I must have read Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s classic tale to my children a hundred times when they were little and yet they never seemed to tire of it: ‘We’re going on a bear hunt ... We’re going to catch a big one ...’. If ever there was a celebration of the motivational power of a clear-cut objective this story is it. No matter how big the obstacles they encounter, the fictional family’s clarity of purpose drives them relentlessly forwards towards the fulfilment of their quest. Can’t go over it? Can’t go under it? No matter: they’ll just go through it. Until, that is, they encounter the bear they have been searching for. Suddenly, catching the bear no longer seems quite as desirable as they had formerly imagined; the story ends with the family dashing pell-mell for the safety of home, pursued by one very angry animal.

It is now widely accepted that setting goals is essential if we are to achieve anything in almost any field of activity. Self-help books invariably tell us that our aims have to be specific, and our objectives broken down into a series of manageable and measurable sub-goals. Psychologically there are various problems with this approach as we shall see, but Rosen and Oxenbury’s tale highlights one of the most overlooked issues: goal setting is only helpful if the goals that we have set ourselves are actually the right ones in the first place.

Underlying most of our goal-setting activities is the natural belief that achieving those goals will in some way make us happier. Regrettably, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, we are often very poor at knowing what we want or, to be more precise, predicting accurately the true value of the things we think we want. We may secretly anticipate that the new house we have set our heart on will make us feel great once we have the keys in our hand. Fired up by this vision of our future pleasure, we set the appropriate financial targets, make the necessary sacrifices and watch with excitement as our overtime hours bring the cherished goal ever closer to fruition. Unfortunately, all the hard evidence of several decades of research suggests that your new purchase (a) is highly unlikely to make you as happy as you think it will and (b) any pleasure that may come as a result will be more short-lived than you had imagined. This doesn’t just apply to material goals, alas, but all manner of things that we think will improve our quality of life. The truth is that when we make these judgments about what will make us happy we get it wrong all the time.

If it’s any consolation, our feebleness at effective forecasting can sometimes work in our favour when it comes to the impact of significant negative events. Gilbert believes that when the big disasters occur – say we tragically lose a spouse or find ourselves unemployed – we often cope better than we had anticipated because we steel ourselves to cope with the crisis and our defences are activated. However, we are left relatively undefended against chronic or petty insults to our well-being, with the net effect that these can actually have a more detrimental cumulative effect on us than life’s bigger challenges. The old adage that we ‘shouldn’t sweat the small stuff’ may actually be rather misguided. It may be exactly the small stuff that we should be paying most attention to.

If Gilbert’s work tells us we should be careful what we wish for, we also need to make sure our goals are realistic ones. Otherwise the very targets that are supposed to be motivating end up de-motivating us. So many self-help writers and coaches encourage us to ‘reach for the stars’ but this may be bad advice unless we are already on a roll.

Research demonstrates that while so-called ‘stretch goals’ may be stimulating and motivating for people who have already enjoyed the reinforcement of recent successes, they can be crushing and disheartening for those with a weaker track record of accomplishment. In other words, reaching for the stars only makes any kind of sense if the stars lie within your reach already. You also need to have available resources for such goals to be useful to you. If you have used everything you’ve got to get where you are or are battling to maintain the status quo then a stretch goal will simply stretch you to breaking point and ping you back towards burnout. Please note that people apparently only achieve stretch goals about ten per cent of the time, and that successively failing to achieve goals creates a downward spiral in which performance becomes ever more impaired as motivation and confidence declines. Most of us should probably aim lower and build from there.

There are recent neurological studies that back this up. The brain, it turns out, is quite a conservative and vulnerable organ, primed to resist any activity that requires any radical reformulation of its patterns of activity. Push too far and your higher centres will shut off. Your grey matter will rebel by seeking to pull you back towards the comfort of the familiar. This process is analogous to what happens in muscles that are overstretched. The myotatic or ‘stretch’ reflex automatically causes muscle fibres to contract and resist the process of stretching, which is why, as any fitness coach will tell you, effective physical stretching has to be done gently and in incremental stages.

Another problem with our goals is that they can also unhelpfully narrow our attention as all our resources are funnelled towards our target objectives. Under such circumstances we can very easily lose sight of the bigger picture and our lives can get hopelessly out of balance. Writing this I am reminded of one of my clients who worked as a bodyguard to A-list celebrities. He was explaining how when involved in a fight every ounce of his attention is concentrated on removing the obstacle (in this case his opponent) from in front of him. This ability to produce a laser-sharp, focused beam of aggression has proved an invaluable and highly effective technique for him in his work. There is absolutely no question in his mind that the object in front of him will yield and, invariably, it does. He’s a burly chap. However, there is a downside, he tells me. In this state of pure focus on what lies in front of him, he is actually quite vulnerable. There are no spare attentional resources to devote to what might be going on behind him. For this reason, he tells me, bodyguards often have to have ‘wing men’ who, quite literally, watch their backs.

Similarly, some of you may have encountered the well-known selective attention task devised by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. If you don’t know this one already then do take a moment to log on to YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo before you read any further.

By introducing a simple goal of counting how many times the players in white shirts pass a basketball between them, most observers watching the video completely fail to notice the presence of someone dressed in a gorilla suit walking in plain sight across the field of view. When we create goals for ourselves we stop attending to supposedly ‘irrelevant’ information that may not actually be irrelevant at all. In an article entitled ‘Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Effects of Over-prescribing Goal-Setting’, the authors point out that losing touch with the context can encourage risky and unethical behaviour and the neglect of equally important objectives and relationships. The prescriptive nature of goals can also lull us into a kind of mental laziness, even downright stupidity: the goals provide us with a simplified agenda and one in which we no longer have to look to the way different elements of the task interact.

Sometimes goals create a sense of false priority so that people end up making sacrifices that, with the benefit of hindsight, seem hardly worthwhile. How many businesspeople have woken up to find themselves at the top of their organisations but feeling like empty shells, abandoned or ignored by the family and friends whose needs they have repeatedly set aside in order to achieve their ‘dreams’?

Perhaps the most toxic thing about our obsession with goal-setting is the implication that we always have to get somewhere else, become more, do more. Where we find ourselves now, the ethos of goal setting whispers insistently, is never quite enough. By implication, who we are is never quite enough either. And yet all the Positive Psychology research tells us that supposedly high achievers are on the whole no happier with their lives than their lower achieving counterparts. I guess it all comes down to what achievements really count.

Whilst our goals may all too often induce the kind of tunnel vision demonstrated so elegantly in the Simons-Chabris task, by contrast contentment is one of a group of positive emotions that the cognitive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson believes actively expands our field of attention and the range of thoughts and actions that lie open to us. As a relatively stable mental disposition, contentment is not quite the same thing as happiness, which tends to be a transient emotion. However, it certainly seems to be largely independent of achievement. The yogi T. K. V. Desikachar says that contentment (‘santosa’) is ‘the accepting of what has happened ... what we have and what we’ve been gifted with.’ Goal setting, which ultimately is about wanting more rather than being satisfied with the riches we already have, is the enemy of gratitude. Yet happiness researcher Dr Robert Emmons is only one of several scientists to have discovered experimentally that people encouraged to cultivate gratitude were up to 25 per cent happier on average after just ten weeks than people in the control condition. Interestingly, the sorts of things that the ‘gratitude group’ identified as their sources of gratitude were fairly simple and readily available to most of us. Brace yourself for a special Disney moment, but they listed things like ‘sunset through the clouds’, ‘the generosity of friends’ and even just ‘the chance to be alive’. And if this stuff just makes you cringe then you really need to take a leaf out of Emmons’ book: that kind of cynicism won’t keep you warm at night, you know...

Goal setting is a statement that you will only be satisfied when you get what you want. Perhaps we need to be thinking more about how we can escape the trap of our own desires in the first place? This is of course the central idea in many Eastern philosophies including Buddhism and Taoism. We should also acknowledge that the practice of mindfulness, which encourages people to be fully present in the moment without concern for past or future, is also proving highly effective in outcome studies as a treatment for depression in the West and in producing stable improvements in people’s quality of life.

Student Luo Lu, in a doctoral examination of Chinese folk psychology, summarises the Taoist position on happiness in a way that seems diametrically opposed to all our frantic goal-setting strategies. Lu explains:

‘Happiness in Taoism is the personal liberation from all human desires, through following the Natural force, not doing anything, accepting fate calmly, and facing life with a peaceful mind. In so doing, one may reach the ultimate happiness of merging with the universe, termed “tian ren he yi”. Happiness in Taoism, therefore, is not an emotional feeling of joy, rather, it is a cognitive insight and transcendence. Taoists practice a life style of withdrawal, isolation and quietness. The ultimate goal is to achieve anonymity, vanishing into the Nature, transcending the Nature, and merging with the Nature.’

So, ‘vanishing into the Nature’ is the key, is it? Now there’s an item you won’t be finding on many Westerners’ ‘To Do’ lists. Goal setting has a place in our lives: we all need to get things done and occasionally challenge ourselves. However, we also need to be careful that our goals don’t cause us to lose sight of what really matters to us. In all our striving towards happiness and achievement we don’t want to end up developing a mindset that effectively keeps it forever at arm’s length.