MAY 2013
How to avoid sabotaging your goals
FR OM TH E E D I TOR
I was recently chatting with a
young woman about smoking.
She currently smokes 10 cigarettes a day. She knows it's bad for
her but she's addicted.
Last year she spent months
tapering off her smoking and she
eventually got down to just two
cigarettes a day.
Pretty good, right?
She proudly told her mother
about it. Her mother flew off the
handle. "You're smoking?! Are you
crazy? You're going to have a heart
attack!" ...and you can imagine
how the rest of the "conversation"
went.
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Joyce Grant
It wasn't long before the woman
was smoking 10 cigarettes a day,
with no immediate plans to try
quitting again.
The life lessons
It seems to me there are a bunch
of lessons here. And they apply
equally well to work—especially to
admins who may have an overbearing, judgmental mother type of
boss.
Here's a work example: Let's say
you've recently decreased the lag
time you get meeting minutes back
to attendees from an unacceptable
two months to a less unacceptable
two weeks. In other words, you've
fixed a bad situation, but not entirely.
1) Recognize when you're
seeking external validation
My friend was being needy. She
wanted her mother to say, "Wow!
Great job! You're hardly smoking at
all—that's fantastic!" If that's what
she wanted, she would have been
smarter to wait until she was no
longer smoking at all.
But my friend wasn't sure she'd
ever get down to zero cigarettes a
day so she thought maybe she'd
cash in on some praise before the
roof fell in on her resolution.
In a work scenario, if you're
looking for your boss to tell you
that getting meeting minutes back
to attendees in two weeks is terrific, you're probably out of luck.
Because two weeks—just like two
cigarettes a day—is likely to be unacceptable to her, especially if she's
quite judgmental.
Your boss will judge you by your
current results, not your journey.
2) Give yourself the
validation you seek
Looking back, my friend sees how
much healthier she was at two
cigarettes a day rather than 10. At
the time, however, all she could see
were those two she still smoked.
She knew she was making progress
but her internal voices were muttering about the work that still needed
to be done.
Why do we do that to ourselves?
Sometimes, especially when we've
climbed a bit of a hill and are on a
plateau right before the summit, we
need to celebrate. Celebrate reaching a pentultimate goal.
But in that case, we should celebrate quietly, and to ourselves.
Continued on page 5
