Staying on Task with Approach and Avoidance Goals

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert and this week’s video is all about the difference between avoidant goals and approaching goals. It’s a bit just like it sounds. Avoiding goals are things that we don’t want and they motivate us to not get that thing we don’t want. So, I don’t want to lose my job, I don’t want to lose this important relationship in my life, I don’t want to get fat. Got it? Avoidance goals. Approaching goals, by contrast, are things that are like, I do want a great relationship in my life, I want to get a promotion in my workplace, all the things that we want to have. Which do you suppose is going to be more motivating and easier for us to achieve the things that we want in our lives? That’s what this video is about. Stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. There’s this very fundamental difference that researchers spent a lot of time looking at: this difference between wanting to avoid certain outcomes and wanting to achieve certain outcomes. The question has always been, “What’s going to motivate a person more, to avoid loss or to get some gain?” It’s pretty clear. We’ve talked about this before in previous videos, this idea of negativity bias, which draws our attention and our motivations towards things that appear in our environment as potentially negative. So that we pay more attention to things that could hurt us or cause us negative emotions, then we pay attention to things that cause positive emotions. So, not surprisingly, avoidant goals are actually quite powerful. They’re very motivating. Not wanting to lose your job is really going to cause you to do at least the bare minimum to stay employed. That’s a pretty powerful motivator, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it.

I’ll put a link to the negativity bias video that we’ve done in the past on this topic. There’s nothing wrong with this thought that we want to avoid a loss more than we will be motivated by the prospect of gain. That’s just the way it is. But my second point in this video is that avoidant goals can be very stressful, unhappy-making, frustrating, to the point sometimes that they’re paralyzing. You can say, “Oh, I really just can’t afford to flunk out of school this year,” and you can get so stressed out by it. It’s really hard to get to studying and you’re just so paralyzed by your fear of what might come, that your life is miserable as you struggle to maintain a passing grade point average. It makes sense. So, there are times when avoiding goals are too potent, too negatively provocative, and then we need to be looking at approaching goals more concretely. Sometimes, it’s just the opposite. Instead of saying, “I really can’t flunk out,” it might be that “I really need to pass my courses because I see all these good outcomes. My parents are going to be proud, I’m going to have made good use of the money I’ve invested in school, it’s my path to a great career.” Start visualizing that kind of thing, very, very detailed. Even though approaching goals are less motivating sometimes than avoiding goals, when we make the picture clear, super clear, very concrete, we visualize at length what that would look like to achieve that approaching goal that we have in mind, it makes it easier for that to be highly motivating. When we have enough reasons why, then the actions to get there go up. Does that make sense?

I’ve got a video that we’ll put in the link in the description below on visualization techniques too, which are proven in some very good science to work. There’s a third thing I want to say about this whole avoidance versus approaching mechanisms. Distance is one of the complicating factors. Our distance from the goal makes it less motivating. If I said, “Gee, I really want to become president of the company one day.” Well, if I’m an intern, I’ve just got come out of university, that may be a big stretch to think that’s going to be motivating for me. Or think, “I really don’t want to flunk out from my math class.” If it’s the beginning of the term, well, I’ve got this assignment, and tomorrow’s assignment, and the quiz next week. And those may not be very motivating because flunking the course is quite far away in the future. So, if I can instead say, “My goal is to hand in assignments every week so that I don’t flunk the course.” By milestone and breaking it down, it’s gonna be much easier for me to stay motivated and avoid flunking the class.

Similarly, if the approaching goal is, “I want to become president one day,” well then my goal might be to break that down into a bunch of milestones. I need to get an analyst position once I’m through the probation of my internship, I want to be a manager of the department, and then I want to move into operations, and so on. And so you can see your trajectory towards ultimately the president’s office that’s going to happen when you’re 60, I’ve got gray hair, but there’s a path to get there that’s got lots of near-term milestones. If I said, “I need my house clean for the weekend when family comes over and I really want it to look good,” and, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, the house itself might be a terrible mess and you don’t feel very motivated to be able to get to it all. Well, maybe the near-term kind of milestone goal you can make is saying, “I’m gonna spend five minutes cleaning the house today. That’s it, I’m gonna set a timer.” And when you do that, that goal becomes so much more achievable. Because if you do the five minutes, easy, right? You’re probably going to turn into 10 minutes, or turn into 20 minutes, or turn to a half hour, and suddenly your house is clean. That’s the benefit of these shrinking the distance between where we are and our goal. So, milestones can be really, really effective. And, I’ll give you one last example. If you said, “I really need to lose 50 pounds in order to be fit for the summer season,” and it’s, you know, winter right now, well, that distant goal may be pretty hard to achieve. But if I said, “Gee, I really need to eat one salad per day, and I want to lose three pounds this month,” that becomes a lot nearer, a lot more achievable. I can, I can visualize that one quite clearly and move towards it, and then ultimately if I’m successful, I might move towards my big goal down the road. Hope that makes sense. If you like this kind of content, click the like button, share it with your family and friends. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you next time.