Sometimes you come across a goal that you think you should want to achieve, but it seems like you’re not taking enough steps to reach it. You are not really afraid of failure or rejection, the path to the goal seems clear enough and can even be an interesting challenge, and occasionally you will make some progress. But most of the time you just can’t seem to get into that state of flow, and you’re not sure why. This often happens with long-term goals that require intermittent action, such as losing weight or transitioning to starting a new business and eventually quitting your job.
One question I have found useful to ask in these situations is this: What will happen if you are successful? Forget about what you hope will happen or what you fear will happen, but consider realistically what is likely to happen. This is how you achieve your goal. And that? What else will change?
I’m not talking about giving a superficial 5-second answer like “If I lose weight, I’ll be skinny.” Spend at least 15-30 minutes just thinking about how your life will really change once you achieve your goal (without TV, radio, or other distractions). There are often unexpected side effects that you may not be aware of, but unconsciously may be enough to prevent you from taking any compromised action. For example, if you lose a lot of weight, here are some possible side effects: People will notice and comment on it Other people will ask you for diet advice You may feel like you need to continue with a permanent lifestyle change to maintain your new weight, you may need to buy new clothes, you may become more attractive to others and therefore attract more social encounters (wanted or unwanted), overweight friends may become jealous, your family may resist your changes, you may feel stressed about whether you can keep the weight off, you may worry about losing certain favorite foods from your diet, etc.
It is rare that a goal is all rosy. Success requires change, and change has both positive and negative consequences. Often while people claim to want to be successful at something, the reality is that the negatives outweigh the positives for them. But one way to overcome this problem is to consciously think about what those negative aspects are and then eliminate them one by one. Uprooting a negative side effect might mean figuring out how to eliminate it altogether, or it might mean just accepting it and learning to live with it.
It certainly helps to focus on the positive side of a goal. But don’t forget to take an occasional dark side survey and accept that you’ll have to deal with that too.
Unlike fear of failure and fear of rejection, fear of success can be much more insidious because it is almost always unconscious. But the problem is not the fear of success per se, but rather the fear of the side effects of success, many of which may be genuinely unwanted. Fears that are never consciously evaluated tend to grow stronger. The reason is simple behavioral conditioning: when you avoid something you fear (whether consciously or unconsciously), you automatically reinforce the avoidance behavior. So when you (even unknowingly) avoid working on your goal due to a hidden fear of success, it actually reinforces the habit of procrastination, so as time goes on, it becomes more and more difficult to take action. Insidious!
Ask: “What will happen if I succeed?” you can solve this problem because you focus your conscious attention on those fears. Fear tends to shrink under direct examination, making action easier. When I say that fear shrinks, another way of saying it is that subconscious behavioral conditioning weakens under conscious scrutiny. I know some people don’t like the word “fear” in regards to their own behavior; don’t get hung up on exact words; call it “avoidance behavior” if that’s more to your liking.
But an added benefit is that you can also come up with clever workarounds for those fears that become conscious, some of which may be valid signs of unresolved issues. For example, going back to the weight loss example, if you lose a lot of weight, you’ll probably need new clothes. And if you don’t have the money to buy new clothes, then that’s a real problem you’ll need to address (unless you don’t mind wearing clothes that are too big). If left unrecognized, even a simple problem like this can be enough to subconsciously sabotage you from achieving your goal. But once you consciously examine the situation and figure out a way to deal with it in advance, you are sending a message to your subconscious that you don’t have to fear this problem because you have a practical way to solve it.
Now let us consider the opposite side. Suppose you ask, “What will happen if I succeed?” and considering all the side effects, you realize that you really don’t want to achieve the goal at all. The negatives outweigh the positives. I found this when I made a plan to grow my gaming business, but it just didn’t seem to be progressing as much as I wanted. When I asked this magical question, I realized that I really didn’t want to achieve the goal with all its side effects; what I really wanted was to transition to writing and speaking full time, and building more of my games business would actually take further away from that larger goal. Growing my gaming business seemed like a goal I should be aiming for, but when I really thought about where I would be if I achieved that goal, I realized that it would not be the success I really wanted. That was a difficult realization for me…recognizing that my original ladder of success was now leaning against the wrong building. So I actually had to “unset” that goal once I really understood the possible consequences of achieving it.
Even now that I set goals in the direction of writing and speaking as my new career, I recognize that there are big side effects. I just don’t have the mental bandwidth for two full-time runs. One of the hardest side effects for me was letting go of the goals and dreams I had for my gaming business. All those creative ideas for new games that will never exist… and the potential players that will never experience them… But this is outweighed by what will happen as I succeed in my new career. Creating a new game that challenges, entertains and encourages people is wonderful; however, being able to help people grow fulfills me even more. I found it a very enlightening process to go through all these side effects and acknowledge one by one that I accept them.
What will happen if you are successful? If you lose weight… you get the date… you win the promotion… you start the business… you get pregnant… you quit smoking… you become a millionaire… do you work hard?
