Why I Hate Goals as a High Performance Coach - Olesya Luraschi - Agile Lean Ireland Visiting Speaker Series

There is a better way to set goals that are backed by psychological science, the issue is most of us don't do this. Learn how to set better goals for 2023 in this video.

Olesya is a Harvard-educated Leadership and High-Performance Coach. Her work lies in helping people achieve their full potential and utilizing psychological science to achieve their goals. Her areas of focus are optimal performance, motivation, neuropsychology, and stress optimization. Her clients are from Microsoft, Amazon, Accenture, as well as entrepreneurs and start-up founders. She was previously Head of Marketing at the Institute of Coaching, Harvard Medical School, and continues to serve as an advisor to Seattle area start-ups.

https://www.olesyaluraschi.com/

Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Transcript

Hey, friends, I hate goals. Like I just really hate them because I think they make people feel bad. And they actually end up with worse results in the long term. And you would think that I like goals because I'm a high performance coach. And it's literally my job to help people achieve goals, like big goals, like getting the next promotion, completing a degree, like launching a startup making massive amounts of revenue, things like that. But the thing is, the way that people set goals is really detrimental to their psychology, and not in line with actual psychological science and how the brain works. So even though I do hate goals, there are ways of setting goals that I really, really like. The issue is that most people are not setting goals this way. And it's really harming them. And it's leading to people just failing at their goals come February, just like the news always reports like whatever, however, many percent of people fail at their New Year's resolution. So if you're here setting a new year's resolution, or if you have some 2022 goals here, I really encourage you to watch the rest of this video to learn how to set goals in a way that will help sustain them in the long term and really increase your ability to achieve these goals. Okay, so number one, people set outcome goals over process goals, I despise outcome goals. And the reason I despise them is because they are not great for our brains, our brains don't like things that we can't control. This is called internal locus of control versus external locus of control in psychology. So basically, if I am not able to have control over something, it's actually stressful to me, and it makes me feel bad. And therefore, it makes me potentially not be able to achieve my goal, because of this additional stress and psychological turmoil. And so I'll give you an example here. So I know a lot of people have weight loss goals or health goals in the new year. And so for a lot of people, that is actually a scale weight goal. And so that may be like, I want to lose 10 pounds, 10 pounds is an outcome goal, because losing 10 pounds is an outcome. And so what I would encourage you to do is to change this out goal, comm got to change this outcome goal into a process goal. So let's say hitting like four servings of protein and five servings of vegetables a day, something like that can be a process goal, because you are in control of the intake of your protein and your vegetables, hopefully, I mean, most of us are. And so if you are able to control what you are doing, then that is a lot less stressful for your mind and for your body. And so therefore you have a much higher ability to sustain this goal and to adhere to it. And so you might actually be able to hit an outcome goal through a process goal. But I really advise against setting outcome goals, because they can really blow up in our faces. And I think they can be pretty risky. Especially especially in the world we live in today, where it kind of feels like things are already out of control. I really don't want you all adding more things that make you feel out of control. Alright, so number two people are setting infinite goals versus finite goals. And this is just so common. I, whenever I ask if someone has a goal, I actually expect them to answer this way. Because it's just kind of the way people think. So an independent goal is something like, I want my business to blow up. Like what does that mean? Like? What does blowing up mean? How do we know we have reached the end goal of blowing up? We don't. And basically, again, this is super stressful to our minds, because now you are literally running an infinite marathon like you have no idea where the finish line is. And that's super stressful to us as well. Because if you've watched my motivation videos, you know that if we have to expend endless energy, our brain does not want to increase motivation. There's no obvious reward here. And there's no time limit to how much energy we need to expend. And that is extremely stressful. And our brain just wants to keep us alive by not expending a tonne of energy and just keeping us safe. So when you're setting goals, you want to be really, really specific in what would mean achieving that goal. And so let's go back to that example of blowing up in my business. That is an infinite goal. Like you could literally go on forever. And you could never define yourself as blowing up in your business. And what often happens to my high achieving clients is that they kind of keep upping it. So like you know, they reach one plateau and then they're like, oh, but blowing up would actually mean this. And basically it's just kind of exhausting, like you keep going and going and going. So you really want to define it. And it might be something like I want to make 100k revenue in my business this year. So there you go. That's that's a definable goal. That's what I would call a finite goal. So I can look at it and say I did that or I didn't do that. But let's start Go back to point number one 100k would actually be an outcome goal. So we don't really want to strive for that goal, and you want to look at your business and you want to think, okay, let's think about the end of the year, I'm making the 100k revenue, what did I do to achieve those results. So you want to just list out like a whole bunch of processes that you can implement, to actually achieve that 100k or result. And don't think about the 100k result, your only mission here is to just hit those processes that can look like I'm going to schedule five social media posts a week, I'm going to create a weekly check in with my team, I'm going to test five different marketing campaigns this year, things like that. And so that type of goal setting is actually allowing you to feel like you have control over your world. And it's not creating psychological stress or distress. And it will allow you to keep going towards your goal because you feel like you are able to do things, and you don't feel completely out of control in an outcome goal, or an infinite goal that makes you feel completely depleted. And just sad at the end of January when February hits and everyone stops working towards their goals. Okay, so I hope this video was helpful. Okay, I hope this was helpful. Take care.