Are Your Secret Goals Sabotaging You at Work?

In How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that you don’t see the world “as it as,” but rather you construct it, moment by moment, by filtering and analyzing the torrents of sensory input that you receive.The main tool your brain uses to do this, once you’ve acquired language, is categories.What category includes the following?: a house, a fly swatter, a beekeeper’s suit, and a degree in entomology.Things that protect you from stinging insects.Cool, huh? These items have nothing in common, except for a specific goal. And once you’ve formed the goal, you can add other things to the category: a bottle of DEET, a zapper, a plane ticket to Antarctica.Conscious and Unconscious GoalsWhether you’re aware or not, you approach every situation with multiple goals. These goals shape what you notice, what you prioritize, and how you behave.You’re aware of some of your goals: “find out what this person thinks” or “build team safety and camaraderie” or “impress the boss.”But you also have goals that are running below your conscious awareness, like “be the smartest person in the room” or “avoid conflict” or “don’t draw attention to yourself.”Can you see how the unconscious goals might interfere with and even sabotage your conscious ones?How Unconscious Goals Affect PerceptionUnconscious goals are even more powerful than conscious ones in determining what you experience in any given situation. That’s because you’re not aware of them, so you can’t perform any reality checks.If your goal is “be the smartest person in the room,” your brain will be working as follows:Other people’s ideas are stupid, or flawed, or incompleteWhen people ask me questions, they’re challenging my competence rather than being genuinely curious.All feedback is actually criticism.If your goal is “avoid conflict,” here’s what your brain will do:Anyone expressing a strong opinion is being dangerously aggressive.All disagreement is a personal attack.All sighs, glances, and movements signal tension that could erupt into conflict at any moment.If your goal is “don’t draw attention to yourself,” your brain will automatically perform the following tricks:Anyone who speaks up confidently is showing off, and is not to be trusted.Any opportunity I might volunteer for will expose me to judgment, and is too dangerous to consider.My own contributions aren’t good enough to share.In each case, the unconscious goal acts as an invisible filter that constructs your experience of the situation before you even have a chance to think critically about it.These goals are so harmful because you don’t experience them as goals. You experience the distorted perception they engender as reality.Positive Thinking Doesn’t Tip the ScaleI’m a big believer in uprooting the schemas — the unconscious ways of seeing the world — that underly these goals. The process of doing so — activating the original belief and exposing it to disconfirmatory knowledge — can be surprisingly tolerable, brief, and effective.But what do you do in the next meeting, the next one-on-one conversation, or the next performance review to construct a more helpful, empowering reality?You might think it’s by reinforcing your conscious goals: “find out what this person thinks”; “build team safety and camaraderie”; “impress the boss.”Like, repeat them as affirmations on your way to the meeting, draw them in shaving cream or lipstick on your bathroom mirror, and make them your screensaver.The problem with this approach is that you’re setting them up to fight with the unconscious goals. And the unconscious always wins, eventually. And the unconscious always wins, under pressure.Value-Based Goals to the RescueThe elegant, effective move here is to set value-based goals that don’t try to fight against old patterns of self-protection. Where you identify how you want to be, rather than what you want to accomplish.For example, before a conversation where you’re trying to get someone’s opinion, set your goal as relentless curiosity. It’s imperative that you find out what they think!Now all your self-protective circuits will rally around that goal, rather than the one of making you seem smarter than the other person. You’ll construct a reality in which their perception has value, and that it’s in your best interest to find out what it is.Another game-changing goal is compassion. When your goal is to be emotionally supportive of other people, you’ll see their behavior through the lens of their needs, which you can attend to.That’s very different than viewing their behavior as provoking and dangerous.The third game-changing goal I’ll mention here is creativity — yours and everyone else’s. If you’re consciously focused on cultivating an atmosphere where new and exciting ideas can be born and nurtured, your “don’t get noticed” circuitry gets assuaged by the fact that you’re drawing attention to ideas, not yourself.Your Mission, Should You Choose to AcceptBefore your next meeting, take two minutes to set a single conscious goal — curiosity, compassion, or creativity — and notice how it changes what you see. Notice the ideas you might have dismissed, the people you might have misjudged, the opportunities you might have ducked.And if you'd like help shifting your team's or organization's culture to one rooted in curiosity, compassion, and creativity, reach out to me at howiejacobson.com. Let's build something together.