Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (19 page)

What is mood, anyway? We've all experienced moods—the good, the bad, and the downright ugly—but how do they differ from emotions? We all know from experience that moods affect our judgment and our ability to regulate emotion and they challenge our objectivity. Moods, good and bad, shape how you perform at work, how much fun you have at that party, how quickly you're likely to lose your temper when your kid acts out, how you react when there's stress or a problem to be solved. What, if anything, can we learn from
what science knows about moods, especially mystery moods?

In contrast to moods, emotions are consciously experienced and stem from an identifiable source: you feel happy because you've been praised or your beloved looks at you tenderly; you're blue because you've let your friend down or your dog has died. Moods are different; they are more diffuse, and while you may be aware of the mood you're in, sometimes you might not be. That is a
mystery mood
. How many of us have had a friend or spouse ask why we're in such a good or bad mood, only to answer—either defensively or indignantly—“No, I'm not!” Once you've had your mood pointed out, you may become aware of it, but you still might not know why you're feeling that way. The “nonconscious” nature of the mystery mood operates on two dimensions: the person's lack of awareness of the mood itself and his or her lack of conscious awareness of its origins.

When you know you're in a bad mood—or a good one, for that matter—and you know why you are (your boss screamed at you for no reason, or your long-awaited promotion came through), you are conscious of how your mood is affecting not just your general outlook on life but how you're processing information and thinking. That's not true of the mystery mood, though, and in that case, you'll be taking out your rose-colored glasses (or your doom-and-gloom ones) as you survey not just the general landscape but your goals and make decisions. Of course, just because you may be unaware of your mystery mood and its source doesn't mean something isn't causing it. One possible cause is
what Tanya Chartrand and her colleagues call a “nonconscious” goal.
What, precisely, is that?

It could be a goal that you've pursued for so long—chatting up and flattering your boss, trying to be more outgoing—that it's become automatic or a goal you haven't thought about consciously. The example Chartrand and her colleagues use is that of a guy named John, a perennial partygoer who, once upon a time, consciously cultivated his behavior to gain social acceptance. Since then, he has been to so many parties that he shifts into party mode without even being aware of what he's doing. But even though he's no longer conscious of that goal he set so long ago, the goal of being well-liked and appreciated is still present and is activated by simply being at a party. One night, though, no one smiles at him appreciatively or laughs at his jokes, and his mood darkens. But he can't really pinpoint why this party is leaving him feeling so dispirited.

Mystery moods can also be triggered by the environment—by objects, people, or situations that act as primes—or may be caused by the other people's nonverbal social behavior. Psychologists call this
social contagion
. You've probably experienced this yourself when you've realized that your blue funk is a result of spending too much time with a friend or friends who are down.

Mystery moods affect us both emotionally and cognitively. Because we don't know why we're feeling the way we are, we're likely to attribute those feelings to something random—another variation on Skinner's superstitious pigeon—rather than its true cause. Our mood, whether it's good or bad, affects how we process information and hence the tenor of our thoughts as well as our judgment about our goals. In line with the other evidence of the effects of overoptimism, positive mystery moods “lead to less effortful processing than negative moods,” leading us to put a spin on our efforts to reach a goal that may not have any basis in reality. Mystery moods can convince us to keep pursuing a goal or can cue us to disengage. Even more important, trying to regulate our feelings and get out of the mood we're in may lead us to formulate new goals.

You can deal with mystery moods by countering them with conscious self-awareness, by making yourself focus on the possible cues that might have triggered your mood and then actively
working to regulate that feeling. It's another step in the process of learning when you need to disengage from a goal and reengage your efforts in another direction.

Next, we'll turn to mapping our goals—surveying the territory of our wants, needs, and aspirations.

 

Chapter Seven

Mapping Your Goals

For years, many books and talks
famously included a reference to a supposedly renowned and definitive study—variously attributed to the Harvard MBA class of 1954 or the Yale class of 1979—that explained why 3 percent of the class had made ten times more money than the other 97 percent within ten years after graduation. The answer was deliciously simple and very cool: The 3 percent had written their goals down. It's not hard to see why this supposed study made a fabulous sound bite—easy-to-remember numbers, marquee schools, and an easy way to guarantee success.

Not an Urban Legend, After All

Alas, no such study was ever conducted. But like the alligators in the New York City sewers, this urban legend deserves to be true. As it happens,
a study done in 2011 at McGill and Toronto Universities
shows that writing down goals is beneficial and that elaborating and reflecting on personal goals actually improves the performance of struggling students. Putting your goals in writing can enhance your ability to evaluate whether your efforts to reach a goal are working and whether attaining it is feasible; it helps clarify whether you should continue to pursue a goal or disengage from it. Mapping also allows you to see your goals in relation to each other, which is invaluable.

We mean
goal mapping
in a rather literal sense, with pen and paper or a computer screen at hand. (We suppose that if you're fabulously good at visualizing, you might even be able to do it in your head.) For most of us, though, writing about something clarifies our thought processes in important ways and forces us to be more articulate and concrete about our wants and aspirations. You can read through the pages of this chapter first without mapping your goals on paper or screen, if you like, and then double back, or you can map them, step-by-step, as you read.

Listing Your Goals

Use the following categories to organize your goals. Make two columns, one for short-term goals and the other for long-term ones. You can, if you wish, personalize the categories further; they are meant only as a starting point. Feel free to include any goals you think are pertinent. How you define
short term
and
long term
is up to you; a short-term goal can be defined in months or years as you wish.

Life Goals (Personal Strivings)

Your life goals include personal aspirations that pertain to the growth of the self (becoming a better leader, being less impulsive, feeling better about your choices, making peace with your limitations, for example). They can be broad or abstract (becoming a better listener, being more mindful, cultivating gratitude, being more responsive to others) or concrete (reading more books, wasting less time online, spending less money, working to resolve disputes, mastering a new language). They should include both approach goals—such as having children, being financially stable, owning a home, traveling the world, or doing anything else important to you—and goals focused on avoidance.

Career or Work Goals

The goals you have for your job or career can be as various as becoming a novelist or hedge-fund manager, finding a more interesting
job, going back to school to switch careers, making more money, or working for a more sympathetic boss. You can also make the goal more specific, going beyond the mere description of the work or career and adding what you hope your work will add to your life, such as meaningfulness, a sense of community and belonging, daily satisfaction, and intellectual challenge. In the same way, you should add your avoidance goals, if you have any (such as staying out of fractious or demanding environments).

Relationship Goals

For relationship goals, list your aspirations for connection and affiliation (such a establishing an intimate and satisfying relationship, getting married, expanding your social circle, deepening your friendships, or improving family communications); add in concrete steps that will help you reach your more abstract goals (such as socializing more, doing volunteer work, joining a sports team, starting a book club, mentoring a child). Avoidance goals (e.g., staying out of family fights) may also be part of your list.

Learning and Achievement Goals

Your learning and achievement goals should be more concrete and reflect the other three categories; if a personal goal is financial stability, getting a higher-paying job or paying off student debt or incurring no new debt might be interim goals. If you're contemplating a career change, going back to school or networking could be one of your short-term goals.

In this first iteration, write down your goals in no particular order. If you'd like to see samples of what a goal map migh
t look like, see Sample Goal Maps 1 and 2, at the end of this chapter on pages 171–172.

Intrinsic or Extrinsic?

Review your list of goals, and begin by asking whether each goal is extrinsic or intrinsic.
As described by psychologists Richard M. Ryan and his colleagues
, extrinsic goals aren't just those imposed by third parties (e.g., your father, mother, mentor, or spouse wants you to be a lawyer, or your coach wants you to continue swimming) but are those that depend on the reaction or approbation of third parties. Extrinsic goals also tend to be the means to other ends, rather than ends in themselves. Our culture is, of course, obsessed with definitions of success that depend on extrinsic goals—namely, money, fame, and image.

In a study called “Further Examining the American Dream
,” Tim Kasser and Ryan asked adults and college students to self-­report on four intrinsic aspirations and three extrinsic ones and denote which goals or principles were most central to their lives. The four intrinsic domains were self-acceptance (achieving psychological growth, autonomy, and self-regard); affiliation (having satisfying relationships with family and friends); community feeling (improving the world through activism or generosity); and physical fitness (feeling healthy and free of illness). The three extrinsic principles were financial success (being wealthy and materially successful); social recognition (being famous or well-known, and admired); appealing appearance (looking attractive in terms of body, clothing, and fashion). People who focused on more intrinsic goals reported greater well-being, less anxiety and depression, and fewer physical ailments than those who were directed toward extrinsic goals.

This doesn't mean that extrinsic goals are inherently bad or that striving for them necessarily dooms you to a life of unhappiness. Have no fear: You can safely keep lusting after a closet full of Louboutin shoes or a fully loaded Porsche. What does appear to matter is whether, first, you are pursuing extrinsic goals with autonomy and, second, how central to your sense of self the extrinsic goals are. Extrinsic goals, unfortunately, don't feed the soul; as the researchers write, “their allure usually lies in the presumed admiration that attends them or in the power and sense of worth that can be derived from attaining them.” It turns out that just as the Beatles had it right when they sang, “Money can't buy you love,” fame, money, and even beauty don't appear to guarantee happiness
or life satisfaction, either, no matter what you see on television or in the pages of
People
magazine. The happiest and healthiest people are those whose goals are preponderantly intrinsic, and contribute actively to their sense of self.

Write an
I
for “intrinsic” or an
E
for “extrinsic” next to each of your goals. Keep in mind, though, that even intrinsic goals may become shopworn over time; even a long-held intrinsic goal can stop making you happy, because both your sense of self and needs are fluid over time. While that is a good thing for personal growth, it does complicate life and may require you to make sometimes painful changes and abandon your goals.

That was certainly the case for Marie, who, after over twenty years as an artist, knew she had to quit. She'd known she wanted to be an artist from a very young age—three or four—and had the requisite talent, drive, and perfectionism. She went to a prestigious art college, launched her career as a commercial artist at the age of twenty-two, and married shortly after. She enjoyed success and moved from doing one-shot illustration to creating four-color books, which yielded a steady royalty stream; she then branched out into cards and calendars. Marie had wanted a career that gave her autonomy, permitted her to do what she loved in solitude, and let her make her own hours, but over the years, the very things she'd wanted for herself at the beginning began to make her increasingly unhappy. Because she had trouble managing her time, each project was chronically late and she felt trapped in her studio, cut off from the world.

Looking back, she says, “The way I worked was self-sabotaging and exhausting—physically, emotionally, artistically. My work was spectacular, but it was also eating me alive. I missed weddings, funerals, christenings, family holidays. At the same time, the marketplace shifted as the demand for gift books dried up. I was getting paid less and less for the work I did.” She began slowly to reimagine her goals and to take steps that would propel her into a life with very different aspirations. More than anything, she wanted to be out in the world, connected to other people, away from her solitary working life as an artist.

Sometimes, a goal that appears to be intrinsic will turn out, in the end, to be only extrinsically rewarding. David was a child of divorce himself, and choosing family law as his specialty was conscious and deliberate; his goal was to work with couples to try to mitigate the strain and anguish experienced by families going through divorce. But some ten years into his practice, he began to understand that his own efforts on his clients' behalf often prolonged the divorce process and, from time to time, even amped up the damage inflicted on the family. The realization threw him into crisis; he quit his practice as a partner in a law firm and retrained as a mediator. It took him two years to decide to quit and another three to establish his solo mediation practice, but what he does for a living is now intrinsically motivated. His work reflects and is a part of his sense of self.

Articulating and mapping your goals and anticipating changes you might have to make in the future are effective strategies.

Conflict or Congruence?

The next step in the process is to review both your short- and long-term goals for conflict or congruence between them. Ask yourself if any of your short-term goals are related to your long-term goals or can be seen as stepping-stones to larger goals. In the best-case scenario, your short-term goals will facilitate your chances of succeeding at some of your long-term goals. In the worst, you will find that some of your goals—personal or professional—are in conflict.

As we've already discussed, conflicting goals are a reliable source of unhappiness and stress. Of course, the achievement of certain long-range goals—making partner in a large institution, building a business from the ground up, going to medical school and becoming a specialist—that require a tremendous investment of time and energy will, inevitably, be in conflict with other goals that draw on the same limited amounts of time and energy allotted to each of us. The conflicts between the demands of making enough
money and the desire for an intrinsically rewarding and satisfying job are well known, as are the often conflicting demands of being an available and hands-on parent and pursuing a job or career that requires an outsize amount of time, effort, and diligence. Similarly, you're not likely to have the time to cultivate your other interests—whether that's playing golf or studying bookbinding or carpentry—no matter how personally rewarding they are, if you are devoting yourself to your career. Only you can answer the question of which of two conflicting goals is more important to you; there is no hard-and-fast rule that can be applied generally.

Rick grew up poor in Wisconsin, the only child of a mother whose husband had abandoned her. He attended college on a football scholarship and then earned an MBA from an Ivy League institution. His goals, set early in his twenties, were financial success, emotional stability and security, and the ability to work on his own terms with some autonomy. Strong-willed and very persistent, he married right out of college, eager to have the kind of family he hadn't had himself. After business school, he got a job at a prestigious consulting firm, working sixty to seventy hours a week, outflanking his peers and consistently racking up a series of promotions and pay raises. He was both praised and valued by his bosses. But the long hours he put in took a toll on his marriage, and he chafed at the total lack of autonomy he had in a traditional corporate setting; his job was to please both his bosses and his clients. Still, he kept on going until the day his wife walked out on him and he realized something had to give.

This moment, which might have been a turning point for him, wasn't. Most of his friends worked the same long hours he did, and their wives, their eyes on the long-term prize of big houses and expensive cars, didn't complain. As a result, Rick settled on the idea that what was wrong was his wife's attitude. He married again some three years later, and this time, the union lasted less than a year. He finally hit a wall at the age of thirty-five with a big bank account but little else. It took him close to two years to find a start-up opportunity he believed in, and he began soliciting investors. He succeeded in getting the venture off the ground and
then settled into a forty-hour work week, which permitted him to start and pay attention to a new relationship. He finally managed to find a way of making his career and personal goals work without sacrificing one for the other.

If you have discovered potentially conflicting goals, start a new column and list those goals side by side under the heading “Conflict.” If your goals are congruent, leave your lists as they are.

Approach and Avoidance

With your goals mapped out in front of you, think about how you tend to frame your goals. Are you in the habit of seeing your goals in terms of avoidance or approach? Is there a balance of each, or is there a preponderance of one or the other? Paying attention to how you frame your aspirations will help you get a better bead on whether you should continue heading in the same direction or whether you need to change your course, if only partly.