#16: Stop moving your goalposts
You know what I’m talking about. You set out to achieve something important, you manage to achieve it (because you’re awesome and of course you did) - but instead of celebrating, you tell yourself it was no big deal and that you probably weren’t aiming high enough anyway and omg how are you ever going to get anywhere if you keep chasing such tiny, piddling little goals? Goalpost-moving is one of the main perfectionist weapons we use against ourselves. Doing it means that, by definition, we can never succeed. But there’s a way you can stop. In this episode, I’m going to:
Explain how you’re harming yourself when you move your goalposts
Talk you through how to set goals in a way that makes later goalpost-shifting more difficult
Show you how to set goals in a way that helps you become the sort of person you want to be
Explain why celebrating your successes is important
To download the Goal Contract template mentioned in the episode, go here.
Episode transcript:
Do you set out to achieve things, and when you manage it, beat yourself up for not achieving even more? You need to stop that. Here’s how.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
I think you imperfectionists might relate to something that happened to me this week. There was a deadline today for an article I’d agreed to write. Well, actually, the official deadline was a month ago, but today was the real deadline, the one I absolutely had to meet, otherwise it would be too late to publish the article. A few days ago I hadn’t even got around to starting this article. I didn’t even know what I was going to write about. I spent the last four or five days panicking, and going back and forth between telling myself that I was putting myself under too much pressure and maybe I should just pull out, and then deciding that no, I was going to write it, I wanted to write it, and anyway I’d been invited to write it a year ago and how annoyed with myself was I going to be if I couldn’t manage to get it together to write a 3000 word article despite having a whole year to do it? So, not meeting the deadline wasn’t really an option, as far as I was concerned. In addition to not leaving myself much time to write the article, what made this especially hard was that over the last few weeks, my kids and I have had to deal with two back-to-back quarantine periods. My son’s class at school had to quarantine for ten days, and then the day after he returned to school I had a call to go and pick up my daughter because her class needed to quarantine. They weren’t allowed out during the quarantine period, of course, so I’ve had some very bored and whiny kids knocking about at home while I’ve been trying to get stuff done. But … listener, I met the deadline. I sent the article off late yesterday afternoon. Despite the panic, the frantic planning, the waking up in the night thinking ‘oh my god, how could I have left everything this late?’, two surprise quarantines, and - over the past few days - the sort of brain-melting heatwave that British people, with our non-air-conditioned homes, are really not very good at dealing with - I made it! So, what did I do to celebrate this really quite impressive achievement against the odds? Did I reward myself with some quality time off? Did I treat myself to a takeaway from my favourite restaurant? Did I high-five myself in the mirror? Well, none of that, I’m afraid. What I did, instead, was tell myself that what I’d achieved really wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t as if I’d written about a super difficult topic. And I mean, I met the deadline, didn’t I? That itself proves that the whole project was always completely achievable and that those nights I’d spent lying awake worrying about whether I’d taken on too much were completely unnecessary and that I’d got myself into a stupid flap about nothing. I’d made a mountain out of a molehill. How embarrassing. I should get a grip. At least, that’s what I did for a while, until I noticed what I was doing and stopped myself - although 18 months ago I wouldn’t even have noticed that I was doing anything wrong, let alone had the ability to put a stop to it. What I was doing wrong was moving the goalposts. I’m going to bet you do this too. I see it all the time. It’s one of the traps perfectionism sets for us. We start out wanting to achieve something - in my case, submit a decent article by a certain date - and when we manage that, we give ourselves a hard time because we didn’t achieve something more. Our goalpost-moving tends to happen in such a way that by definition we could never achieve anything worthwhile or impressive. That’s because we take the very fact of achieving our goal as evidence that we were aiming too low. Faced with a choice between concluding ‘I’ve met my goal - that shows I’ve done something really impressive and worth celebrating!’ and concluding ‘I’ve met my goal - that shows I set my sights too low’, we choose the latter, every time. Zooming out a bit, goalpost-moving means that, if you’re the sort of person who doubts her own worth and is waiting for evidence that she’s good enough, you’re unlikely ever to find it. I encounter a lot of coaching clients who say things like, ‘I’ll be satisfied with myself when I get my PhD, or when I get a job in a particular department, or when I get that grant, or when I publish a book with a certain publisher’. It’s like they’re on probation with themselves, as if they’re yet to prove themselves. When I ask people like this about their history of setting goals to prove themselves, it often turns out that they’ve made and attained important goals in the past - but when they achieve their goals, they come up with some excuse or other to explain why those goals don’t count. They say things like, ‘I did end up getting my PhD, but I took a year longer than most people do, so I can’t conclude that I’m smart’. Or ‘I did end up getting a job in that department I wanted to work in, but by the time I arrived it wasn’t as well-respected as it was a few years before, so it doesn’t really reflect positively on me’. In other words, these are people who are telling themselves that they’ll believe in themselves when they achieve x, y, and z, but when they actually do achieve x, y, and z, they have a story about how their achievements don’t actually prove what they were designed to prove. Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on how we’re treating ourselves when we move our own goalposts. Imagine working for an employer who sets you tasks, and then when you complete them in exactly the way you were asked, gives you a hard time for not having done something different instead. Or who gives you a list of duties and responsibilities that you’re expected to perform as part of your job, but then when you apply for promotion having spent a year or so fulfilling exactly those duties and responsibilities, pulls out a completely different list and tells you that this is the list that you are actually being judged against. You’d end up frustrated and demoralised, right? Just as you end up frustrated and demoralised when you move your own goalposts. You’d also conclude that your employer is an incompetent, sadistic psycho - although I’m willing to bet that you don’t think this about your own critical side. You might never have even noticed how unreasonable you’re being to yourself. So, what can we do? One important step is to notice that our goalpost-moving habit is causing us to filter the evidence we encounter about our own worth: what is meant to be evidence of our own progress gets reframed as nothing special. That means that, although we might often think that we encounter evidence of our own inadequacy everywhere we look, that’s not what’s happening. I talk about this sort of evidence filtering in more depth in episode #14, ‘Become your own biggest advocate, with Immanuel Kant’. Another thing we can and should do is to set our goals in the right way. Our inner critics are shady characters: if there’s a loophole they can use to deny that we’ve hit our goals, or even to deny that we even had any respectable goals in the first place, they’ll use them. Got that article accepted in that journal you wanted to publish in? Ah, but didn’t I mention that it wouldn’t count if you had to do revisions before it was accepted? Better luck next time, loser. There’s a wealth of advice out there on how to set goals effectively. Happy googling if you fancy digging into that. I’m going to highlight three useful techniques here. First, it matters how you express the goal you want to achieve. It’s natural for us to express our goals in vague terms - procrastinate less, eat healthier food, go to bed earlier - but, seriously, your inner critic is going to have a field day with those. You are dreaming if you think she’s ever going to acknowledge any success with those sorts of goals, no matter how much progress you make. You need to be specific. In fact, you need to be more than specific. In the 1980s, George T. Doran came up with an acronym - SMART - that summarises some ways to formulate goals in order to maximise your chances of success (and, we can also add, they maximise your chances of acknowledging your own success). SMART stands for specific (what are you trying to achieve, exactly? Never mind ‘procrastinate less’ - precisely what is it you’re wanting to get done?), measurable (how will you know when you’ve attained the goal? What does success look like?), achievable (do you have the means to attain this goal, or can you realistically obtain the means?), relevant (how does it fit into your overall plans for how you want your life to go?), and time-bound (what’s the deadline?). The second goal-setting technique I want to highlight is, before you set out on trying to attain the goal, you need to be clear about how attaining it is going to reflect positively on you. This is important, because it helps us avoid reframing things after we’ve attained the goal in such a way that it ends up not having the significance we initially attached to it. You might think, now, that you’ll accept that you’re a serious and respectable researcher if you manage to get that article you’re writing accepted in the International Journal of Hot Shot studies, but if you’re a goalpost-mover, you’ll find some other obstacle to throw in your own path once the article is accepted, so that you’re not yet forced to accept that you’re now a serious and respectable researcher. So, when you’re setting your goals, write down what positive conclusions you’re going to draw about yourself if you succeed. A good tip here - and I’m drawing here on the insights of James Clear, author of Atomic Habits - is to link these positive conclusions to your identity. That means they should count as evidence that you’re the sort of person you want to be. So, let’s say that you really want to be one of the top researchers in Hot Shot Studies, and also that you really want to be the sort of person who doesn’t let their own anxiety hold them back, and who doesn’t give up. If you manage to have an article accepted into the International Journal of Hot Shot Studies by the end of July next year, some identity-based positive conclusions you can draw about yourself might include: ‘I am in the top 10 percent of Hot Shot Studies researchers’, and ‘I don’t let my performance anxiety drive my career’, and ‘I am someone who doesn’t give up on goals that are important to me’. My third and final tip for effective goal-setting is to decide how you’re going to reward yourself if you attain your goal. Keep the SMART acronym in mind here too - don’t give me any vague bullshit like ‘If I achieve my goal, I’ll be kinder to myself’ or ‘I’ll believe in myself’. If you were choosing some specific item off the menu of goal rewards, what would it be? Some examples might include, ‘I’ll go on a hike at the weekend,’ or ‘I’ll spend a day in bed reading a novel’, or ‘I’ll take a bubble bath’, or ‘I’ll schedule a 2-week vacation, completely free of email and any other work commitments’. I’ve found that people - especially successful, smart, ambitious people like you - can be quite resistant to the idea of celebrating their successes. It seems childish, somehow, or at least unnecessary. Shouldn’t our success be its own reward? Well, no, actually. Celebrating our successes is important. BJ Fogg is a behaviour scientist at Stanford University and author of Tiny Habits. He’s an expert on behaviour change and how to establish new habits. He emphasises the importance of celebrating our successes. It’s not just a matter of doing something nice for ourselves; it’s also, in Fogg’s words, ‘a specific technique for behaviour change’. It helps us establish the behaviours that are necessary in order for us to succeed. If you can’t bring yourself to celebrate your successes simply because you deserve it (which you do), then do it because it will help you attain the next goal you set. Handily for you, I’ve created a one-page template for setting goals, which incorporates all of these techniques - I’ll include a link to it in the notes for this episode, or you can find it on the all-new and still-in-progress ‘resources’ page on my website, academicimperfectionist.com. I’ve called this template a ‘goal contract’ between you and your future self, because you use it to set out in detail exactly what it is you’re aiming to achieve, what achieving it would show about the sort of person you are, and how you’re going to reward yourself when you achieve it. By setting out these details in writing - and displaying the contract somewhere where you’ll see it regularly - you make it harder to shift the goalposts later - or at least, if you do try to shift them, the contract is going to make you aware of what you’re doing, and awareness of our destructive and self-limiting behaviours is an important step towards challenging and changing them. Go and download my goal contract, cement those goalposts to the ground, and start counting your successes. I’m off to spend the rest of the day reading a book in the garden, which is my reward for meeting my deadline yesterday. See you next time.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook @AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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