Be Mindful with Goal Setting
About seven years ago, I neatly packed my clothes, guitars, and books into my Volkswagen Passat and raced my way across the country from New York to Phoenix. My mind was fixated on the destination, laser-focused on “getting there” and making good time, stopping only to eat and sleep. I drove eighteen hours each of the first two days and made it to Phoenix on the third day around 5:00pm. I made it! I had achieved my goal and was ready to start my new life.
Looking back, one of my regrets is that I missed out on an opportunity to see the country. I stuck to the road, never wavering, never venturing off to explore anything beyond the highway. There was no connection to my pilgrimage, no great odyssey full of mystery and adventure. I was too goal-focused and forgot about the process of the journey. I wanted the drive to be over before I even got into the car. Similarly, many of us anxiously race toward a point of achievement, a place where we assume we can finally rest and relax because we’ve accomplished our goal.
What happens when we set goals?
Just about every undergraduate psychology 101 course will show the selective attention test. If you are unfamiliar, take a minute to watch this video. We are given a goal, namely, to count the number of times the players wearing white pass the basketball. The moment we calibrate our minds to focus on this task, we begin to filter out what our brain considers extraneous information. Our mind is so efficient that about half of us will miss the person in the gorilla suit walking through the middle of the court.
We are continuously exposed to limitless sensory and perceptual information – too much to process, in fact - so it is important for us to filter out unnecessary content, which is the job of our reticular activating system. With enough practice, we can focus our attention and ultimately construct our own subjective reality. Along the way, our brain makes assumptions, fills in missing pieces of information, and sometimes fails to detect subtle changes in the environment due to narrowing breadth of awareness. While focus and goal-orientation are important executive skills associated with concentration of our attention, it is equally important for us to diffuse awareness, which opens us up to a more fluid field of experience - the flowing stream of consciousness.
American Fusion with Goal-Setting
Scott McCloud wrote a comic book about comic books, in which he discusses stylistic differences between Japanese and American comic art. He highlighted a significant cultural difference in panel transitions. In particular, American artists typically use “action-to-action” transitions, while Japanese artists will use “aspect-to-aspect” transitions, where “time seems to stand still,” setting the tone for a “quiet, contemplative” environment. Their storytelling allows their work to “wander” and emphasize “being there” rather than “getting there.” Robert McKee teaches American writers that all scenes must “add value and progress the story.” Lean storytelling requires movement toward a specific point and that actions not in-line with the goal would be considered “non-value added.” Racing toward a destination seems to permeate throughout American culture.
Goal-setting is a staple of corporate America because it ultimately leads to higher levels of productivity and other performance measures that organizations are looking to achieve. Unfortunately, this philosophy has spilled over into the therapeutic process. We set SMART goals and use the DAPPS method to ensure we are compliant with our important task of achieving mental health. Insurance providers are notorious for ensuring their dollars are leading to quantified measurable change (logical positivism), which means the therapeutic process is reduced to manualized treatment protocols that have earned the distinction of “evidence-based.” The therapeutic process needs to be efficient, meaning each session must show how progress is made and relates back to treatment goals. The Arizona Board of Behavioral Health requires clinicians to develop treatment plans and that therapy is conducted only in accordance with the agreed upon plan. Our emphasis on efficiency has reduced the therapeutic relationship to a handful of sessions to ensure “focused treatment.” During an interview at one of the more notable behavioral health facilities in the Phoenix Metro area, the hiring clinician told me that he does not focus on building the relationship, rather, he immediately sets goals that will treat the depression and be able to discharge within six sessions.
This system, in my opinion, has a tendency to be rigid. It constricts and limits us. The therapeutic process has become fused with treatment goals. In my experience working with and supervising professional therapists, goals are sometimes forced for the sake of compliance. While goals are often helpful to get us started and establish a baseline, we are doing a disservice when we fixate on them. We miss opportunities for deeper connection that perhaps is a bit beyond the surface of the initial presentation. What have we missed by anxiously focusing our attention on adherence to requirements set by agencies, insurance payers, and regulatory boards? What have we missed by fixating on outcome measures? I don’t believe we are reaching our full potential as helpers when we box ourselves in with these attachments.
And then there is the dark side of goal-setting. Goals set up a binary contingency of success and failure. Either you achieved or did not. We can only feel good about ourselves when we achieve. We can only be successful if we progress on our goals. If we make minimal progress, we are doing something wrong and our work together must have been ineffective. We also know there can be consequences for such hefty pursuit of goals, such as workaholism and an addiction to the dopaminergic release each time you achieve a goal.
How to be Mindful When We Set Goals
Let me clarify that rather than a treatise on reasons we should dismiss goals, instead, this is meant to be an exploration of an alternative way of thinking, to put goal-setting into context, and to challenge deeply fused assumptions. Goals are important and vital to our success. They help focus and guide us when strategically implemented. We can use goals as a starting point to move in a more valued-based direction.
We can set achievable goals to form helpful habits that align with our chronobiology. There are some things that make sense for us to measure, such as hours of sleep, time you went to bed and woke up, food intake and other substances that enter our bodies, our weekly exercise. We can track our vitals such as heart rate, body temperature, respiration, and blood pressure with measurement. We can complete comprehensive blood panels. We can increase our awareness by accurately and precisely measuring our behavioral patterns. We can use this information to build healthy habits. Goals can be used as benchmarks to ensure we maintain the necessary upkeep of daily living. Measurement systems allow us to demonstrate improvement in a specified direction. Goals allow us to focus attention.
However, our goals are typically the bare minimum of what we can do - a sliver of our humanity. There is much more to experience than movement toward a fixed point. Instead, we can establish a direction and then allow ourselves to wander a bit, to explore and discover. Rather than fixating on an outcome, we can shift focus on the actions we want to take, the choices that makes sense to us, and move our behavior in a direction that is line with the things that bring joy, engagement, and peace to our existence.
When we can set goals aside for just a bit, we create an opportunity to open up to novel experiences. When we can defuse from goals and wander into the breadth of experience, we create an opportunity for deeper insight and illumination of knowledge. We can work toward a more mindful existence.
Be Mindful with Goal Setting
In Buddhist practice, concentration is a way of restricting breadth of attention while mindfulness “enhances the recollection function by expanding it.” After concentration practice, the mind becomes calm and steady. It is “malleable” and one can begin mindfulness meditation. We can view goal-setting in a similar manner. We can begin by setting a concrete goal and stepping foot on our chosen path, then allow ourselves to wander outside the boundaries of the trail. We can savor the journey and allow ourselves to notice what would have otherwise been missed.
We can train ourselves to switch between the “spotlight” and “floodlight” of our attentional field. We can become more fluid in our approach to the therapeutic process. We can use goals as guides, not as containers. We can work toward a middle path and allow ourselves to emphasize both sides, working together toward our valued direction. Allowing ourselves to wander can further elucidate values and clarify our needs so we can be responsive and psychologically flexible.
As a conclusion, here is a brief exercise to demonstrate the shifting of our attentional field from focused toward diffused awareness. Notice how we progress to expand the attentional field. Take your time.
Take your right hand and notice its shape. Notice the outline. Notice the details. The lines. The textures. Move it around a bit. Ball it up into a fist. Squeeze tightly. Then release. Notice the difference between relaxed and tensed. Notice the temperature. Notice the temperature differential of your hand from the air that is touching it. Now switch and do the same with your left hand. Now try and zoom out a bit, and notice both hands at once. You may notice it difficult to attend to both simultaneously, fluttering a bit between each hand. Stay with it. This is what it means to diffuse awareness. Now zoom out more and notice yourself in space. Notice the vastness of the space you are in. Beyond the container you place upon yourself, there is a vast universe to explore. Magnitudes of orders beyond what you can even imagine. Allow yourself to be receptive to what Is out there. You don’t want to miss the gorilla walking right through the court because you were too busy counting passes.
