What if I’ve already peaked?
As the old saying goes, the only certainties in life are death and taxes. At some point, unknown to us in the moment, we all find ourselves on the summit of our personal Everest. What follows next, from a performance context, is nothing more than a steady decline towards the grave. Whether you’re an athlete setting a PB, or an artist painting a masterpiece, it’s impossible not to consider your own mortality if you stop to consider whether or not your latest achievement was as good as it’s ever going to get.
Cheerful start to an article, right?!
However, this is a fantastic thought exercise to see whether you’re using goals and values in a way that can maximise both your fulfilment and your performance levels.
First, a primer. What’s the difference between a goal and a value?
A goal is something tangible that can be obtained or achieved through a chosen behaviour. It gives us a powerful sense of direction, and it has a binary nature to it: you’ve either reached your goal, or you haven’t.
A value, on the other hand, is a principle or standard that generates behaviours you judge to be of importance in your life. Unlike goals, which come and go, values are constant. The more strongly you hold a value, the more likely you are to embody this value through your behaviour. Values are effectively our ‘why’.
Put simply, my goal might be to launch a social enterprise, but my related values might be to live a life that demonstrates equality, service and altruism.
Now, think about your own life goals. Pick one that you’re pursuing with a passion: the thing that, if you could just reach it, would change everything. Finally, after years of toiling, you’d feel worthy once reaching it. Fulfilled. Whole. Nothing else matters but achieving this goal.
Next, imagine it’s been snatched away from you due to reasons outside of your control. Perhaps it’s a sudden, life-changing event; perhaps your abilities are just ebbing away thanks to old Father Time, thereby pushing your goal agonisingly out of reach.
How do you react?
Do you pack it all in? After all, what’s the point now your goal is unattainable? Has your passion, the thing that has defined your life’s journey to date, suddenly become meaningless?
This is where healthy, productive values come into play (more on what constitutes ‘healthy’ and ‘productive’ in a future article).
If your primary motivation to keep plugging away at an activity is to achieve your desired goal, then every day presents another opportunity to measure, and therefore pass judgement on, your progress. Are you one step closer to the prize than you were yesterday? Based on today’s efforts, how far until you ‘make it’?
This common misuse of goals is a double-edged sword: it’s motivating when you’re moving in the right direction, but crippling when not. The source of the problem is that you very rarely have control over the outcome of all your efforts, and what little control you do have is unlikely to result in a direct “effort in = result out” equation at the micro level, i.e. day-to-day.
This is the reason why so many of us operate in a boom-bust cycle of intense effort, followed by ‘giving up’ when progress towards our goal stalls. Incidentally, this leads to a self-perception of weakness, or being a ‘quitter’, which generates a vicious cycle of decreasing performance and motivation.
The alternative? Pursue your goals passionately, because they give your life’s journey a direction, but hold them lightly. Your barometer of success should not be measured through progress towards your goal, but by how well you embody your values each and every day.
Returning to the social enterprise example from earlier, I recognise that I don’t have total control over the success of my venture, but I do have total control over whether or not my behaviours align with my values of equality, service and altruism. This control leads to three things:
Consistency. Nothing stops me from living a life true to my values, so I can do it every day, no matter the obstacles I may face. Consistent good habits are the building blocks for success
Intrinsic fulfilment. I start to gain satisfaction and fulfilment from the process rather than the outcome. This builds motivation, which leads to even more consistency
Motivation to stay the course. Goal-orientated people are more likely to chase smaller rewards sooner, because they’re fixated on achieving an outcome. This undermines their ability to stay resilient, and hold out for the larger rewards that take longer to get
Remember: goals have their place, but true fulfilment - and high performance - comes from living a life where your behaviours are aligned to your values every single day.