Goal vs. limit

Nice, if it’s worth the price. (National Library of Ireland)

I’m in the midst of growing my coaching and consulting business again after a several month hiatus.

It’s been fun to step up my activity and bring in some new clients now that I can fully focus on it.

It has suddenly become important to set a target number of clients. This is not a goal. I’m not striving intensely to get to that number.

Rather, this target is a limit that tells me when to stop. If I don’t decide ahead of time when my roster is full, I won’t have room to launch any other programs.

My target is not a finish line I hope to run through to cheers and applause. It’s more like the wooden board my father has on the floor of the garage that tells him that he’s brought the car in far enough in to drop the door.

I don’t really like goals. I like to focus on the process I will go through day-to-day to achieve the things I intend to accomplish. For example, I’m not shooting or a certain number of subscribers to this blog — I simply write every day, just like I brush my teeth every day.

A goal is useful for creating a single-minded, focused intensity to drive action. And most of the time, I don’t like the way that feels.

For example, when I had a goal of getting out of debt, it dominated my experience. My shower thoughts were about getting out of debt. My commute was spent listening to podcasts about getting out of debt.

That’s the whole point. If you maintain that drive and intensity, you generate results faster and stick with the process for the long haul. But with a goal like that, I never have a sense of peace. I can never let go. For me, that is not an acceptable way to live my life.

Instead of setting a goal, I design a process based on certain parameters. If I want to get out of debt, I simply organize my budget to account for the actions that I need to take to, say, pay down a credit card. As the days go by, I follow the process that I outlined. Eventually, the balance on the card will be zero. The results probably look similar, but the key difference is that I’m not obsessing over it.

What I’m really talking about is contentment. I’m content whether I’m in debt or not. I’m content with the number of clients I currently have.

With respect to clients, I have an upper limit so that I know when to stop. I have a lower limit to ensure that I can pay the bills. Within those limits, I choose to put my energy elsewhere.

This contentment does mean that I am not pushing myself to pay down debt or acquire new clients or learn new skills. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t do these things — only that I do not impose a sense of urgency on them by default.

Urgency carries a cost. It’s a state that I only want to live in for short bursts. The rest of the time, I want to be free to find more interesting solutions to my problems than to push hard on the established ones.

If I want a particular outcome — if I want to achieve something that is not part of my current experience — I am willing to work hard. To do that, I’ll design my daily life to build in that hard work. And then, I’ll set a limit so that I know when I have reached the desired outcome and can slow down.

In a sense, that’s a goal, but there’s no hustle and grind. There’s no staying motivated or keeping my eyes on the prize. I just do the things I set out to do until I get to where I wanted to go. And when I hit that board in the garage, I put the car in park and turn off the engine.

By no means am I saying that goals are foolish or that you shouldn’t have them. I’m just sharing a framework that, after many years of experimentation, I have discovered works well for me. And if goals stress out out, maybe it will work for you, too.