happened to you in the past, things you have heard from people who are close to you or who you trust, things you have observed in the world around you, things you have been taught and even imagined create your belief system. Most of them have occurred during childhood, when you did not have enough life experience to doubt them.

Doubt is a defense mechanism in our mind that functions as a bodyguard and prevents beliefs from entering our system. This bodyguard evolves over the years. When kids are young, this bodyguard is not very developed and it has very simple ways to filter beliefs.

- If it is from someone close to me who cares for/about me, it must be true
- If I have heard it 3 or more times, it must be true
- If something has happened to me once, it will happen again
- Every painful experience must be recoded to so I do not get hurt again
- Every success experience must be recorded so I can make it happen again

I have written a lot about the fear of failure, but I think many people are not aware this fear has a twin brother – the fear of success.

Fear of failure will make you try to fit into a standard (usually external), but fear of success will make you do anything to avoid reaching that standard.

While fear of failure is out there and everybody knows about it, fear of success is hidden so deep in our identity we may not recognize it, but it can be much worse for us.

Fear of failure is associated with making mistakes and not getting approval, while fear of success is the fear of doing things right and therefore not being accepted, not being appreciated and not being able to maintain the level of achievement and success.

Last week, I had a session with a new client. She was very frustrated about things in her life. She had wanted to change them for so many years and nothing had happened.

“I feel like I have no control over my life”, she said to me, “It’s as if part of me says ‘go left’ and the other side says ‘go right’. For some reason, neither is the direction I want to go and I’m stuck! I can’t get the two sides of me to communicate with each other”.

I smiled. It sounded familiar.

“Sometimes, I wake up with energy and motivation that lasts for three days. There is a voice inside of me that keeps telling me it can be like this forever. I’ve tried shutting it out, but I don’t know how to”, she kept telling me about her frustration.

I listened to her and thought to myself, “She is ready for the sailing story”.

I hope you are ready too.

Two years ago, I wrote about choosing to be miserable in the The Art of Misery. It is amazing how many people in the world qualify for the Certificate of Misery and have mastered this art. For some strange reason, it is easier to master misery than happiness. I do not know exactly why that is, but for most people, the definition of happiness is so hard to achieve they can never be happy. Even when they have a happy moment, it does not last long enough to get them to the next happy moment.

In The Art of Misery, I gave 10 lessons in misery with clear instructions on how to pass each test and gradually move on to the next level. Although I wrote that only those who completed the program would be entitled to the certificate, I have discovered it is enough for people to master some of the lessons to declare themselves eligible.

In the last two years, I have had many requests to extend the misery course and I believe the time has finally come. After two years of practicing and holding your misery certificate, you are ready for the next level. Today, in the second part of the Misery Mastery “training program”, I will improve, refine and help you upgrade your skills. I will add 10 more things you can do if being just miserable is not enough and you really, really want to be extremely miserable.

What we do on a regular basis, even with little things, becomes our future.

Yes, this is a bold statement, but it is true. The main challenge is that sometimes, we may not realize that what we have just done or said came out of habit. It is easy to see that we eat the same cereal for breakfast every day. That is a simple one to spot, as is driving the same way to work, choosing a certain style of clothes and the likes.

What is much harder to detect is a particular kind of thinking. Today, I want to talk about focused, persistent, determined thinking, as opposed to scattered, carried away, wishy-washy thinking.

We have many defining moments in life, but we do not always know that they are defining, because they simply add a little, or chip away gently, to the definition of who we are. Over time, however, these tiny changes in our self-definition become a whole different person than the one we could be otherwise.

Kids are not born with organizing and planning skills and do not automatically adopt them, even if their parents are planning junkies. They need to be taught how to be organized gradually, as their mental abilities develop.

My 20-year-old daughter Eden is so organized she managed to work full time in a very demanding job, study psychology full time and get 100% and 99% on two of her university assignments. If Tsoof had to do what she did, he would not have a chance.

But…

At the age of 13, Eden could not plan ahead very well, much like most of the kids and teens I work with.

Just last term, during the school break, I discussed with my busy son Tsoof how to prepare for his last term of school. Because he is a busy kid who performs and rehearses during school hours, he misses many hours and even whole days of school.

The reason I talked to him about it was that the previous term had been too hectic and there had been mornings when he had gotten up and lacked his usual spark about going to school “Yay, today I have…” He had been nearly exhausted, so I hoped that preparing for his last term would make it easier on him.