Motivation and Goals | Part 4: Goals

so today we're it's going to be a whirlwind all right so first thing that we're going to do is talk a little bit about what we've covered so far so on day one we went through an introduction right what is coaching what is therapy and how do we understand uh what gets in the way of our clients achieving their goals on the screen share with y'all there we go and so what we kind of came to is this you know diagram of this is their intent this is the resistance they have to overcome and then once they overcome their resistance they're prone to take action and so on day one we sort of went over an overview of this model and the key takeaways from the overview of this model are that the reason that people can't find motivation is because they kind of you they use one term oh i'm unmotivated right but the truth is that motivation involves a number of different physiologic psychologic neuroscientific spiritual behavioral economics there are lots of different disciplines that look that go into what motivation is and the reason people stay stuck is because they don't have the precision to figure out where is my problem is it a problem of intent am i not like do i not really want it or am i conflicted am i ambivalent is there a part of me that should get up at 8 am every day but there's a part of me that wants to stay up till 4 a.m every day so that internal conflict makes their intent kind of scrambled so they can't really act is the problem resistance so even if i really want to do something and my best example of this is people who are like very very lonely so people who are very very lonely will want to make friends will want to find a romantic partner will want all of these things and their intent is a hundred percent they want it more than anything else in the world and yet they still can't do it so if we kind of diagnose that person's motivational problem what we'll probably uncover is that there's resistance there's some amount of shame that they experience some amount of identity problems that they have so if we kind of talk about resistance you know there's two components to it there's like emotions and identity there are other things as well but that's kind of how we break it up and so how can you as a coach even if their intent is fully clarified how can you help them overcome their resistance and so today we're going to kind of talk about i think the nuts and bolts of what most people expect from like goal setting and motivation which is the action and the key point here is that a lot of people come in and they like want to jump right towards their goals but it's been my experience and hopefully you all have seen this too i'm pretty sure y'all have that people who focus on the action right away without focusing on the obstacle and the energy going into their their goals are the ones that tend to get blindsided and feel stuck because they're like oh i know what i need to do but i can't bring myself to do it and then they go and keep on looking for magical solutions to their problems but they don't need a magical solution what they need to do is fix the problem to begin with right they need to remove the resistance they need to remove the obstacles so now what we're going to focus on is actually how to set an appropriate action and how to help your clients like succeed in the goals that they set and today we're going to cover four things we're going to talk about setting a goal we're going to talk about science a little bit and evidence-based or scientifically valid validated um points or like understandings that will help your clients achieve their goals so there are lots of different psychological principles and other things at play that we can kind of leverage to optimize a client actually achieving their goal then we're going to talk about troubleshooting goals and then the last thing that we're going to talk about is give you all a good solid cognitive framework to think about the dimensions of a goal so that you can try to figure out where a problem within a goal exists questions okay so let's jump in so setting a goal how do most clients set goals they look at what other people are doing very good right so monkey see monkey do what else they have a desire to sort of achieve something okay so let's say that that my so uh goal is based on achievement right is that fair to say kent yep so i know this sounds kind of weird but like when we use the word goal like what we're kind of focusing on is like the end of the road the achievement right so like if i have a goal like what's like a goal is like i want to become an olympic gold medalist that's the achievement right most of the time when our clients think about like goals they set it based on the target so it's like a target focus fair end of the road where else where do you think goals go what else like where else do your clients goals come from any other ideas sometimes there are consequences of their current behavior and they want to change it but what do you mean by that eli um like i guess sometimes like i have a few clients who maybe want to lose weight because of you know what it's like to be physically active and so they like set a goal to be more fit can you help me understand how they decided to set the goal to be more fit i guess the adult to you last point would it be like reaching like a certain like emotional feeling like happiness okay so sometimes they're chasing a feeling or there's like a correlation with their goal like that's that's kind of a good point so like i think that if i get promoted i will be happy is that a good way to put it if i'm you know all of my life would be better if i got jaw surgery and made my jaw extend further from my face and then i could be a strong john male right so like they're sort of their goal correlates with some what's actually their goal correlates with their values but it's not directly chasing the value it's like chasing some approximation of the value it's an excellent point okay so the the i think the key thing here is that a lot of clients will set goals based on what they see other people do um you know what that target is and they may even attribute some inappropriate things to that target so this is like grass is greener on the other side right so the first thing that i kind of want to point out is that like goal setting is not a systematic or thought out process it's not methodical at all it's just sort of like they wake up one day and they're like oh this is what i should do right and all of the the societal conditioning and stuff kind of comes in so first thing that we can help people do in terms of coaching is to set an appropriate goal we can actually set like use a systematic process to set the right kinds of goals for the for our clients and help them achieve it and our first kind of approach to setting a goal is the 25 rule and so what we kind of say is here's where our clients are here's where they want to go so here's the goal and so what clients try to do is they try to think okay how do i get from here to here which makes perfect sense that's the nature of a goal right if this is like olympic gold medal like of course they're gonna think about how do i get to an olympic gold medal but the problem is that this actually this approach does not scientifically kind of set us up for success so the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna ask them okay between where you are and where you want to go what's the halfway point between that and then what's the halfway point between that and this is usually the first general target that we want to set and there are a lot of things that we're engaging by doing this process the first is that our brain has this circuit that sort of you know measures progress towards something and it's it's able to tell that like okay if i if i work out today how close am i to achieving my goal not very close at all and so when the gap between what i'm capable of and what i want to achieve is wide it decreases motivation right so i'm curious do any of y'all like want to be president of the united states like who thinks it would be cool to be president i think it would be pretty cool right so like why don't you strive for it every day brian that's really hard and very abstract absolutely right so what we see is that the gap between what you're what you believe you're capable of or what you the actions you can take and what you want to achieve actually decreases motivation so the first thing that we're going to do is like shrink the goal like to the first target so there's also like positive psychology and things like that that are involved here so when we shrink the first target you know we increase the likelihood of positive reinforcement right we kind of open our ourselves up to like being successful and like all kinds of other stuff so i'm i'm gonna ask you all so maybe you guys know so if i if i were to tell one of my clients hey i know you have this goal over here but why don't we start over here what is your client going to say what's their resistance to it it's not enough or it's not important beautiful not enough so we're going to get that okay we just want to table that eli we'll talk about how to deal with that in a second okay so the first thing that we want to do is set a reasonable goal okay um and the 25 rule is kind of how to sort of frame it i think this is a goal that we also really discovered worked very well in our parent coaching program so there are a bunch of parents who feel like their kids are addicted to video games and so they came to us and they said oh my god can you fix our children can i sign them up for coaching and we said no your kid isn't the problem you need to sign up for coaching and some parents get really really upset with that they're like they're the one who's playing video games all day and i'm like you're their parent if they're doing something all day it's your fault i don't say that say it in that way but our parent coaching program we don't work with the kids we work with the parents and the first thing that we do is help the parents understand that the goals that you want to achieve you want your your kid to start running track and never play video games and and do all their chores and be home for like show up at the table and set the table and eat dinner like they're not gonna do that right that's a completely inappropriate goal for you to set let's meet the kid where they're at what does the kid want what do they care about you know what are they capable of and so in terms of setting this goal like there's a couple of good techniques that you can use that can get people to to buy in a little bit so um you know you can ask questions like uh you know where can you start so this is kind of emphasizing this point instead of this point okay so like asking the client so if they say oh it wouldn't be enough focusing on the start sort of dismantles then not enough somewhat does that make sense because then it's not like there's no there's no enough if you're just talking about where to start is enough has to do with hitting your target it doesn't have to do with like where you are it has to do with where you want to go does that make sense so you can kind of ask clients where you can start and then you can also ask them like you know what did you do over the last week so you want to sort of emphasize where they are but right so if someone wants to like diet for example or lose weight or whatever you know if someone wants to find a new job you can kind of ask them okay what effort like what did you do over the last week in terms of like moving towards this goal and chances are they'll say nothing because they haven't started on the goal yet right which is kind of fine so you kind of approach them with a little bit of like compassion and then you can say okay that's totally fine so if you didn't work on it last week so where's your this is your baseline kind of telling them this is your baseline okay and kind of cognitively i know it's kind of weird but people don't do this right they don't sort of think about where they are is their baseline they think about where they are is a negative does that make sense like cognitively so and so that cognitive shift is incredibly important right so like instead of the gap of like in the negative numbers you know this is kind of where they are so all they see is a deficit whereas like this line actually belongs here because that's where you're starting so you can sort of set this out as your baseline and then kind of ask the question you know what's the like and then you can kind of get back to where where can you start um but you can sort of ask the question like you know what what's one step you can take above the baseline right so this is where like once you frameshift to the baseline of where they are it adjusts their expectations so using these techniques like does a lot of things like adjust expect adjust expectations which correlates with increased success it also has a present focus which correlates with in increased success it meets people where they're at which correlates with increased success it models acceptance for them about where they are and this also leads to increased success so what we're going to use is like use this kind of frame shift and use some of these techniques to recruit several principles that are correlated with better outcomes questions about that okay so just to give you all kind of a quick example so you know let's say okay i want to i want to get healthy all right what did you do last week i didn't exercise at all and i ate you know i ordered like uber eats every day okay so like let's take that as your baseline sounds like you've got a long way to go you want to kind of acknowledge right you want to acknowledge their goal you want to acknowledge the gap you want to acknowledge the feeling of not enough then you can say okay where do you think is the so for someone who doesn't exercise and kind of is eating out every day what do you think would be a reasonable goal for like that person to start like what do you think is the first step they need to do and then this is where your client will say well i guess they need to start working out every day and it's like no no i don't think that's reasonable that's like that's do you think that someone who didn't work out zero days in the last week can start working out every single day and then you kind of like they're like no well i don't think that that's really possible so like okay so like what do you think is possible you know do you think working out a single day is like possible for this person all right let's try let's see what happens i understand that it feels like it's not going to be enough to you and frankly it's not going to be enough let's just acknowledge that but what's enough and what you're capable of are two different things where you want to go and what your baseline is or two different things okay you all get that so what we're going to do is set our goal at 25 of where they want to go and then or maybe even smaller and then sort of have this kind of discussion of where their baseline is defining their baseline and moving upward from the baseline and that sort of recruits positive reinforcement and being successful instead of this gap between what they're capable of and what they want to achieve and will positively enhance our motivation it also has the added benefits of adjusting expectations helping people retain a present focus so people will ask the question how do i stay focused in the present it's not something you can do right you don't just stay focused in the present as a coach what you're going to do is model a certain kind of behavior that forces them to be in the present and then their brain will learn oh this is how i stay in the present they're not even going to realize that it's happening to them but over time they will start to be more present focused as you direct them to be like to force them into the present by sort of focusing on baseline instead of goals it meets people where they at where they're at which i think you guys all understand the value of and it also does things like models acceptance right you're not judging them for their baseline you're kind of saying oh so you don't work out at all and you eat out every day like okay that's where we're gonna start you're not spending the next 15 minutes beating them up about how they could do better or how they're pathetic or whatever so you're gonna start to adjust their self-talk by modeling acceptance okay so that's how we set a goal questions before we move on okay evidence-based goal setting section number two so there there are uh a number of different kind of scientific principles that we can we can kind of leverage to optimize how to set a goal okay so number one is advice giving and why not to do it number two is going to be operationalizing and understanding the frontal lobe number three is going to be done in krueger yeah so these are going to be the three things that we're going to focus on so the first is when you give people advice how effective is it it's not very effective absolutely right so why is that you all know i think because like the advice we give them doesn't take any like context of their situation okay very good right so oftentimes it's invalidating yep so advice can be invalidating it doesn't um kind of it doesn't seem to land right like so presenting people with information we've talked about explicit memory and implicit memory and all that good stuff so the other problem with advice giving is that it tends to be like a gut reaction so the other thing about goal setting that most people tend to do is that it's like a gut reaction they like wake up one day and they're like i need to get in shape right they just sort of set this arbitrary goal so there's evidence that shows that instead of giving people a solution if you want to engage them in behavior give them a choice so choice is greater than advice or solutions so i know it sounds kind of weird but this is just a very simple technique which there have been there's been a ton of research on which is like if someone wants to lose weight if you tell them okay let's develop an exercise plan that is not as likely to succeed as if you ask them hey so if you want to lose weight do you think a dietary approach would be better or like an exercise approach would be better and then if they say exercise approach and then you kind of run down that like that will actually be more likely to succeed even if you give them the answer at the beginning giving them the answer at the beginning and letting them choose the answer is actually like leads to different outcomes even though you both settle on on the same answer which is kind of weird right because generally speaking when we think about the success of an endeavor we think the endeavor is what results in success so if i exercise i will lose weight if i don't but the the really interesting thing about human psychology is how you get to the conclusion of exercise actually drastically affects your outcome in terms of whether you're successful or not and so this is also where we're going to draw on nobel prize winning economist daniel kahneman and so remember that where do goals come from monkey see monkey do right where goals come from is our gut so human beings do not engage in a methodical process of designing goals they just rely on their gut it's driven by emotion or their goals or what they see by other people and so this is called type one reasoning which is the big discovery that daniel kahneman made and the interesting thing about choice is that choice starts to recruit type two reasoning and what kahneman kind of realized is that human beings have two ways that they make decisions one is type one which is like gut so this is like easy to do and it feels very logical so a good example of this is is if you look at like uh you know research on advertising if i put a display of oreos like front and center in like a grocery store and then someone purchases oreos and then i asked that person why did you buy the oreos what are they going to say it was in front of me that's actually incorrect they will never say that they'll say it's because they wanted them absolutely the reason so kent your map hacking bro the reason they bought it is because it was in front of them but the reason they think they bought it is because of something that feels very logical this is a big discovery that that matt packing can this is a big discovery that um daniel kahneman made is that people make gut reactions but they think that their gut reactions are well thought out so an example of type 2 reasoning is differential diagnosis so generally speaking type 2 reasoning is cognitive it's intense and it feels bad people don't enjoy doing it they actually don't enjoy being like logical or methodical so literally what we have to do with doctors is we have to spend years like literally years of cognitive training for them to go from this to this so generally speaking a doctor usually has a hypothesis about what's wrong with a patient within five minutes of like seeing the patient sometimes even less like you kind of got an idea of like what's going on but what we spend years actually training is to not trust our gut and start to be systematic in the way that we approach patients and that's how we don't miss things okay so there's a lot of really interesting research as well about you know why uh family members shouldn't be physicians because it's hard for family members to do type 2 reasoning with like with your family or sorry it's hard for physicians to do type 2 reasoning with their family so the interesting thing about type 2 reasoning is that this leads to better results but it feels really hard it's like cognitively very intense you know when um you know if you're studying and you find studying boring that's like an example of like type 2 reasoning it's not it's a bit of a stretch there but all of the activities that human beings find like cognitively cumbersome or boring tend to be closer to type 2 reasoning and the real tricky thing that also kahneman discovered is that everyone thinks they operate from here i mean sorry everyone thinks they operate from here but most people actually operate from here most of our decisions like when you think about what you want to eat today you don't sit down with a chart of all possible foods and do calculations about caloric inputs and vitamin needs and like all this kind of stuff it's sort of like i kind of feel like eating this right if you think about your grocery shopping like you may have a list but where did that list come from it wasn't a list of all possible things that you could eat it was sort of like okay we need more of this well where did that idea come from well the fruit bowl is empty so we need more bananas like it's all just random ass gut-oriented non-methodical thinking this is also where advice comes from right so like if you think about it and someone gives you advice you know if you talk to someone about their pro your problems how much time do they spend thinking about what's the best advice they could get it's a fluid conversation they spend all of like two seconds if even that right they listen to you for a while like hey i think you should do this even i do that so what i present on stream most of the time when i'm doing q a is type one reasoning it's just like my gut so you can refine your gut over time and we'll kind of get get to that but this lecture is type two reasoning it took a long time for me to like write out right so i have like a whole script i sat down i can answer questions about motivation but if i actually want to offer like a complete educational experience i have to do type 2 reasoning and it takes me like six or eight hours whereas like i can just show up and talk about motivation that's easy peasy lemon squeezy done y'all with me so here's how we're going to help our clients we're going to engage in type 2 reasoning by giving them a choice so you as a coach are going to ask open-ended questions okay so if our if our target is is wait okay let's someone give me a target that i can run through for the whole lecture what's a target what's something that people want to do what do you mean by target just like what's a goal that someone will come in on like okay i'm gonna take one from chat it's work out okay this is our target so one of the the questions that we could ask people is you know we could ask people okay like um what are the ways in which you could work out okay so we're gonna start with like an open-ended question and then they're gonna give you a couple of answers like uh like it's like most of the time when people say work out like they're gonna jump straight to like i need to go to the gym every day y'all see that it's like automatic there's not even like uh what are my options and then they they say like like even asking that question is gonna lead to like i suspect a small uh like improvement in outcomes okay so they can say i can go to the gym i can work out at home i can go for a run so you want to generate as many options as you can okay i could work out with friends i could do push-ups while i'm waiting in queue for a game right and so like you want to generate as many options as you can and then i know it sounds kind of weird and then you just repeat the options back and you're like which one do you think which which one do you want to do do you want to try so already in this process like maybe the gym sucks like like sure that's what other people do right like other people go to the gym but i have a ton of social anxiety and feel ashamed of myself so that may be a terrible idea but like that person without your help they're gonna have this goal they're gonna come up with a solution based on type one reasoning and they're gonna stay stuck forever and never work out that's why people wanna work out and don't work out because they don't go through this process so just by generating this process we begin to see okay this is what your individual preferences are what do you want to try and they can say okay i want to try working out at home okay so you've already won there like that's already better than like what most people do so the next thing that we want to do is just like kind of refine that choice over time right so like what could you do at home right they're like oh i guess i could do like push-ups i could do yoga i could do parkour you know like whatever like they can come up with whatever like stuff they want and we'll kind of get to the different dimensions of goal setting at the end but the key point here is that you want to give them a choice because when people make a choice and you all remember from the stages of change change model this is why planning and action are actually like scientifically or psychologically discreet steps they're not the same planning it planning an action is the one that most clients like don't realize are actually cognitively discreet steps so this is all planning phase okay from stages of change model and so this is how you work with someone in the planning phase you give them a menu of options and then what happens when you give them a menu is they're going to gravitate towards the most likely scenarios and sort of set themselves up for the most success okay questions about giving people choices instead of advice oh one question so does this evidently lead to like a solution for that for the client yep yes right okay so like this is gonna end up with a plan like instead of jumping straight from i want to work out to the gym this is going to be like okay you're going to do yoga every morning and then you're going to do push-ups while cueing for a league of legends game while you're waiting for fortnite cue okay like that that's how you develop a plan this is going to be like more attainable for them and we'll get to you know why this for example probably won't work but anyway so the second thing that we're gonna do so this will lead to a plan but it's one of the steps of planning brian so the second step of planning is operationalizing do you guys know what operationalizing a problem is you all heard that term before like breaking it down yep breaking it down what does that do for us makes things concrete yep how does that help well now they're not abstract and you can actually do them because something abstract is essentially like insurmountable okay very good right so you can't take abstract action i can't get into shape it isn't possible welcome forrest by the way bro how you been surviving and thriving awesome dude good to see you um what else how else would y'all describe operationalizing it kind of increases the amount of achievable steps there are in absolutely achievable steps okay so we have this part of our brain called the frontal lobe all right and the frontal lobe is good at operationalizing so i don't know if you guys kind of know this but you know like when some kids uh apply to college their parents help them manage the application process y'all familiar with that so let me ask you something why does the kid need the parent to help them with the application process and how is it that the parent is able to help them with the application process to begin with right why can't the kid just do it on their own just apply to college easy well isn't it because like two things like one and never applied to college in two i guess they don't understand like the actual process of like falling through that decision yeah right so so it's really interesting because like maybe the parents have applied but not always and then the second thing is that like the parents may have some ability to like understand the process so we have this part of our brain called the frontal lobe and the frontal lobe is responsible for executive function and what executive function means is the ability to plan and execute tasks so it's like a literally this ability to operationalize so if i look at you know so this is kind of my favorite example but it applies to college and stuff too so if i tell by a two-year-old to clean her room she can't do that i can tell her i can ask her to put her books away so she can do that but she can't clean her room because cleaning her room is an abstract process and based on what her frontal lobe is capable of i have to break as an adult i have to break it down into books toys and pencils right and even if you look at the the brain of a one-year-old they can't even put away the pencils but i can tell them hey here's a pencil can you go put it in the box so like putting things in boxes right so if we look at what's the difference between an adult and a kid maybe it's experience but it may not even be experience it's just that an adult has a fully developed frontal lobe so they can take this abstract process of applying to college and like divide it into chunks and give their kid like a chunk that they can manage and so if we talk about you know like a six-year-old or a ten-year-old a ten-year-old can clean their room right and even like theoretically because i imagine we have a lot of people myself included who don't have clean rooms um so even sometimes adults can't clean rooms but so this is the process of executive function so one of the ways that you can help people succeed is like if i tell a two-year-old to clean their room they're gonna fail like they're destined to failure so as a coach you can help someone by operationalizing for them operationalizing is a very cognitively intensive task that once again is like you know difficult for people to do they may think they can do it they may beat themselves up for you know because they should be able to do it but they may actually be hard it may be hard to do and this is something that's also a little bit theoretical i don't know there's actually good science behind this but in my experience gamers especially are very bad at operationalizing problems so if you look at video games all of the operationalizing has been done for you right there's part one of the main quest part two of the main quests part three the main quest part for the main quest part five of the main quest and then there's the final boss so gamers excel a lot they actually do really well with something that i call close-ended problem solving which is when they're given a discrete task and all of the tools necessary okay so if i like tell a gamer hey i want you to build a car out of tape they'll actually be able to do that like you give them a task with the goal very clear and all of the pieces laid out it's basically like they're good at assembling legos right they're awesome at legos because you could tell them hey i want you to build you know a tree with legos they can do that um maybe even superior to the the average population by the way what they're bad at is open-ended problem-solving which is things like getting into college right because what like what are the pieces of that like i don't really know like who where do i apply to i don't really know do i apply nationally internationally like you know you know like i i don't know i don't know like where to start with that so as a coach one of the key things that you can help them do is convert an open-ended problems uh problem into a closed-ended problem you want to act as their frontal lobe and break an abstract task into achievable steps right and so this is we kind of did this right here do you all see that this is actually operationalizing for them okay so you're gonna do yoga every morning notice how i defined am over here so how did i get that it's because i'm gonna ask another question when could you do yoga right so this is how we're going to operationalize and break the task apart so this week what you're going to do you're not going to find a job this week what you're going to do is we may even say something like make your resume but that's even too abstract this week what you're going to do is google three different resume templates take a look at them and decide which one you want to use then what you're going gonna do is you're gonna replace the demographic information at the top so you're gonna replace the john smith at the top with like your actual name and your address and then what you're gonna do is grab a piece of paper and write down all of the things that you think could belong on the resume that's your task for the week right it's like two or three tasks but they're like super simple if you really think about it takes like less than half an hour and then next week they've already started adding they're editing their resume at least the top part is done the next week it's going to be translating what they put on their piece of paper onto the resume and once you do that then we're going to look at your resume together and we're going to try to figure out okay how can we make this sound good so you're going to take one task on your resume and you're gonna try to like sell it in some way so for example if you were president of your esports gaming association in college right like how can we buff that up some so you can state that and then you can say i increased membership over 300 percent like over the course of one year you know organized a 50 000 charity tournament and organized 200 students into like organized an event that involved sponsors 200 students and all that kind of stuff so you're demonstrating on your resume like president of esports or what does that mean like is that a thing but when you start like listing things out that like an employer will be like oh wow so this person can like get stuff done this is actually pretty cool they organized an event okay so you may have to help them a little bit with their and and that may be a little bit tricky in terms of resume building but do you all see how the key thing is breaking apart the pieces of like making a resume is that clear so you want to operationalize out their task as best as possible when you do that the chances of them being able to succeed will be a lot better key other things you know so when we talk about achievable steps that also you know helps us uh where is it where's positive reinforcement there it is right so we get a plus there and we get a plus there as you kind of do these things okay so we're going to help them with their frontal lobes the cool thing is as you engage in this process with them over time you're engaging in type 2 reasoning which will over time actually become type one reasoning okay so then they'll actually get automatic at doing this kind of stuff they'll be able to break apart tasks for themselves so the first time i teach my kid how to clean up their room i have to like direct them right but as they practice their brain is able to operationalize that task and i could even take them to a house they've never been to and i could say clean up this room and they could do it make sense so that's the second thing that we're going to kind of focus on our second principle that we can leverage so now we're going to move on to number three which is dunning-kruger so dunning-kruger graph has um you know so this is unconscious this is competence right so i i may be miss attributing this so generally speaking we start up here where we're unconsciously incompetent and at the end we end up this may not be done in kruger actually i think it relates to don and kruger but and up here we sort of end up with unconscious competence i'm a natural right and if we think about playing a video game like you know there are times where you suck and you intentionally try to get better and your brain is like doing the cognitive work so and then over time you know so this is conscious incompetence and then we move over here to conscious competence right that's what what this is over here and then eventually we move up to unconscious competence and then it becomes easy so we're natural over here over here we're oblivious so one of the key things this is a little bit more anecdotal or based on my own experience but i think our goal so a lot of people when they think about achieving their goals what they want to do is they want to go from here to here right this is where you start i suck i don't know how to work out this is me working out every day i think our job as a coach is not actually to move along this axis our job as a coach is to push people down here what we want them to do is to start thinking about it right so what we really want to emphasize is like conscious thought process we want to emphasize type 2 reasoning we want to emphasize being methodical we want to emphasize being critical of your process we want to emphasize problem solving in a very organized and conscious way this is being thoughtful being mindful being present all that crap so one of the key things that that this process does right is we ask people these like different kinds of questions and things like that is we're making the process of goal setting become competent conscious so you don't know how to set a good goal that's fine even after asking you a few questions you're going to be down here you're still not going to know how to set a good goal right you may come up with push-ups between while cueing but who the does push-ups while queuing no one come on that's ridiculous right the point though is not that these are gonna succeed we'll get there in a second when it comes troubleshooting goals and iteration and all that kind of stuff the point of doing this exercise is that people are going to be thinking about it in a critical and calculating way that's ultimately what leads to success in goal setting is bringing things from the unconscious to the conscious and now that we're aware of the problem right because remember that most of our problems are lying dormant they're invisible we can't detect them and then we can't deal with them you all know this through coaching right this is what the emotional catharsis is you all have done this with all of your clients where you've helped them understand something in a way that they didn't understand anymore and that understanding proceeds change so we know this you guys already know how to do this process i suspect just keep doing what you're doing and once it's conscious then we can start acting on it right you don't go from here to here you don't go from here to here you go from here to here then you start doing being successful but being successful involves being conscious first then you become successful and then it becomes easy then you get to the person who's in shape and you ask them how hard is it for you to work out and they say it's not that hard it's natural for me and this is where everyone wants to go but since all of our clients want to go from here to here they want to actually ignore where the money happens this is where change happens change happens down here not up here and as long as they keep on doing this they're doomed to failure so your job as a coach is to help them become conscious even if they fail be conscious be conscious of your failure because that's what's going to help you succeed questions about that okay now we're going to move on to number three on our big topics which is troubleshooting goal setting okay so what are the problems with the goals this open-ended question kind of read my mind question what are the problems with the goals that our clients set what are the different kinds of challenges they have with goal setting let's even don't even think about what they set what are the what are the problems that what when you when clients come in what are their what are their challenges around like setting goals or you know just okay chats helping expectations oh what does that mean expectations oh they have like like a higher like expected outcome based on their actions okay so very good so they're gonna have overly ambitious goals what else maybe goals that don't really align with their values very good misdirected goals what else the last one is remarkably common and also really easy to miss because i may be set is setting it up to fail they lack goals right we see this too where someone comes in and they're like i don't even know where to start there's no point anymore right so we still have to think about that person in terms of goal setting like we owe it to that person to help them find an appropriate goal okay so here's the problem that we run into with goals is that some people lack goals to begin with and they don't know where to start how should we deal with the person who lacks goals what do you all think maybe kind of trying to understand them a little bit more try and get a feel for like what they want to do absolutely right so like this is where the first like we just need to understand them so before we figure out where we want to go let's like triangulate our gps and figure out where we are right so where are we what's going on in your life right so and this is you all know how to do this i'm pretty confident right so they don't they feel overwhelmed they feel directionless they feel hopeless so it's like all these questions about okay like why do you feel hopeless like where does the hopelessness come from you know why don't you have like you know you don't ask why questions but um you know what makes it hard for you to pick a direction to go and you're gonna uncover all kinds of crap like oh there's no point in trying okay like when did you give up hope like when did you learn how to give up hope you guys know all this stuff right pretty familiar we good okay so if they lack goals it's going to be like exploratory work it's not about directing them anywhere it's about exploration so for clients who have overly ambitious goals what are we going to do for them start with the 25 rule sure so 25 rule is good what else why are their goals overly ambitious um i think we would try to make them like let them figure out that their goal is actually ambitious yep good so increase in sight into overly ambitious goals good i'm pretty confident that you guys are able to do that as well but why are their goals ambitious eli you figured this out some time ago because yeah they're comparing themselves to others and it's not it's not enough all that crap right so this is where enter all of the things that you guys are already experts in shoulds not enough comparison ahamkar all this crap comes in so the key thing here is you've got to deconstruct the idea of should right and i think you guys know how to do this because what does that mean like or enough because like that's not a thing enough is not a thing right and you can make the argument that it is a thing you can say okay i did not get a score high enough to pass the class dr k clearly that's the thing i didn't pass the class okay fair enough so like enough can absolutely be a thing there's a reason why there's a word for it but i would say that most of the times whether some outcome is enough or not enough because enough is an outcome orientation whether you do something that is enough or not enough is completely or whether it's enough or not enough is completely independent of what you do does that make sense so i can study every day or i can study as much as i can and maybe that'll be not enough but do i want this to determine what how i take action in the present or do i want to focus on this and then just hope that this happens so the problem with the idea of not enough is that as people are like thinking about not enough it actually paralyzes them from taking action and destroys their motivation so you really have to deconstruct the idea of like enough and should and all this kind of crap through all of these things which i know you all can do so you kind of do that if they have overly ambitious goals right and then on a more practical level so this is like on a philosophical level what you need to do as a coach oh no i missed an oh and on a practical level you can help them set more ambitious goals and be prepared for that resistance right and so you like as soon as you try to use the 25 rule on them they're gonna say it's not enough but you're gonna be ready for them because you know all this stuff and then you're gonna be like let's talk about that right you're gonna work through all this crap then they're gonna set an appropriate goal and then they're more likely to achieve it we good another key point here is that sometimes people confuse goals with wish lists i don't know if you all have ever done this yourselves or you've heard someone else or where like you start to set a goal for yourself and then you start tacking more on it's like i should work out every day and i should eat healthy and i should have a smoothie every morning and then like goals like quickly like spiral into wishlists and then it's like everything when a goal turns into a wish list you're destroying your frontal lobe's ability to do any of it it becomes overwhelming it's too many goals so you're going to help them kind of scale back okay so number three the misdirected goal so this is the hardest thing about coaching is that sometimes clients come in and they have the wrong goals and you may say dr k that's ridiculous how can a client have a wrong goal isn't it for them to determine aren't they the ones to decide incorrect sometimes our clients are stupid let me give you an example so i had a client that came in one day and said dr k my boat is sinking i need a bigger bucket i need a bigger bucket this bucket is not big enough to get all the water out of my boat can you give me a bigger bucket and what they need to do is plug the holes so like this is where type one reasoning comes in again right because it's clear because the person's logical if they've got a bigger bucket they can bail water faster and they'll you know like that's what that'll fix it right but their goal is coming from like an incorrect understanding of the problem and this is where you can roll in a bunch of stuff that we've talked about like jung's shadow right we can talk about things like alexithymia you know like psychological defense mechanisms like suppression we can talk about ahamkar blind spots right because the ahamkar won't let them see where the real problem is oh yeah like if i'm a narcissist the problem is that everyone else is like very insensitive to me people need to be more insensitive to me you know it's like everyone around me is an everyone around me needs to be nicer it's just like i need a bigger bucket no the problem is something else like so your job as a coach is to help people access all this crap cognitive biases and i know you've done it i know all of y'all have done it where a client will come in and will be like you know we'll say one thing and then you're like hey wait a second what you're saying actually doesn't make any sense you point out the discrepancy you point out the cognitive bias you point out the ambivalence right so oh i just need to start drinking after 5 p.m i just need to not drink early well what how do you get to that conclusion well because when i drink after 5 pm everything is fine when i start early it's a problem whereas like the real problem is like maybe you've got a problem with alcohol you should be drinking at all so there are all kinds of things that can result in a misdirected goal so this is once again where y'all you know i'm pretty sure you guys know how to deal with this right do you all feel comfortable with like people who have misdirected goals right so and this is where building a therapeutic alliance is really good this is also where like remember as a coach you're not like you're not there to just agree with whatever they say you're there to challenge them so with clients who have misdirected goals like it's a good place to challenge them once you have an alliance and you can say hey i'm wondering you know if maybe there's a different way to think about how to fix this problem once again recruit type 2 reasoning to help them think about you know how they could deal with this problem otherwise like what's a creative solution to your problem because their solutions are not individualized they're not based on their own creativity they're based on what someone on the internet what worked for someone on the internet i watched this person who did this on the internet this is what worked for them so that's what i'm gonna do maybe you have a different problem okay questions about troubleshooting goals or troubleshooting goal setting i should say okay so um now we're going to talk about one other thing in terms of uh kind of how to iterate so we're going to talk about iteration for a second so our approach for goal setting and motivation at healthy gamer is to not achieve your goals it's to iterate success is not our target learning is our target so i don't know that we can succeed but we can certainly try to learn so what we're going to do is we're we're going to give you guys a robust framework for this but you know expect your clients to succeed some and fail some and then what we're gonna do is like do kind of like a post-mortem analysis of like okay why did you fail what got in the way things like that the key thing that i want to share with you all is a really fascinating uh other i guess scientific principle for lack of a better term actually comes from public health is something called positive deviance so often times when our clients have goals and they fall short of their goals their emphasis is on the failure and what they could do better but the interesting thing is that the recipe to success is not necessarily and what they could do better it's actually in the times that they already succeeded so this is a quick story that i'll share with y'all so these were the people who sort of discovered positive deviance there were a group of uh doctors from france in the us that were tasked by the world health organization or someone like that to fix malnutrition in rural vietnam really fascinating story you guys can check out the book positive deviants um so what they did is they went to vietnam and they sort of made all these arrangements and the vietnamese government said like okay our people are malnourished and so these folks were like okay do you all have food that we can give them and the vietnamese government was like yes because the problem to malnourishment is food aid right like if you're in a developing country and people don't have food to eat gg like you just need food just get food easy bro so then they show up and it turns out that there's been some kind of communication problem or maybe corruption and the food aid is no longer there and they've like set they've taken sabbaticals and they're like traveling to vietnam they're going to be there for like six months but now they don't have any of the resources that they were supposed to have to fix this food aid problem and so the vietnamese government was like or whatever the health department or whatever was like we can give you a van lodging and a translator can you please help us with this problem can you please help our population become less malnourished without any food and so these people are like sure why not and so the malnour like the rate of malnutrition amongst like pediatric or amongst kids because it was focused on children was something like 50 and so the researchers had this really interesting idea which is like you know there are a thousand people in in let's say this part of rural vietnam and half of them are malnourished that's terrible but why aren't the other half malnourished like it's kind of interesting because there's actually a success there's like some people are not malnourishing like what's up with that and so what they sort of discovered was like this principle of positive deviance which is that if you're trying to figure out how to fix a problem don't focus on the people who are unsuccessful or don't focus on your attempts that are failures focus on your attempts that are successes and by emphasis by exploring why you were successful then and duplicating that you will actually fix the problem of failure in and of itself as it turns out for those of you who are curious what they discovered is that most of the people are malnourished because they're rice farmers and so their primary staple of their diet is rice so they get enough calories but they just don't get enough like protein and micronutrients and stuff like that and so what they discovered is that some families when they're out in the rice fields there are different kinds of like things that are growing in the rice fields so you'll get like small like clams and shrimps and things like that and that some people would literally like have an apron and any time they saw like some tiny bit of fish like like a small fish or a clam or like a shrimp or like some kind of you know water organism crustacean they would scoop it up and stick it in their apron they also found that that this same group of people that there were certain weeds that would grow in the rice fields that are actually very nutritious but are considered like poor people's food so in the in the southern united states for example like if you look at it historically like collard greens were foods that like slaves would would eat because they were considered less desirable so like you know the the slave the plantation owners would eat like the desirable vegetables and then the slaves would eat the collard greens collard greens are delicious by the way and so if you look at recipes for collard greens they all involve like you know like off cuts of pork and things like that so you add like a little bit of bacon and like other like types of meat that you can't it's hard to eat but if you add it to collard greens makes it delicious so um what they sort of discovered is that there's kind of this social stigma against eating this like nutritious vegetable and so that's the way in which like half of the population was not malnourished while the other half of the population was and so by sort of discovering that success and applying it to the other people by teaching the people oh hey you should scoop up shrimp too they also did a couple of other interventions like um they had like they set up like a meal plan where like one family would cook every day for like five or six different people so they kind of got together and shared their cooking duties said like one pot of stew that would serve five families and that worked really well too so discovered a couple of other things but essentially the the the idea behind positive deviance is when you're working with a client our tendency you know if they let's say they you know did yoga for three days and then like failed for four days and their target was yoga every day qd means daily medical abbreviation okay so then what you what we want to do is we can say oh why did you feel like what happened what got in the way but i equally important is asking them you know why did you succeed what were the circumstances for the first three days that allowed you to succeed and what changed on day four so oftentimes i've noticed this bias in how people solve problems is that everyone focuses on the negative in problem solving right if you kind of think about it i do this kind of stuff in all dimensions whether it's investment banking working with traders working with physicians around like like you know uh bad outcomes with patient care even in esports because what everyone focuses on on esports is the games that they lost not the games that they win do you ever watch replays of the games that you crush the opponent not usually right usually if you want to learn we focus on your mistakes um so recruit positive devious deviants and uh focus on how your clients are able to succeed and duplicate that process to troubleshoot goals questions okay last one i recognize i'm out of time dimensions of goals so this we're gonna run through very quickly there'll be a lot more um information in the manual okay so when we think about a goal much like our original um diagram there's a lot of value to be gained out of something like motivation and actually breaking apart motivation into multiple things because there isn't like one motivation lever but when we break it apart into different things we can like adjust the levers in different ways so if we think about even something like language so the more letters we have the more we're able to like compose different words right so increasing the resolution on which we can act increasing the precision at which we can make changes will lead to better outcomes so there's also like a balancing influence and that you know at some point we decided that a collection of letters should make a word instead of you know having one unique word i mean one unique symbol for each word which is what hieroglyphics is which is also like if you look at um you know chinese characters or kanji if you look at emojis right so there's like an interesting balance between like what's the resolution of like letters versus symbols and what we can see is if you look at something like emojis you can communicate things very effectively by like increasing the precision as we expand the number of emojis at our disposal we become more efficient communicators so what we're going to do is expand the precision with which we look at a goal and so here are the dimensions that i would encourage all to think about with a client and work on okay so the first is the target so this is what we kind of think of traditionally is the goal like become an olympic gold medalist right so what are the ways in which we can adjust the target so the goal here is that each of these dimensions can be explored and adjusted to help us attain success okay so should we change our target so this is where the 25 rule comes in okay second thing is what are the actions so this is also where like operationalizing comes in because oftentimes we set goals that are not actually actions so to explicitly take a goal a target and reduce it to actions we'll we'll operationalize will make things easier abstract to concrete all that good stuff so this is all uh this is all stuff that hopefully all will understand it's just an organized framework that y'all can use with a client okay so what are the actions that we can take third dimension is exploring examples of success and failure right so very practically what you can do with a client is you can ask them you know once they if they set a goal for themselves and they come in next week and they say i succeeded i did it for the first three days and then i forgot and then i didn't do it again so we can explore that okay how do you feel about that you know what what do you what do you understand about what got in the way what made it hard for you to to do it the last four days uh it's also kind of bizarre because it seems like you were crushing it for 72 hours how do you understand that right so that's positive humans we just talked about that but still a part of our framework you can you can explore examples of success and failure and the key things is what are the key what are the key takeaways from these successes and failures that once you make these key takeaways conscious you have increased your clients ability to like engage in them again right so we're going to dunny krueger we're going to move along to dunn the dunning-kruger uh curve by asking this question so um this is also an opportunity to explore resistance right so like when you fail like there may be like resistance there could be and then once again emotions ego etc a good question here is what gets in the way so you don't want to ask the question why did you fail you want to ask the question you know it seems like you were able to do yoga the first three days what got in the way the fourth day and so what even if you think about that question what you're instead of them saying oh i'm a failure right like instead of letting them retreat to their identity and it was doomed to fail and all this kind of stuff i am dot dot dot you're raising awareness about an external factor that could be influencing them which then they can control so for example what you may discover is i wanted to do yoga but i actually like overslept because i stayed up way too late and that's really interesting right because then you've sort of discovered oh the problem isn't boosting your willpower the problem is if you want to do yoga consistently you need to fix your sleep schedule so it could be an issue of a misdirected goal dimension number four um okay so i had actually split these uh in my in the framework i'd actually split these into two different things so examples of success in exploring failure and then going down the route of resistance okay so that's number four okay so there are some things here that we're going to include for the sake of completeness which is not really within the scope of coaching so then if we also think about it there are physiologic factors right so people could have circadian rhythm disorders they could have vitamin d deficiency they could have um they could be hypothyroid they could have testosterone deficiency they may be vitamin b deficient there are all kinds of physiologic factors they may be in a high a high inflammatory state which makes people like feel kind of sluggish and makes it hard to work there's a lot of physiology that goes into motivation a little bit outside of the scope of coaching but i just include it here for completeness this is also where we can think about things like sleep and diet and exercise as being physiologic factors psychological stressors so when you have a goal i know it's this is going to sound really simple but i don't think that people really appreciate this it's everyone sort of intellectually understands it but they don't really understand it on an implicit level and they're not consciously aware of it that you know if you're overwhelmed or stressed or had a bad interaction at work that's going to impact your ram right so like we all have a limited amount of ram working memory we all have like limited amounts of like energy in our frontal lobe we have limited amounts of willpower and what you'll see time and time again is like you know when people get sober for example oftentimes there's a psychological stressor like their ex started texting them again which sort of precipitates the relapse so there are all kinds of psychological stresses that can contribute to difficulty in achieving your goals okay so you can ask them you know what's been stressful for you over the last week um when when things get stressful how do you think that will affect your ability to meet your goals because generally speaking what people the conclusion they tend to come to is oh i suck at this if i was better if i could manage stress better then i would succeed so the failure is mine but by sort of pointing out explicitly that their psychological stressors which will make their life hard you allow them to do things like forgive themselves demonstrate self-compassion you also give them axes so if i think the problem is that i'm a failure and that i can't handle stress well that's not actionable whereas if you reframe the problem you take that misdirected goal and you help people recognize that you're human and that if you get stressed it's hard to work out you're going to stress eat more maybe the solution is not to be increase your willpower because i don't know how to do that but maybe the solution is to set better boundaries with people who create stress in your life and that if you really want to work out every day the first step is to actually set boundaries with people who are very stressful so psychological stresses next thing is social influences i kind of bled into this with the last one but i think it's actually very important to explicitly acknowledge what the social influences towards your goal setting are who are the people that you hang out with so there's a there's an entire video about this in dr k's guide on sangha which is in the meditation path and the path of accomplishment so you know like if you you know what do your roommates inspire you to do you know how do your parents um affect your motivation and there's some interesting like revelations here which not a lot of people realize because like parents think they're being supportive right they'll go to their kin they'll say oh my god you have so much potential like you can do anything you're so smart oh my god you're so smart you're so brilliant you have so much potential how do you think that affects a kid's motivation makes it worse absolutely right the parent thinks that they're helping they're actually making things worse oh my god you're such a wonderful boy i don't know why you can't find a girlfriend you're so handsome and you're so wonderful and you're so sweet you're such a catch i don't know what why the girls just don't like you like i don't understand what's going on well first of all mom i'm gay you know so that's part of it um anyway so like it's kind of interesting but i think once again the goal is to consciously make people aware so like you know you have your friends right and so like but what are your friends actually motivate you to do like when you spend more time with your friends what how do your behaviors evolve when you hang out with your friends do you play more video games eat healthy food like what happens what's the influence explicitly understand what's the influence of different people in your life and even in cases of like romantic partners right like so i this is a really surprisingly common example so sometimes you'll have a married couple and one member of the married couple is motivated to change their diet and then they start eating healthy and what does the other member of the married couple do they start eating healthy too you would hope so if only that were the case can anyone imagine the opposite if you're resentful absolutely right so sometimes steve sometimes you're correct i tend to be kind of pessimistic so i see the dark side of things and what tends to happen is the other partner feels ashamed right because it's like i still want to eat my doughnut and there you are eating oatmeal it's like i just want a doughnut and then i feel bad about myself because you're sitting there eating oatmeal and i'm sitting here eating a doughnut i feel like an idiot and then i resent you and then i start to sabotage you and then i start to get in the way happens all the time right and you may see this kind of thing like even within your like online friends right i love them but sometimes they're like oh no man like play one more don't quit play one more like we're gonna crush them like let's do it bro don't don't quit don't go to sleep yet i'm not going to sleep yet what's wrong with you putting together your life screw that let's play so social influences right thinking about so a couple of explicit questions here who holds you back who pulls you forward and there are a couple of other revelations to be had here as well so the first is that sometimes the people that make you feel bad are actually the ones that pull you forward i certainly had this experience at harvard where i felt like holy crap these people are amazing and every time i talk to them i'm like you did what you have how many publications that's insane you have a picture with barack obama because you served in the health department and helped him pass the affordable care act like that's crazy bro right like that's what you wind up with and you may feel some amount of like resistance to hanging out with those people but helping your clients understand who are the people in their lives that pull them forward and what's the resistance to hanging out with them can actually be very helpful next thing is environmental influences okay and by environmental influences this one's pretty straightforward but it's it's things like access to cell phone so like where is your cell phone when you're trying to work is it in your pocket is it easily accessible is it locked you know what's the status of your notifications when do you get distracted how do you get distracted where do you study is it the library is it at home what are the environmental influences that are going to lead to success once again going back to the working out example right so we kind of asked people like gym or home that's key it's crucial so a lot of these dimensions are baked into everything that you guys are already doing which is by the way part of the reason that you all have the outcomes that you do despite never having had this training because it's all baked in you're already doing it but by giving you this framework hopefully it'll help you be a little bit more focused and increase the value that you bring to your clients so right now after spending eight weeks with one of y'all lovely people our clients feel 25 more in control of their lives that's awesome 25 control in eight weeks is like really amazing no one ever feels 100 right it's just not going to happen there's some issues with the data so 25 is actually objectively very good and so as we sort of teach you the these kinds of things my hope is that we'll be able to bump you all from like 25 to 30 percent um and then the last thing this is kind of weird this isn't really so much for the average client but matters more in terms of like performance coaching and things like that is i like to think about stakeholders so like what are the different stakeholders for the goal that you're trying to achieve um and this is kind of important because this is kind of goes back to the married couple example but sometimes for the goals that you have they're actually like other people who don't want those goals right so if you're trying to get promoted for example that's a great example of like doing this like we're doing a stakeholder analysis is very helpful to help your clients recognize that there are things outside of them that are going to be influencing them and actually consciously thinking about those things can help you adapt your goal and adapt your actions to accommodate for those stakeholders this is definitely something that we'll talk more about so as we sort of um we're probably going to do like a relaunch of performance coaching at some point we'll talk a lot more about this but it's just i'm kind of including it here for the sake of completeness okay so i've run way over time i apologize i wanted to go fast

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 23,039

Rating: 4.9771752 out of 5

Keywords: doctor k, dr k coaching workshop, dr k motivation, dr k motivation and goals, dr kanojia, dr.k, drk, healthy gamer gg, healthygamergg, mental health, motivation and goals dr k, psychiatrist, twitch

Id: RTwk_iHOZv0

Length: 79min 19sec (4759 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021