S4E4 – Can We Do Goal Setting Differently This Year?

Every year around this time we take stock of our achievements versus the goals we had made. But are we going about it the right way? Are we disappointing ourselves by being too narrowly focused on specific aspects of life, ignoring other achievements? Are we reaching for the unattainable? Should we do things differently this time round?

Discussion Topics: Can we do goal setting differently this year?

• The downsides of being too narrowly focused and how to expand our goal set.
• How to set goals.
• Rewarding ourselves for achieving goals.
• Setting SMARTER goals.
• Foreshadowing failure is as important as visualising success.
• Don’t try too many things.

Transcript: Can we do goal setting differently this year?

Hasita: Welcome to another episode of the Small Talk with Rainkraft podcast! So Subha, it’s time for the new year, new me. I think we are less than a month away from 2023. And in some ways, this has been our favourite time of the year. How do you think the book that we are planning to write is going to come along next year? Do you see a future for it?

Subha: I’m guessing that’s why the two of us didn’t go to Bangalore Lit Fest this year because we’re going there next year with a book, right Hasita?

Hasita: As published authors Yes. Yeah, this is a moment when we want to manifest it because I just wonder, is there time for it first of all, and somehow we do this exercise every year, wherein we talk about what we want for the year ahead, and we talk about in very articulated terms, it’s not just a wishy-washy conversation. Usually, it brings up interesting things and we’ve seen a lot of growth happen because of that.

But this year, for me, somehow, it’s made me feel a little uncomfortable. And I’m feeling a little lost. And I just kind of wonder if I’ve done what I set out to do. If some amorphous goal that I had set for myself, I saw myself as a very successful business person, and that’s come to pass, why am I not feeling it? And then it makes me question the process, why bother? I mean, it’s a year it will pan out the way it’s meant to. What do you think about that?

Subha: No, I think quite timely, because I’ve also been just kind of reflecting on the year and thinking about as we like you said, I end up doing goals for the coming year. And I feel like I want to do it a bit differently, too. So let’s, deep dive, shall we?

Hasita: For sure.

Subha: You know, I think one thing I realised is that the minute I thought of goals, I have a very straightforward way of bucketing it right there is the personal life, and there’s the work life. And so the goals that I tend to write also just speak to very, two specific aspects of everything that’s going on around me. And maybe that’s where the answer to your dilemma also lies, that the satisfaction of a good year is not really jumping at you, because you’re looking at two sets of goals whereas you’ve accomplished so many other things.

Hasita: I think you’re right because the minute you said it my immediate reflection was have I? So maybe it is true that I haven’t thought about it in those terms at all.

Subha: Yeah, I feel like one good useful tool that we can use when we sit down for the coming year is to expand that world in which we set our goals. That the tool that comes to mind is really the wheel of life. And simply because it makes you think about the various other parts of your life, which make you whole. So there’s definitely your career and the finances associated with it.

And actually, I would even call them out as two different things, there’s a career and what you do, and then there are your finances and your financial independence, success, and comfort. There’s family, home, friends, and relationships, there’s your physical health, there’s mental health, there’s spiritual and emotional health, and there is what you are doing for enjoyment and leisure and just happiness. So, so many parts of us which I feel we’ve been kind of excluded from the goal-setting process. What do you say?

Hasita: I actually hadn’t thought of it on those lines at all, because as you said, it was always okay that I’m this person at work, and then I’m this person outside of work. And if something doesn’t go very well in either of those contexts, then it’s probably, and in fact, last two, three months, there has been a period of, you know, just laying low, taking it slow, doing lesser than I did before and it felt good at the time, but I think I see now where this discomfort is coming from because, in that sense, I’ve done a disservice to the work goal in the interest of the wellness goal, and because I had not seen it that way, there’s that little bit of discomfort in terms of how I’m looking at it perhaps.

Subha: Right, like even I look back at the year, and I say, Okay, what goals were XYZ, and I hit them and there were periods of lull or periods where I chose not to do something which we’ve talked about, like, took a back step on the whole content agency bit. But those were also the same periods when I got to spend a lot more time with my daughter’s one who’s going to potentially leave the nest the next year. That’s been like a wonderful time spent with very meaningful, high quality, but because there’s no goal or box to tick it doesn’t seem to count.

Hasita: Yeah, yeah. Oh, but it does count. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I’m sure the family and you would appreciate it so much more as well in the longer term, which is what brings me to, you know, we have these processes in terms of setting goals. But is that really necessary firstly, and when you do it, what really is the right way to go about it like, you know, I set a goal with the intent, the full intent that I hope to kind of achieve for the next 12 months.

But sometimes some of them are not compelling enough, like right now, for me being an Open Water Diver is, I don’t know if I’d call it a goal as much as a wish. And I know it will happen. And that’s why maybe when I do it, I’ll not be so happy again. So if I had to go about being happy about it, how do I really kind of deconstruct that thought process?

Subha: No, I think it does need a bit of deconstructing, and I was listening to Huberman Lab, and it can be quite heavy, but I’m liking his style and the whole kind of neuroscience behind a lot of things that we do because most of us what we are pros at is the behavioural science, right? Like we know the tools and the frameworks, we know the do’s and don’ts.

But when you combine it with neuroscience, as he does, it’s quite enlightening. And actually, in his talk on goal setting, it took a very different path. He was talking about how one there’s fundamentally the goal setting phase, and then there’s the pursuit of the goal, let’s call it like, you know, how do you assess it, how do you execute, which we feel like we know a lot about but anyway, turns out, we come to that. But one very interesting aspect of the whole neural bit was that most goals, we actually set to avoid the thing we fear.

Hasita: Okay, that’s interesting. I would have thought it’s the other way around, like, do we not set goals with the intent of achieving a certain amount of pleasure from having accomplished them? Like, in my mind, that makes more logical sense than the fear component.

Subha: Yeah, but it does. But apparently, the science, and this is through research at a lot of the top universities where they’re looking at, I think brain patterns, your blood pressure, various body parameters to say that, where we really want to kind of get things done is when we want to avoid something we fear. So I fear that I will get diabetes, like my mother, so I’m thinking about fitness. I fear that I won’t get that promotion, because I’m not communicating well enough, or I’m not assertive enough at work.

And so I build some goals around that, I fear that I’ll be left behind, or I’ll be embarrassed in a meeting because I don’t know enough about something. So apparently, it sounds like a very negative approach. But I think all that he’s saying is that the underlying driver, more often than not, tends to be that. So while you may think I’m doing this because I want a promotion, in a way I’m doing this because I don’t want to be left behind in that batch.

Hasita: That sounds like a very interesting thing because now we have to find a fear about not being published authors. And I don’t know if we have a fear about that as such, so we better get really, really scared about not getting invited to the Lit Fest next year.

Subha: That’s an indication of how ready we are for it, and how much it really means to us. There’s definitely a fear that if I look at it that way, there is a fear that what if I don’t have a large enough and thriving enough coaching business by the end of next year. What would that mean to use my time, my love for the space monetarily, etc? That’s enough of a driver to set four, or five goals for the coming year. But the driver is still not strong enough and so I had to think about what it means, if that book is so important to, let’s say, my credibility in the space, or it’s so important to just my need to put all of my thoughts in one place and impact X number of people, then maybe it’s a better driver.

Hasita: It could become a reality. But also, in the context of what you just said, is it necessary for goals to be on the action side of things? And what I mean by that is, you know, I feel like some of us really need to set goals around doing less in life. Calling myself out is guilty there. But how would I articulate something like that? So this is where we are and we’ve had a successful run as an agency. But the fact also is that it’s taken its toll in terms of my emotional health, and that’s why we’re like, so keen and eager to kind of wrap up operations and look forward to the next year.

But I think the niggling fear is that next year is also going to look like this year. So if we had to work with something like that in terms of paring back cutting down, and I think this applies professionally, personally, and in all the other areas that you’ve spoken about, as well, what could goals around not doing something look like?

Subha: No, that’s interesting. I think, for you, there was, let’s say, that long arching goal of kind of Hasita 2.0, in the form of Motley Crew, and I set up an agency, I set up a business. And then that, ideally, should have been certain milestones, which is like X clients by Q1, X clients by Q2, etc. And then you periodically assess where you are, and say. Hey, by six months into this business, I was to be at, let’s say, 20 clients, but I’m at 35. So I can now say, hey, the little bit of the time that I’m taking off to go diving or to just swim more, even on a daily basis, it’s part of my reward schedule, it’s allowed.

Hasita: Interesting. You know, the funny thing is that I had not thought about rewards at all because the achievement of the goal, I think, is usually treated as the reward in and of itself. So I had not actually thought of the fact that there is a reward step in there somewhere. And how do you celebrate? I mean, is it like a one-time thing? Do you go out to have lunch? Or is there a way to really incorporate rewarding yourself into your daily schedule as well?

Subha: Once you have a team, the gestures matter too. So the lunches and ordering in some ice cream, and all of that is, as you hit small and big milestones I think that’s always important. After our Spotify wrapped, we all went out and celebrated, you need to do those little things. But I think what’s also important is that you then say, okay, I can recalibrate some of the stuff I’m doing. If I was to hit 20 clients, that was part of a plan, and now I’ve hit 35.

Now, I should be able to then say, okay, I can go a little bit slower this month on the cold calling, or the BD efforts and spend a little more time in maybe researching something or working on some open AI chat stuff, and whatever that will contribute still, maybe to the work that I do on my own wellness and health, etc. But allow yourself to say, Hey, I’ve hit certain milestones, that was the whole point. I mean, what is the whole point of these smart goals, etc., that we could measure? So if you measure and if you’ve hit it and then do something about it.

Hasita: Yeah, so true. I mean, somebody needs to tell us this, like, can we add something next to smart to tell us to remember this elaborate, but speaking of smart goals, and ABC goals, and I know that these are time-tested frameworks.

Subha: I’m going to stop you there because something that I heard Huberman say, which I didn’t know and he was actually saying how there are so many acronyms, that smart also, it’s been kind of, to meet the times, it’s now smarter. So they’ve added an E and an R. The E is whether it’s ethical, the goal that you’re setting, and the R is whether it’s rewarding. So the reward could be like rewarding the world.

Hasita: That in itself could be a goal, right, like, all of us are driven by different things, and if changing the world is a reward, then I mean, by all means. But just coming back to I think the frameworks, right? Specific, Measurable, Actionable, I forgot what is time-bound. Do you still see value in some of these given that the conversation around goals has now moved into a space of neurobiology if I could put it that way, maybe what you’re saying is that even the earliest man, in that sense, probably had some goals, and I can see why they would be fear driven in the sense that I have invented tools so that I don’t have to be afraid of being hungry?

So in that context, do you still see the relevance of some of these frameworks? Or is it just a lifestyle choice, the setting and the achieving and the rewarding ourselves for goals is that a more organic process?

Subha: I think the smart and all of these frameworks are just kind of one part of the larger scheme of things. When we talk about the whole goal setting and pursuing of these goals, firstly, like, what are they? We talked about the areas of our life that they could touch upon. How challenging are they? Here again, it shouldn’t be something that you’re repeatedly failing at, it’s something that has a moderate reasonable chance of success, and the number apparently is 85%, like 85% of the time, you should be able to do what you’re intending to do. And 15% failure is good.

If you’re failing 50% of the time, then you want to rethink whether it’s really too much of a stretch you can achieve. Then comes the planning piece, okay, I’ve got this bunch of things that seem like what I want to achieve. Then comes the planning and then the detailing, you know, is it smart, is it smarter, is it achievable, believable, am I committed to it, the ABC of it, etc. The next part, which I really found interesting, was that you would think that a lot of this is about, you know, visualising success.

Hasita: In fact, that is so true, I mean, vision boards exist for that very purpose. And I think much and more has been said about just the idea of visualising and letting it go. And manifesting your success. And somewhere, I have also felt that in not articulating it, perhaps I have achieved more success than I had. Because I think the fear there is if I set a goal and fail at it, then I’m a failure. Maybe that could be an internal drive as well. So in that context, but what you’re telling me now is that it’s not so much that. It’s more about also taking charge of it and ownership.

Subha: Correct. And it seems that, you know, folks have more than a 50% higher success rate, when you foreshadow failure. So visualising success is great in the beginning. So it’s great when you imagine yourself on that stage, maybe getting that Oscar or that Nobel Prize, or whatever your equivalent is. So in that early stage, it’s very useful.

But once it becomes something that you want, and you want to see happen, then foreshadowing failure and saying, okay, you know, what would happen if this didn’t happen? What could go wrong? And hence, what all do I need to do about it? It gives a much higher chance of goal achievement. And you did not want to think about that and use that in the way I look at some of the goals this year, because, for example, visualising success has always been how I thought I could get more intentional and make more head towards fitness goals.

So, I’m visualising myself running some marathon where, honestly, I’m not getting past the start line. I keep visualising that and nothing much is happening. But when I read this, and when I heard him talk about foreshadowing, failure and I thought, hey, I have my college girls gang reunion, like, six, seven months from now. And not looking the way I want to for those photos, and not wanting to be in those photos, because I don’t feel healthy or fit enough. That’s a very strong driver. You know, that kind of thinking about what could go wrong, and could be able to do a lot more of that when I visualise it this way.

Hasita: That’s quite interesting. I think that’s the one thing I’ve always run away from, in any case, in terms of visualising the worst-case scenario. But yeah, I do see the value in it in the sense that on the toughest of days, what keeps you going, and that’s survival I think, because we are all essentially, you know, biologically, still in the stone age, it’s just that we are living in a different world, enabled by different machines right now.

So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I will set aside my smart framework for a while I’m sure we will get to that. But maybe it’s really time for me to think about what are the two or three things that I really really want and what happens if I don’t have them.

Subha: And I’m glad you said two or three because I think trying too many things also is a bit of a recipe for disaster and disappointment. Two to three seems like a good number to do with the intentionality and intensity that you would want.

Finally, what is the value that you’re getting from the goal and hence what are you going to do, what are you going to not do is important. And just to wrap it up, we talked a lot about failure, what could go wrong, what are the things we fear. So it’s not really about thinking about doomsday.

But it’s just another perspective because there’s a lot out there about being a positive and visualising success and manifesting it. I mean, not to take away from any of that. And this is also not to say like, just keep imagining.

Hasita: Assume the worst. Maybe it’s about finding that balance you’re right because the same Instagram scrolling, Doom scrolling, can feel like Doom scrolling on some days and then on the other days, you feel positive, you feel like okay, I can also have this. You know, it’s all a state of mind, really, and maybe goal setting is no different as well.

Subha: Yeah. So maybe this year, we just try it a little differently and look at fears, and look at failures as much as we look at what success looks like, and more importantly, how we reward ourselves for that success.

Hasita: So importantly, let’s start with rewarding ourselves.

Subha: Sounds good. Catch you next time. Bye.