Understanding Personal Goals

At the start of the year, many of us set personal goals and resolutions. Whether they are personal or professional.

I read recently of years of study by psychologists regarding intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and it led me to consider this when setting personal goals. What these separate studies, carried out across many counties, found was that the intrinsic motivation, those that we do for our own enjoyment, resulted in greater happiness, and success in reaching extrinsic targets, those things that result in you getting something in return, had no benefit in the state of happiness.

So when setting your personal goals, look to what things you can do for your intrinsic benefit, rather than looking at materialistic improvements.

Therefore on the road to goal setting, start with your values and look to things that mean something to you. What things do you do for your own enjoyment?

For me this is playing music, spending time with loved ones, kayaking, helping develop and mentoring people, and enjoying travel (difficult to fulfil this one at the moment). My goals are therefore centred around enabling me to do these things as much as possible.

I recognise that I need to do extrinsic things to earn money to do these things, but the happiness will come from achieving the intrinsic things rather than the extrinsic ones. Hopefully I can satisfy the extrinsic need by helping and developing others and getting money for it!

In the past, I have focused on promotions and more materialistic measures which when I’ve succeeded, have not changed my level of happiness. It just leads to me setting the next target. Nicer house, nicer car, next promotion. It becomes a spiral which does not actually lead to greater happiness. We often justify this as trying to achieve a better life for our family and we put our own happiness as secondary. However, if you are happy, your family is more likely to be happy, so maybe this rationalisation is misplaced.

It’s a great time to review your own goals and ask yourself whether these goals will lead to happiness, assuming that happiness is an overall vision for you. Are you being intrinsically driven? Or extrinsically motivated?

Check out the InteChange website for more on this and People Focused Leadership.