11 January 2021
In a previous post, Why New Year’s resolutions fail… and what to do instead, for better health and greater happiness, I described the fatal flaw in the approach that most people take to formulating New Year’s resolutions, and indeed any decision to improve their lives.
If you haven’t already read that article, I strongly suggest doing so now, as this post will make far more sense if you do.
In a nutshell, I am arguing that the fundamental reason why most people fail to achieve their goals, feel unsatisfied when they do achieve them, or stop setting them at all, is that they focus on the outcome rather than on the process.
The outcome is the desired result of the person’s efforts. It can be anything from reaching a particular number on the scales, to completing an athletic event, to paying off a mortgage, or having a specific number of book or album sales or other metric of ‘success’.
As I discussed in last week’s post, we are motivated to achieve such goals by our anticipation of reward – an intensely pleasurable but necessarily short-lived feeling associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine.
The process consists of the daily actions that we must take if we wish to achieve the goal. Examples including making healthier food choices, adhering to a regular training schedule, following a financial budget, and writing daily (whether prose, poetry, music or lyrics).
People who are consistently successful in achieving their goals undertake these daily actions in a manner that generates happiness – a feeling that is less intense than pleasure, but can be experienced for a far longer period of time – and ultimately, contributes infinitely more to quality of life than those ephemeral spikes of pleasure.
The result of prioritising process over outcome is that the goal itself becomes somewhat peripheral to the whole project of improving one’s life.
The goal becomes more like a compass than a point on the map marked ‘destination’. You use it to periodically check that the action steps you’re taking are moving you in the right direction, but if you fail to attain it (or if you find that the goal has lost meaning for you and you want to define a new one), you’re not tied to that original goal. You simple set a new one, and use all the knowledge and skills that you’ve accumulated in the process of working toward the old goal, to work toward the new one.
Weight loss provides a good example. Most people start out by setting a goal to lose x kilograms by y date, or alternatively to weigh x kilograms by y date. However, as I’m forever pointing out to my clients, you have no control over the vast majority of the myriad of factors that govern the speed at which you will lose weight, including genetic and epigenetic individuality, your previous dieting history, how long you’ve been overweight, and your sex and current age.
If you’re female, post-menopausal, began gaining weight early in life, have a family history of overweight/obesity, and/or have followed extremely restrictive diets in the past leading to repetitive cycles of weight loss and regain, you are highly likely to find that weight loss takes a looooooooong time, even if you’re diligent with your daily food choices and physical activity.
Hence, if you’re hell-bent on ‘achieving’ a particular weight target by a set date, there’s a high probability that you will fail to achieve it.
If you haven’t developed a process-oriented mindset while pursuing your goal, the odds are that you will feel utterly demoralised and even depressed because your supreme efforts were not rewarded in the precise way that you expected.
Abandoning any further thoughts of losing weight, you’ll likely retreat to the couch to binge-watch Netflix while diving head first into a family-sized carton of ice cream, figuring “What’s the use in even trying to change – no matter how hard I try, I can’t achieve my goal.”
But what if you had adopted a process-oriented mindset from the get-go, or developed one along the way?
If you didn’t achieve your target weight by the target date, but you had made significant progress in conquering your addiction to unhealthy food, established a solid routine of weekly meal-planning and batch cooking healthy food that you enjoyed eating, and developed a daily habit of enjoyable physical activity, you would most likely experience temporary disappointment – an understandable reaction to failing to achieve a goal – but still feel a great sense of satisfaction at what you had accomplished.
And then you would take stock of the progress that you had made toward your goal, decide what you needed to do in order to fine-tune your diet and exercise habits, and recommit to the process.
This approach is the polar opposite of that purveyed by gyms and diet product companies, which encourage customers to focus on attaining the ‘body of their dreams’ or their goal weight or clothing size.
In other words, they sell the promise of the reward, rather than disclosing the reality that losing weight and keeping it off is a process that you’ll need to engage in diligently, for the rest of your life.
And no wonder. That dopamine-spiking reward is, after all, far sexier – and therefore much more marketable – than the good old plain-Jane happiness that people who consistently make healthy choices come to experience, as they build their self-esteem by making consistently good choices over long periods of time.
Oh, wait, did I forget to mention that building these healthy habits also improves your self-esteem, while experiencing reward does not, and in fact cannot? More on that in this post!
Leave A Response