Peak Performance #27 | Creating and Committing to Goals that Scare You
The best goals are exciting and frightening.
Goals, goals, goals.
We love them.
We hate them.
I’ve worked with people who panic without them and others who rebel if you try to formalize a single one1. Goals seem to be the ex that everyone has baggage with.
Even if you somehow manage to get everyone rallied around setting a goal (everyone sometimes meaning the disparate parts of yourself), you run into the issue of what methodology to use to set it. You might set:
or intentionally set no goals at all
I’m not going to endorse any one of these frameworks. Each has its pros and cons depending on the context. The purpose of lining up all of these methods is to illuminate the question they beg: what are these goal-setting methods in service of? Namely, what are the goals for?
That question has led me to prefer a different way to create goals.
For me, a truly magical goal is identified by the unique emotional state it inspires in the goal-setter: a mixture of fear and excitement. What’s so magical about this state?
The best goals achieve two outcomes:
They align with something that you truly and deeply want for your life, product, project, or company
They stretch you, facilitating your development as a person
While this reasoning is logical, there’s no logic-based method for determining if a goal does this. Your best indicator is the emotional state that the goal inspires within you:
Does projecting forward and envisioning yourself achieving the goal excite your true self—not societal expectations or egoic images, but your authentic self?
Does something about the process of accomplishing the goal scare you, putting you in the position to work yourself out around the fear and create the learning and growth that results from the process?
If you answer yes to both of those questions, you’ve created a goal that is both meaningful and developmental.
Commitment: The Antidote to Fear
Ahh what a happy ending! We’ve created the perfect goal. Now we get to walk into the sunset of our inevitable victory, right? Right?!
Wrong ☹️
The story isn’t over.
The fact of the matter is that when most people create a goal that excites and scares them, they don’t commit.
Instead, they hesitate. They turn away from the goal.
Choosing a goal that excites and scares you is highly uncomfortable for two reasons:
If you’ve spent much of your life creating goals that don’t resonate with your true self, setting a goal that does can be terrifying. When a goal doesn’t deeply resonate, failure doesn’t mean anything. The first time it does, the thought of failing to achieve something you really want can feel downright existential.
Fear is a highly uncomfortable emotion. Most people label it as bad, and so will avoid committing to things that bring up fear.
This duel axis of discomfort puts many in their survival patterns—in particular patterns that allow them to discount the goal:
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s too hard.”
“I don’t really want (or deserve) it anyway.”
I wish I had an easy answer for how to flip the switch here. I don’t.
I have a simple one.
But it’s not easy.
Ready for it?
Commit anyway.
Make the choice to commit, both despite and because of the way committing makes you feel. Choose to commit because, if you’ve done the inner work of sorting out how you feel, you know that it’s the right one2.
Commitment and consistency are two of the most powerful forces in human psychology3. So much so that getting you to make an escalating series of commitments based on a small initial commitment is a core tactic in many sales methodologies.
We are hardwired to stay consistent with our commitments. We have societal pressures to remain committed to a stance—meeting our commitments signals intelligence, competence, capability, and integrity. The more public the commitment and the more effort put into it, the more committed we become.
While marketers and salespeople may use these forces to get you to make a purchase that is only questionably in your best interest4, you can leverage this force for yourself to create the life that you want.
Once you have a goal that genuinely excites and scares you, the next thing to do is to commit. Commit in writing. Commit out loud. Tell someone you respect and trust that you’re committed. And make a commitment in dollars or time.
There will be a loud voice in your head: “but what if I’m not ready?”
This is actually an important point. If you want to live your fullest life or build the best version of your company, you need to develop the muscle of committing before you know that you’re ready.
Needing to be ready is an excuse. When you say you’re not ready, what you’re really saying is “I don’t see the way forward.” But for most big goals, the way will only reveal itself once you’ve committed and stepped into the process of making it happen.
Let me say that again: for sufficiently challenging and uncomfortable goals, the way won’t reveal itself until you commit.
The reason comes back to one of our favorite old friends, approach vs avoidance mindset. Absent your commitment, you’re wiring yourself for avoidance. You’re looking for all the ways things can go wrong, getting absorbed by your fear and lack of readiness. Most importantly, you’re blind to all of the ways you can proceed.
When you commit, your psychology and nervous system eventually follow suit. You start to look for (and see!) ways to approach the goal rather than avoid it. Your commitment puts you in a position where you can see the potential paths forward.
For challenging goals, readiness does not precede commitment, readiness results from it. We must commit in order to become ready.
A story from my youth to nail this in.
In my high school and college years, I used to go cliff-jumping with friends in Ithaca, NY. There were about five different heights you could jump from, ranging from five feet to a sixty-plus foot jump down to the lower portion of a damn. I was comfortable with the first three heights, but I consistently avoided the next height out of fear (the highest jump was legitimately dangerous and so it was never on the menu—you had to wear shoes to avoid injuring your feet).
On one of the last of these trips I decided that it was time—I was going to jump off of the next height. I hiked up, looked down, and was terrified.
And so I waited. I looked over that cliff and waited for a sign from the universe that I was ready.
It never came.
People came and went, simultaneously cheering me on and scaring me off.
Finally, after what was likely hours, one of my friends came up to me, “Hey man, we’re ready to go. It’s now or never.”
And in the moment, I decided. I counted down from 10, and I threw myself off of that cliff.
To be honest, I was never ready. No sign came. I just knew that it was something I wanted—it excited and frightened me—and that if I committed and threw myself off of the cliff, I would figure it out on the way down5.
Post-Script: Leadership Applications
As I finished this post, I realized the natural gap in this essay: this is nice for my personal goals, but I just don’t see how this applies to leadership.
Allow me to respond:
As a leader, you will inevitably find yourself in circumstances where you must commit yourself, your team, or your organization to exciting yet scary goals. At the moment of commitment, there are two potential failure points:
Not being able to commit yourself to the goal
Not being able to get your team or company fully enrolled in the goal
Read the above essay for point one. As a leader, modeling is the most important thing that you can do. If you can’t model the behavior and mindset that it takes to commit to goals that scare you, you can never expect your team to.
Enrolling your team requires more finesse. What often comes across as nitpicking and doubt around goals is actually people’s fear at being held accountable for goals that they don’t know if they can achieve.
When this happens, it’s important to be able to coach your employees around the purpose of committing to the goal. It’s precisely that you don’t know that you can achieve it that makes it so important to commit. If the goal is genuinely exciting, committing despite uncertainty is the single thing that will empower you to do what needs to be done to accomplish it. Creating a shared mindset around goals as vehicles for outcomes and learning is an important competency as a leader.
You know which camp you fall in based on your reaction to the word “accountable”. Do you salivate or did you wince?
Many people choose goals for suboptimal reasons. These include ”because I know I can achieve it” or “because achieving it will make me look good to others”. The optimal reason to pick a goal is because it gets you what you authentically want and develops you in the process.
This is not intended as a derogatory remark against salespeople and marketers. There are just as many who use these mindfully to empower you to do what’s in your best interest.
Lucky for me, when it comes to cliff-jumping, it’s really gravity that does most of the sorting out.