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This week we are talking about goals…again! Goals; we all have something that we seem to want or would like to experience don’t we? Locke really got at this when he started his research in organizations by simply asking people, “what are you trying to accomplish?” We approach the show this week with three considerations in mind. First, do we know what will make us happy, are we that great at managing success, AND are our goals connected to our greater life vision?

First, what about the “arrival fallacy”? The arrival fallacy is the belief that once you arrive at a certain destination, you’ll be happier. The truth is, we aren’t that great at knowing what will make us “happy”. Dan Seigel’s book Stumbling On Happiness makes this evident; we’re just not that good at predicting this. You can cover this pretty thoroughly in episode 60. Our imagined futures tend to fill in the gaps too. Oh, and remember that we make our choices about the future based on how we think we will feel. We treat what we imagine as “the facts” and we ignore the “absence” of things. And this influences the choices we make in the future.

And what about the idea that we aren’t that great at handling all of our success. We all have an upper limit problem which is the way that we unconsciously bring ourselves back down after achieving certain successes. Integrating our success into our new normal in our neurological system is a real thing. Lastly, are our goals connected to the biggest vision of who we want to “be”in our life? This is where the rubber hits the road.

What do you think? How do your goals fit into your why?  Are you operating from the arrival fallacy?