# 56 - Why You Should Resize Your Goals
[00:00:00] : Hey there, everybody. It's Rick Lewis with Episode 56 of the follow through Formula Podcast. Today I have some thoughts about goals and goal setting, particularly the size off one's goals, and I have a story to tell you. This is a story about being 15 years old and winning. Ah, free martial arts session at a local dojo that was in my town in Little Rock, Arkansas, when I was 15 years old. I was very into sports at that time, doing all kinds of different sports, but I had had zero exposure to martial arts as a discipline. But I won this free lesson. It was a 90 minute session where I would get to have this one on one training with the sense a of this local dojo who was going to show me some basic martial arts technique I can't even remember. I think it might have just been karate, Um, but I can't remember exactly what form it waas. So I went to this studio, the martial arts studio, and the instructor just showed me a lot of basic exercises, moves some Kakuta's some routines to move through in order to begin to understand the basic movements of martial arts. I haven't done any sense either. So, you know, if I'm not using the right terms and your a martial arts expert, please forgive me. But the point is that over the course of this whole session, when we got to the end, the instructor took me into an adjacent room and they're set up across a couple of cinder blocks were several boards stacked on top of each other, and the instructor invited me to break these boards with my hand. And I don't know if this is common practice to do on a first visit for someone, but perhaps as a 15 year old boy, this gentleman thought if you could help me break a couple of boards, he'd get me to sign up and I'd get excited about martial arts in general, and he didn't give me a lot of instruction. But he did show me how to hold my hand. And he invited me to try and break these boards. And, you know, that was pretty interesting and exciting for me. I'm like, Oh, this is gonna be cool. So I psyched myself up and I raised my hand up and I gave the I took a good whale at the boards and practically broke my hand. It was my hand was red and throbbing and hurting. And I remember looking at this guy like what the heck and why Why would you have me do that? Figuring that he probably knew that I wasn't gonna be able to break these boards. And he was looking at me, you know, somewhat self satisfied. And I was not. I was not too pleased about this, but what he said, Waas, I want to give you some or instruction. I want to give you a tip on. My first thought was, Well, you know, you could have given me the tip before the first time, but he had an end in mind here. He wanted to demonstrate a principle to me, which first of all, involved me experiencing some pain in coming up against a barrier. Now imagine thes two cinderblocks with these couple of thin boards on top, and this is raised about 18 inches off the ground. So what he said to me is, I want you to try and break the boards again. But this time, as you bring your hand down. I want you to focus on this point on the floor that is beneath the boards. And he had a little dot on the floor, which I could see just past the boards. And he said, This time I want you to use this dot as the destination of focus for your strike. So instead of focusing on the obstacle, he now had me focused on a destination that was well beyond the obstacle. So I raised my hand and I actually hit it once again and it didn't work. But interestingly, it didn't hurt as much, even though I didn't break the boards and I couldn't ever really figure that out. And then the third time I tried it, I was able to break the boards, and the breaking of the board's actually had very little impact on my hand. And I remember this whole episode. I remember this experience very vividly. It had a deep impact on me evidence by the fact that I could still remember it now 45 years later, but it has really relevance to follow through and how we set our goals in relationship to what we want to achieve and what this martial arts instructor did with me actually lines up with existing research on goal setting and goal attainment. Someone named Edwin Locke, who is a psychological researcher. He is apparently the most published organizational psychologist in the history off organizational psychology. He developed something called goal setting theory, and it's fairly in depth. But the upshot of goal setting theory is that the MAWR difficulty and specific ah goal is the easier it becomes to pursue the goal. People are most motivated by difficulty and specific goals. That's what his research says. And so this particular task that was put before me in the martial arts studio fits that description. And when we're trying to identify goals for ourselves, I think there are two worthwhile points of experimentation. And now this is just anecdotal from my own perspective. But I have found that re sizing my goals either up or down is often very effective in helping me get Mawr movement. In my actual action toward the goal and by re sizing up and down, I mean number one, making the goal bigger in alignment with the story. I just told you where I placed the destination that I'm shooting for well beyond the point where I'm hoping for some practical results. So, for example, committing to doing a daily podcast was well beyond the point of what I really needed to engage, practically in terms of committing myself to engage mawr often in expressing what's most important to me. It wasn't necessary that I do a daily podcast, but having a goal that was that large and feels in some ways almost impossible has been very successful in galvanizing my attention. It really piqued my interest as a challenge, and it continues to do that now, 56 days later. And what I see for myself and what I think is generally true of human beings is that we underestimate our capacity. We don't really know what we're capable of because often we don't hold ourselves to, ah high enough degree of expectation in order to realize what we're capable of. And this is one of my repeated criticisms of Western comfort culture. Is the Mawr comfortable and convenient and easy? We make our lives, the more we become disconnected from that essential capacity, and we have no necessity for discovering ah broader range of that capacity. So in experimenting with your goals, if you set an outrageously large goal that actually really interests you, that it gets your attention, you make a very big goal. And then you think, Wow, what would that be like to actually attain that goal? And I wonder if I could actually be capable of that. If you get very interested in the result, the potential result it can help to catalyze finding inner strengths that we didn't even know we had and built into goal setting theory is that goals ought to be depicting and clarifying what we do want if our goals are centered around what we don't want or what we're afraid of, or what we want to push away or get rid of. Then we're back to what I was doing the very first time I tried to break a board which is focusing on the obstacle itself. And then we find our efforts stopping at the same point where we're fixated, which is upon the obstacle, and very often if we want to get beyond an obstacle, we have to think bigger, further and beyond the point of the obstacle itself. In order to overcome the obstacle, and often when we do that, the obstacle actually almost becomes irrelevant. As we're pursuing that big goal, we find that things that we wanted to overcome or get past or rise above can almost disappear from our attention. And we suddenly find ourselves pursuing this big, wonderful, exciting, interesting destination and then realize, Oh, I used to be really socially anxious when speaking in public. But now I'm naturally getting up and doing it because I care so much about this subject or something else we may overcome in the process of becoming very impassioned and interested in pursuing this big vision or big goal. So focusing on what we do want is an important component of setting these goals. And so that's resizing on the upside, which also reminds me of something I saw. I was actually watching a speaker, someone named Pat Flynn, who is an entrepreneur's coach or ah, financial wealth entrepreneurial business building coach. And he was giving a keynote. I was watching this on video, and it was really neat what he did. He was speaking to the audience, and it was a big crowd, and so the camera was in the back of the audience. You could see the over the heads of the audience and you could see him on stage. And he said, Okay, I want everyone to raise their hand up in the air is high as you possibly can. And so you see this whole sea off hands go up what you're looking at from behind. And then he stops and he says, Okay, hold right there and everyone's got their hand stretched up. Asshole. Aya's they can. And he says, Now I want you to raise your hand three inches higher and what you see is everybody in that audience find another three inches in their reach. And he makes the comment at that point, he says. So what? What was that about? And he points out how we reserve our best effort for some unknown situation or circumstance, and that somehow, psychologically, we are not giving our all in each moment to whatever we're working on or pursuing or attempting to achieve. It was just a really neat demonstration of the fact that we hold ourselves in reserve, and if there's an ability to become conscious of that, that withholding that triggers these realizations that were capable of more than we thought we were. And so setting a big goal of big, outrageous goal can work in this respect as well. Just to get the best out of us that is, on the upside of resizing your goals to make them bigger. But then I have also found going the other way is very useful. Sometimes when I'm just not making any progress on a goal that I claim is important to me. Sometimes making the steps smaller really works, just breaking down what it is I'm intending to dio. And if I haven't seen success thus far with pursuing that goal, if I cut that step in half or even further down, if I turn one what I've been treating as one step, if I break it down into four increments things I conduce you on my way to this step, then that can sometimes make it easier to get yourself a win. And as I've described before in some of the neurological research I've run across when you set yourself a goal and it's measurable and it's specific and you actually achieve that step, it triggers the release of dopamine in the brain which is this feel good pleasure chemical that tells you Oh, that was nice. We liked doing that. That feels good to make progress, to accomplish something. So it actually trains your mind to want to do that activity mawr in the future. So identifying small increments in steps you can take and intending them. So you're actually articulating. Okay, here's what I am going to do today and say if your goal waas I'm gonna exercise every day. But you're not getting to exercise. Maybe what you need to say is I'm going to do one push up today or I'm going to do three setups. And when you declare that and then you're actually able to reach it, it has this effect of empowering the activity neurologically through your brain response, and it makes you mawr able to follow through with exercise in the future. And that's all facilitated by down scaling the size of your goal and getting these small winds under your belt. So you develop some mo mentum in moving in the direction you want to move. It seems often when we set goals that are in this middle range where, um let's say, let's put it this way. The worst goal you can set. It comes across as being mundane and uninteresting because one it's not specific. And two, it's not big enough to excite you. And three, it's not small enough to feel easily doable. So that's a way you can guarantee your goals. Remain elusive is to keep them vague, un interesting in terms of the level of it as an achievement and bigger than something that feels like a quick win. So if you like toe work with this immediately today, just write down three goals that you've had and have a look at these three and see what it would look like to either supersize your commitment to achieving this goal. What would it look like if it were 10 times bigger than what you had been planning, or to downsize it and state what the goal would look like if you were micro dose ing on the goal? If I cut this in half, or if I If I chop this up into 10 steps to reach this goal that I have had, what would those steps look like to experiment with that upsizing and downsizing and see if that helps you to follow through on what matters most for you. Thanks for listening again today. This has been Episode 56 of the follow through Formula Podcast. My name is Rick Lewis and I'll be back tomorrow.