Too often, people think they know what they want without understanding what it will take or how it will fit into their lives. Then instead of rethinking, they ask a coach to help them commit. But you should only commit to goals that will help you create the life you want to live.
Why is it so hard to make good choices? Our brains have developed some strategies that are useful in some ways, and less useful in others. Dan Ariely called us Predictably Irrational. As we think about the way our goals fit our values, three consistent errors block our way.
The first is that we continually scan the world looking for evidence that confirms our biases. Left in default mode, we miss contradictions or surprises. If we think we want something, we are likely to identify reasons we want it, and to not perceive even obvious reasons that we might not want it.
The next is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. This says bascially that we think we’re smarter and more capable than we really are. When we think about our values, it probably means that we assume we are acting in ways that are consistent with our values, even when we are not.
And finally, research has suggested that we are bad at predicting our emotions. The things we think will make us happy often don’t make us happy. So we can’t go with the obvious benefits of a goal and assume that we’ll like the results.
NLP suggests a pragmatic way to improve the odds that you will set the goals that actually lead to satisfying results. This involves working backwards to develop a pattern instead of looking forward into an unpredictable future. Past results do not always guarantee future success, but they often bend the odds in our favour.
Begin with a bright spot that has already happened. What did you feel and experience? How did you make choices and what motivated your actions? Which values were part of how or why you made this bright spot happen? Which relationships were tied into this bright spot?
If you think it takes too long to explore the past before setting a course for the future, go back and read the perceptual errors described above. We don’t focus on the past because it guarantees success. We use the past as a springboard that accelerates our testing of what will work in the future.
