Moving the Goalposts

One pattern authors are notorious for is called "moving the goal posts." 

That tends to look like setting a goal of, say,  publishing your first book. But once you publish it, rather than pausing to celebrate what you've done, appreciate the hard work you put into it, and feel gratitude for everyone who helped you along the way, you may instead say, "One book doesn't make me a real author. Time to start the next one."

This pattern can happen whether you're publishing your first book or your 100th. Two things are usually happening behind the scenes if you experience this in your life....

1. You expected to feel a certain way when you reached the initial goal, and when that feeling didn't magically appear (or it only appeared in a small, fleeting dose), you hurriedly moved the goalpost so that you could maintain the belief that there might still be an accomplishment in your future that would magically conjure the feeling you were hoping to experience... it just wasn't any of the accomplishments you've hit yet.

2. You're terrified that if you do genuinely feel a sense of accomplishment once you hit your initial goal, you'll lose your ambition completely and become unmotivated to keep going. 

It can be both of these things, too, and the kicker is that our minds are subtle about manipulating us this way so that we don't ever spot the pattern of moving the goal posts as the main presenting symptom of a deeper issue. Instead, we blame just about everything else, and the underlying pain is never addressed. 

The solution to breaking this pattern is two-fold. 

First, we can understand that feelings are cultivated through repeatedly and intentionally directing our attention toward the conditions required to generate them. 

For example, you don't wake up one day and feel effortlessly and deeply grateful for all that you have if you've spent a lifetime feeling like you're never enough and what you have is never enough. You wake up feeling that way by pausing and reminding yourself that the conditions exist to feel that way, but you must redirect your attention to all you have when you notice your attention drifting toward all you don't have. You have some wonderful things (your life, friends, pets, breathable air, physical ability, dreams and aspirations, love for strangers, a home, etc.), and you also lack some things that you might one day like to have—whichever one of these two realities you focus on more will determine the way you feel about your life.

This is why we talk about "gratitude practices." You have to practice pausing, shifting your attention to what you have rather than what you don't have, and do that a thousand times to create and strengthen your neural pathways around the emotion of gratitude (or whatever emotion you're hoping to feel more of). Eventually, it may become an emotion you experience without needing to be so intentional about it. 

This is why hitting our initial goal rarely feels the way we hope it will. If you've been motivating yourself each day with all that you haven't yet accomplished or feelings like you're falling short until you hit your goal, you're not developing the neural pathways around recognizing accomplishment, you're developing those around recognizing a lack of accomplishment, so that's what's waiting for you when you cross the finish line. 

The second thing we must learn is what it feels like to be motivated by something other than fear and pain avoidance. Most of us are unfamiliar with this experience because our society isn't generally set up to guide us in that direction. You learn to do your homework to keep from having a teacher or your parents get pissed off at you. You learn to get good grades in college because if you don't, you'll miss out on a career you might actually enjoy. Then you end up in a career you're supposed to love, but you spend most of your time trying to keep your boss off your ass and simply not get fired or miss out on a promotion that would allow you to finally stop living paycheck to paycheck... 

At what point in there did we have the space to recognize that something other than fear could get us out of bed in the morning? 

So of course we carry that same thinking into our writing life, because we don't have much familiarity (if any) with another way of motivating ourselves to finish a project. We forget that passion can keep us going and that humans have an innate desire to create and self-express. 

Most of you understand these concepts already, so I'm only reminding you of what you already know. But boy, oh, boy, do we need reminders, right? I know I do. Especially when the whole world seems set up to make us forget. 

My reminders take the form of sticky notes on my computer and friends who care about me. "How are you going to celebrate that win, Claire?" Oh right. 

Sometimes pausing to celebrate is the first step toward countering the patterns of moving the goal posts, and what a great intervention that is! You get to celebrate! Woohoo! 

I've had to shoehorn more celebration into my life, which is such a fucking annoying thing to have to work on and makes me irrationally angry at the world when I think about the effort it takes on my part to push back against all the contrary messaging. But I do it, because I want my life to be different. So, fine.

One of the ways I've instituted my new pattern lately is to pause between stretch goals on my current Kickstarter. To allow myself to sit with the accomplishment of one and feel gratitude for everyone who made it happen before releasing the next one. It doesn't earn me more money, doesn't push up my backer numbers, but it cultivates my emotional experience of the world into one I like better. So again, ugh, fine, I'll do it. 

I’m always looking for more places in my life where I can practice these sorts of things. Unfortunately, what I’ve learned and what the Enneagram is pretty clear about is that increasing our ability to notice things requires intentionally slowing down. That’s almost always the first step. We don’t have to slam on the brakes, but we may want to tap them more frequently.

We’re all asked to do more things than a fulfilling life can hold, and until we start pulling back, allowing ourselves space to remember that the conditions exist right now for that feeling we’re chasing, we’ll continue to chase it, moving the goal posts over and over again and hoping something different happens inside of us.