The goals you set say more about your beliefs than your ambition

Every January (and, let's be honest, most Mondays), people set goals. Lose weight. Get the promotion. Finally deal with the anxiety that's been in the driver’s seat for years. Some of these goals get chased down with real momentum. Others lose their momentum by February, and the person who set them decides - not for the first time - that they're ‘just not the disciplined type.’

But guess what? How you set a goal, and what happens when it gets hard, has very little to do with discipline. It has almost everything to do with what you believe about how much power you actually have over your own life.

THE BELIEF HIDING UNDERNEATH EVERY GOAL

Psychologists call this your locus of control — essentially, whether you believe the outcomes in your life are driven mostly by you (an internal locus of control) or mostly by things outside you: luck, other people, circumstances, "just the way I am" (an external locus of control).

In The Thrive Programme, we focus on your Sense of Power & Control over Experiences (SPACE). While very similar to locus of control, SPACE also considers your beliefs about your coping skills.

Most people never examine this belief directly. It sits underneath everything, shaping the goals they're willing to set and the story they tell themselves when things don't go to plan.

Someone with a strong internal locus of control sets a goal and treats a setback as information: that approach didn't work, what else could I try? Someone with a more external locus of control sets the same goal, hits the same setback, and hears a very different, very familiar voice: see, I knew I couldn't do this.

Same goal. Same setback. Completely different beliefs doing the interpreting.

TWO KINDS OF GOALS, TWO KINDS OF BELIEVERS

This shows up in the actual type of goal people are drawn to.

Goals built on proving something. These sound ambitious, but they're often driven by a need to demonstrate worth rather than a genuine desire to grow i.e. "I need to get this right so people see I'm capable," or "I have to succeed so I don't feel like a failure." The goal becomes a test, and any struggle along the way feels like evidence against you, rather than part of the process.

Goals built on developing something. These are goals oriented around getting better at something, regardless of how messy the middle looks i.e. "I want to get more comfortable speaking up in meetings," or "I'm working on staying calmer when things don't go to plan." A setback here isn't a verdict. It's just data.

This distinction maps closely onto Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck's decades of research into what she calls fixed and growth mindsets. Her work which is most widely known through her book Mindset, found that people who believe abilities and traits are fixed (you either have it or you don't) respond to difficulty very differently to people who believe abilities can be developed with effort and the right strategy. The fixed-mindset group tends to avoid challenge, because failure threatens their sense of who they are. The growth-mindset group tends to seek challenge out, because failure is just where learning happens.

Sound familiar? It should because it's locus of control essentially! Believing you have some real control over your own development is what makes a growth mindset possible in the first place. If you believe your abilities, your anxiety, your confidence, or your health are just fixed features of who you are i.e. handed to you, unchangeable then there's no point setting a developmental goal at all. Why train for a race you've already decided you can't finish?

WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN THE GOAL ITSELF

This is really important. Before you can meaningfully change a habit, a fear, or a pattern, the belief underneath it needs to be examined. If you go into a goal convinced that you don't have much say over the outcome, you'll unconsciously set it up to confirm that belief.

None of this is a character flaw, and it's very rarely a discipline problem. It's usually just a belief that's never been questioned, because most of us were never taught that we could question it. Nobody sits us down and says, "by the way, your sense about how much power you have over your own life is a belief, it’s not a fact and it can be changed."

And it can be changed. So when you set your next goal, ask yourself ‘how powerful do I feel in achieving this goal?’

A QUICK WAY TO CHECK YOUR UNDERLYING BELIEF

Next time you set a goal - even a small one - notice the sentence that follows it in your head. Is it something like "if this doesn't work out, it's because I didn't have what it takes," or is it more like "if this doesn't work out, I'll have learned something about what to try next"?

That one sentence tells you more about whether you'll actually get there than the goal itself ever will.