For many years I had my weight loss clients set specific goals. I have since realized that the goals were sometimes more harmful than helpful. I still use goals for helping us see the long term vision, but I use them with caution. One of my favorite books that explores this notion further is Atomic Habits, by James Clear.
In his book, Clear explains why goals are not always beneficial. After failing at many goals, he came to realize that the results he would eventually see were far less tied to goals, and more tied to the systems followed to achieve those goals.
He goes on to pose the question – if you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? He believes you would, comparing the theory to sports:
The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
This applies to weight loss too. I often see my clients spend more time staring at the scale – worried about how far they are from their ultimate goal – than they do focused on the habits and system they are putting in place to achieve that goal.
Clear notes that goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. So, let’s explore some of the problems he says arise when we spend too much time thinking about goals, and not enough designing systems.
Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers… It’s only when you implement a system of continuous small improvements that you achieve a different outcome.
Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.
Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a clean room—for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a messy room in the first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.
Is this hitting you as hard as it hit me the first time I read it? This gets right at the heart of my program – your mindset is the cause that needs to be treated. Quick diets aimed at achieving a goal may sometimes work in the short-term, but a shift in your thinking and relationship with food will produce lasting, permanent results.
Clear goes on to write:
Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
Stay tuned for my next blog, in which we’ll explore Clear’s additional problems with goal-based thinking.
