Chapter 6

Achieving Goals and Overcoming Adversity

GETTING OUT OF BED IS AN EMOTIONALLY INTELLIGENT ACT

What is it that drives you toward successfully accomplishing your goals? Achieving lofty goals often requires sacrifice; nothing is gained for free, every threshold you try to cross carries a toll. How do you determine when the prize you seek outweighs the cost of attaining it? This is an emotional determination, and it is from your emotional power that you draw energy as you struggle to achieve what is important to you.

Let's check in on our EI classroom, where a discussion is now unfolding that may shed additional insight onto how your emotions factor into your ability to achieve your goals.

A Glimpse into the Classroom: Sacrifice and Reward

“Who here gets up really early in the morning?” we ask the class. Hands go up. “Anna, what time do you get moving in the morning?” She replies that she gets up at 4:30 a.m. “4:30? Ouch!” we respond with a grimace. “You can't tell us that you actually enjoy getting up that early?” She shares that though she's been arising this early for many years and has grown accustomed to it, she wouldn't claim to like it. “So why do you do it? Aren't there mornings when the alarm goes off that you just want to toss it out the window and keep sleeping?” Anna acknowledges that getting out of bed at 4:30 a.m. is tough some days, but then goes on to describe how awakening so early on weekdays allows her to get on the road ahead of the traffic, get to the office before many of her colleagues arrive so she can have some uninterrupted and very productive work time, and, most important, leave work early enough to be home with her kids in the late afternoon and evening. Heads around the room nod as people see themselves in Anna's story. Anna has made the choice to give up something that she'd like to do—sleep in on certain days—in favor of something that is important to her—spend time with her kids while balancing a demanding career. We are each faced with similar choices every day. Although we may entertain the notion of sleeping in, and would certainly enjoy doing so, we get out of bed each day to get busy on those things that are important to us.

Think of something you once desired and eventually attained—a goal you achieved, a milestone you reached, a triumph you realized—and now think of all that you had to sacrifice, the pain you had to endure, the struggle you faced to attain whatever this desire was. Why did you do it? Weren't you tempted along the way to abandon your quest? Wouldn't it have been easier to just give up? Just as Anna gives up the pleasure of extra sleep to gain something of greater value to her, this accomplishment of yours, and the fact that you actually did accomplish it despite the challenge of doing so, is a glowing testament to your emotional intelligence. Let us explain further.

WHAT DOES A MARSHMALLOW HAVE TO DO WITH SUCCESS?

There's a wonderful story often mentioned in discussions of EI about a research study done at Stanford University back in the 1960s. The study focused on delayed gratification and involved four-year-old children and marshmallows. Researchers would present a marshmallow to a four-year-old; but before giving the marshmallow over to be eaten, they'd offer the child a deal. The researcher claimed to need to step out of the room for a few moments and told the child that she or he could eat the one marshmallow at any time. If, however, the child would wait and not eat the marshmallow until the researcher returned to the room, the child could have two marshmallows. With an assurance that the child understood the game, the researcher got up and left the room. According to the record of this experiment, in some cases, before the door even closed on the researcher's exit, the child gobbled up the marshmallow and the game was over. These kids had given in to what to a four-year-old must have seemed an overwhelming temptation, to enjoy this tasty little puff of sugar as soon as possible. Of course, in doing so, these kids were forfeiting the opportunity for doubling their reward…two marshmallows as opposed to just the one.

There were children who tried not to eat the single marshmallow immediately. Some of them hid their eyes as if to make the temptation disappear. Some turned away from the table or occupied themselves in other ways. One child even licked the table around the marshmallow. These kids fought the impulse for immediate gratification, attempting instead to apply energy toward achieving a greater goal. Some of them were actually successful in doing so. Upon the researcher's return, there was the child and the uneaten marshmallow; and the child was, as promised, justly rewarded.

The researchers asked two important questions of this experiment:

“What quality was it about these children that allowed them to resist temptation and focus on a grander goal, even at the impulse-driven age of four?”

“What value would this quality bring to these children's lives as they grew older?”

The research study picked up 14 years later. The once four-year-old participants were now 18-year-old high school students. The research team found that the “marshmallow grabbers” suffered low self-esteem and were viewed by others as stubborn, prone to envy, and easily frustrated. Those kids who were able to delay their gratification in the face of the marshmallow temptation had scored better on their college entrance exams, were more successful in achieving goals, were more socially competent and self-assertive, were better equipped to deal with the challenges and uncertainties of life at that age, and had, by most measures of success for a young adult, thrived in their lives.

OF MARSHMALLOWS AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

So how does any of this relate to EI?

You have goals you're striving to attain. You are working hard for a promotion or perhaps to finish law school. You're saving for your dream house or putting money away for retirement. You're sweating to shed a few pounds or putting miles underfoot as you work up to running a marathon. To stick with the marshmallow metaphor, you might call such goals your Grand Marshmallow Goals. You can imagine how it will feel to realize your goals, how these achievements will benefit your life. You can imagine how wonderful it will be to take a big puffy bite out of the Grand Marshmallow.

Whatever achievements you seek to realize though, there are temptations along the way that try to lure you off the path. Distractions, diversions, doubts…these are the small marshmallows you must resist in pursuit of your Grand Marshmallow. The small marshmallows certainly taste good, and it is tempting to eat just one or two. But deep inside, you know that the satisfaction they would bring would be fleeting and that giving in to these small marshmallow temptations ultimately undermines the pursuit of your grander goal.

The ability to turn away from temptation and stay focused on an important goal is rooted in your emotions. You are attempting to overcome the emotional lure of small marshmallow temptations and at the same time to move passionately and enthusiastically toward your goal. Success actually requires two acts of emotional self-management:

1.   You need to develop an emotional attachment (passion, enthusiasm, excitement, desire) to the goal you are trying to achieve.

2.   You need to use the strength of this attachment to overcome any challenges (temptations, emotional lures) you encounter along the path to goal fulfillment.

The researchers at Stanford who worked with the “Marshmallow Kids” all those years ago termed this behavior Goal-Directed Self-Imposed Delay of Gratification. We simply call it emotional intelligence.

All of this begs the question: “How do I create emotional attachments to my goals that are stronger than the desires I already have to give in to my temptations?”

TRAINING YOUR BRAIN

In the pursuit of your goals, your brain can be either friend or foe. At its baseline root as a behavioral guidance system, the human brain works to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is an offshoot of the “Good for me!” versus “Not good for me!” behavioral protocol housed within the emotional center of the mammalian brain discussed in chapter 4. This level of the brain is not “aware” of the long-term goals you've set or choices you've made about priorities in life. The emotional brain is disconnected from your desire to lose weight, for example, and may lead you down the path to temptation when the dessert tray comes around. Seeking to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, this impulse-based aspect of your brain determines that, indeed, your immediate pleasure (Good for me!) would be to partake of some dessert, and recognizes, in fact, that it is painful (Not good for me!) to deny yourself such a treat. The desire to enjoy some dessert in this case is an amygdala-triggered emotional reaction and therefore often hard to resist. Resisting is hard but not impossible to do.

Training your brain literally means teaching this emotional aspect of your brain what is truly important to you. It requires the creation of an emotional connection with the goals you've set for yourself, a connection powerful enough to override your brain's immediate-gratification protocol, which initially attempts to influence your behavior. In this effort, you are striving to bring your emotional brain into your long-term, goal-driven vision. This requires reversing the wiring on what your brain understands as “Good for me!” and “Not good for me!” in terms of this particular goal. You would be teaching your emotional brain that cheating on your weight-loss plan, even just this once, is to actually experience the pain of failure in realizing a goal you desire and that true pleasure lies in achieving this goal on which you've placed such a high degree of importance. Through this process, the pain of failure becomes more painful than the pain of resisting temptation, and the desire to experience the future thrill of success becomes stronger than the desire to give in to the dessert.

SUCCESS BEGINS WITH SELF-AWARENESS

Once again self-awareness plays a critical role when it comes to controlling impulses, delaying gratification, and training your brain toward the achievement of challenging goals. Activating your self-awareness in this regard means being clear about what your goal is and why you want it. If you hold only a vague notion or a fuzzy picture of a goal, it won't seem real or solid enough to you. You're striving to establish a powerful emotional connection to your desired outcome and you need something for those emotions to latch on to. Gain clarity by following these two steps:

1.   Create a clear picture of what it is you desire. What does success look like? What will it feel like when you have achieved this goal? Vividly imagine the joy and pride contained in the experience of attaining your goal.

2.   Establish clarity as to your motivation for achieving this goal. Why do you want it? What value will its attainment bring to your life? It is from this clarity around your motivating driver for achieving this goal that your effort gains its emotional energy. If this energy is powerful enough for you, temptation doesn't stand a chance.

CREATE A CLEAR PICTURE OF WHAT IT IS YOU DESIRE

Vision is the powerful tool you use to bond emotionally with your goals. As the term implies, vision allows you to “see” your goal achieved, first in your mind and then in reality. You must be able to close your eyes and envision yourself having attained your goal, to imagine every aspect of the experience, to feel what it is like to have accomplished this outcome you've worked so hard to realize. Your mind cannot distinguish between what is real and what is vividly imagined. To vividly imagine a desired outcome generates an emotional response in your body—you literally experience what it will feel like to have succeeded. This experience, activated by your emotional brain in response to a vision held in your mind, connects you even more fully to what it is you seek to achieve. This is the basis for leveraging the power of your emotions toward realizing your goals.

ESTABLISH CLARITY AS TO YOUR MOTIVATION FOR ACHIEVING THIS GOAL

Connecting with your motivations for achieving whatever your goal may be locks in your emotional connection to that goal all the more. Why do I want this? What will it bring to my life? For someone who has struggled to quit smoking, the birth of a grandchild and the incredible desire to be a part of that child's life as he or she grows up can be an emotionally powerful driver to stop smoking and thereby remain healthy. The pride, sense of self-satisfaction, and measure of individual success that will be yours on attaining a long-sought professional position is a driver rooted in emotion. All motivating drivers get their power from an emotional connection to the outcome they are driving you toward. A goal lacking an emotional connection is a goal to which you are unlikely to commit the energy required to attain it.

OPTIMISM: EI FOR OVERCOMING LIFE'S SETBACKS

Not all desired achievements come easily. In fact, no matter how emotionally connected to them you may be and how hard you work to realize them, some never materialize at all. Sometimes you just fail. What does EI have to say about that?

In Goleman's model of EI, he includes the competency of optimism as being part of the EI domain of self-management. Optimism? Is he referring to the bright, sunny attitude that the glass is always half full and that behind every gray cloud there gleams a silver lining? Not at all. This is not the Pollyanna School of Optimism. This is the Seligman School of Optimism.

Dr. Martin Seligman is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Learned Optimism (1991) among other books. Seligman describes optimism as being based in how we make sense of the setbacks we experience in life. This is what he calls our explanatory style, having to do with how we explain to ourselves psychologically what went awry when life throws a challenge or setback our way and, more important, what we can do about that challenge or setback.

Two salespeople are giving a presentation to an important client. It doesn't go well. The optimist of the two will evaluate what went wrong, acknowledge the individual actions that contributed to the outcome, set in place a plan for improvement, and fully believe in the possibility of success the next time around. We might view this as a positive or optimistic explanatory style. The optimist follows a specific explanatory path in the face of setback. He or she:

   does his or her best to assess the situation objectively

   owns the outcome

   commits to a course of action for change

   holds a powerful belief in the possibility for implementing that change successfully.

The other salesperson, lacking the optimism of his partner, may find himself in a downward spiral of negative thinking and self-doubt, feeling powerless to do anything different toward a more successful outcome in the future. This person obviously holds a different set of beliefs and operates under a more pessimistic explanatory style.

None of us experience a life free from setbacks. We all have known times when life has simply not gone our way. It is our EI that allows us to be resilient in the face of these setbacks, to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, gather our wits, and press ever onward. Our EI competencies concerning self-awareness and self-management—the abilities to understand our emotions and leverage them toward appropriate behavioral performance without letting these emotional responses in the face of life's challenges undermine our intentions—are what we draw on in times of struggle. Our EI forms the basis of our explanatory style, determining our optimistic or pessimistic outlook. Optimism, as a component of self-management, may then be defined as

the ability to recover from setbacks, to learn from mistakes and less-than-positive outcomes, and to have faith in our abilities to implement change toward eventual success.

EQuip Yourself for Optimistic Goal Achievement

Empower your success with the energy of your emotions. Practice training your brain as to what's truly important to you, create emotional bonds to the visions you hold, and harness your sense of optimism to overcome life's challenges. Follow these strategies for success:

Keep Your Eye on the Grand Marshmallow

1.   Think of a goal you would like to commit yourself to—something that holds significant meaning in your life. There are, no doubt, things that you'll have to give up to attain this goal, sacrifices to be made, temptations to over-come.

2.   Generate a list of the temptations that hold the potential to lure you off the path of fulfilling your desired goal. Of these temptations, which is most enticing to you? How will you avoid or overcome this temptation when it crosses your path?

3.   Clarify a list of strategies you'll employ to stay focused on your goal and empower you to disregard the temptations that threaten your success.

Practice Your ABCs for Optimism

In chapter 5, we introduced you to the ABCs: activating event, belief, and consequential response. This simple but powerful tool is the key to maintaining an optimistic outlook in the face of setback:

1.   Start applying the label “activating event” to the daily challenges you face.

2.   Designate a little alarm sound that goes off inside your head whenever you notice such an event coming your way. Recognizing the challenges of life as activating events will trigger an awareness of your ABCs. You'll recall that you have the power to choose your beliefs and thus your response to any challenge that confronts you.

3.   Choose optimism by enacting the attitude that each challenge you face offers learning and growth. There is no such thing as failure except failure to learn.