Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (20 page)

A Question of Priorities

To deepen your understanding of your goals, follow the steps described in the next few paragraphs. This expansion of the mapping exercise has three distinct parts. The first is creative and was inspired by the Toronto and McGill study.

Step 1:
Write a description of what your future would be like under ideal circumstances. Imagine this as fully as you can, with as much detail as you can bring to it. You should include a description of the ideal you—with all of your personal strivings met. Include qualities of character and deportment as well as learning and mastery goals you would like to claim as yours.

Be as specific as you can be about your real-world goals. Imagine your personal and working life, where and how you're living, and how you spend your time and energy. Think about what goals
you've already met, the balance between your leisure and work activities, and the amount of personal satisfaction you experience. Imagine your social circumstances, your circle of family and friends. Your financial circumstances should be part of your imagined scenario as well.

Step 2:
Go back to your list of goals, and rewrite them in order of importance, giving each a number. If you have a list of conflicting goals, list them in order of priority too. Leave enough space so that you can write a few sentences or phrases beneath each of them. Drop from your list any goals that you feel, on reflection, aren't worthy of inclusion, and add any you think you have missed. Be as precise as you can about prioritizing; if two goals are too close to be easily distinguished, please number and label them as (a) and (b).

Step 3:
Under each goal, write a sentence or two explaining why the goal is important to you and how achieving it will contribute to your sense of well-being, happiness, or success. If you have conflicting goals, write a sentence or two about the one you think you would have to give up and how disengaging from it would affect your life. Similarly, write a sentence or two about the goal you intend to continue pursuing and how achieving it would enrich or otherwise change your life.

With these three steps completed, reread what you've written about your ideal future, and then review your goals in order. Ask yourself the following questions:

• •
  Do my goals reflect my vision of an ideal future?
  
• •
  Are my short-term goals contributing to my long-term goals? Are they bringing me closer to achieving those goals?
  
• •
  How many of my goals are abstract rather than concrete? Do I have the concrete steps in mind to be able to achieve them?
  
• •
  Will my strategies be effective in achieving my goals? If not, do I have alternatives?
  
• •
  If there are conflicts between different goals, which of them am I considering abandoning? What criteria am I using to make the choice?
  
• •
  If I intend to disengage from a goal, what will be my game plan? Do I have a replacement goal in mind?
  
• •
  Is there a balance between my intrinsically motivated goals and those that are largely extrinsic?
  
• •
  Of all my goals and aspirations, which are the most likely to make me happier in the future than I am today?
  

This last question may be the most difficult for some of us to answer. To that end, we'll look at our goals in terms of how we feel when we achieve them.

Using Flow to Assess Your Goals

We've remarked more than once that human beings aren't very good at knowing what will make them happy. While there isn't a one-size-fits-all, how-to recipe for individual happiness, some principles can bring greater understanding to how to identify sources of happiness.
One such principle is that of
flow
, as set forth by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; it's also one we can use to great effect while mapping our goals, assessing them, and deciding which we should pursue or discard.

The idea of flow is easiest to explain by example. Recall a moment when you were utterly absorbed in an activity, so completely focused on what you were doing that everything around you seemed to disappear. Your concentration was complete, without distraction. This activity could be any task, as long you felt happy or even serene doing it, so immersed in it that you lost the sense of time. Along with a feeling of oneness with the activity, you also felt a deep sense of satisfaction, of meaningfulness in what you were doing. This moment endowed you with a sense of mastery, as well as freedom from the ordinary worries and hesitations that accompany most of us throughout the day. This is what Csikszentmihalyi calls
flow
. As he explains it, the feeling of flow is a universal experience that knows no cultural boundaries and isn't limited by age or gender.

Athletes often describe how they feel playing their sport in terms of being in the flow; on these pages, you may remember Deidre the swimmer describing racing as “an incomparable feeling of exhaustion, of exhilarati
on, of feeling alive” while James the rower talked about becoming “completely engrossed in a single task with full mindfulness.” These are descriptions of flow. Writers speak of characters “writing themselves,” whereas musicians talk about being “in” the music; a weaver describes the lightness of being she feels as she works, how she gets lost in the process. Flow is probably what the poet William Butler Yeats had in mind when he wrote, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

But the experience of flow isn't limited to activities that are, by their nature, creative. Nor do you need to be an artist or athlete. Ordinary people experience flow at moments doing their jobs, as well as during activities like knitting and gardening. You can experience flow in a great conversation with friends or while spending time with children.

The experience of flow does require certain conditions, which Csikszentmihalyi outlines, beginning with what he calls
the “autotelic experience
.” This term is derived from Greek (
auto
meaning “self” and
telos
meaning “goal”) and refers to the activity that lies at the heart of the flow experience. It is an activity that is, in his words, “an end to itself” and that, moreover, “even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity becomes intrinsically rewarding.” His understanding of an intrinsically valuable and rewarding goal dovetails with other theories we've already reviewed about goals. But among Csikszentmihalyi's unique contributions is his assertion that first, most activities are neither “purely autotelic” nor “purely exotelic” (the word he uses to describe activities done solely for external reasons) but a combination of the two. His understanding makes it possible to see how goals, originally pursued largely for extrinsic reasons, can become intrinsic in meaning and value, and how they can put us in a state of flow.

Among the examples he uses is that of someone who trains to be a surgeon for “exotelic” reasons, including helping people,
making money, and achieving prestige. But, he says,
“if they are lucky
, after a while they will begin to enjoy their work and their surgery becomes to a large extent also autotelic.” Flow lifts us above the everyday, transforming how we feel, because we are deeply connected to our actions.

A trial lawyer explains his experience of flow: “It has happened to me when I'm addressing a jury and I suddenly realize that I've got command of the courtroom. Every person on the panel is looking at me, watching, listening and paying attention to my every word. In that moment, time seems to slow down and I feel no hesitancy at all. I have the opportunity to choose my words carefully, to pick precisely the right word, to craft my argument and every phrase with forethought because my mind is ahead of the words. I am fully caught up in the moment but in command nonetheless. I know that sounds strange—how can a person be both ‘in command' and ‘caught up in the moment' at once?'—but that's exactly what it feels like.”

A woman describes her experience of flow when she taught literature to college students: “It didn't happen every class, of course, but it happened with some regularity, when the discussion of the poem or novel suddenly shifted and my students were all drawn in and paying full attention, and I knew that in the moment, they had simply gotten it. I could see the wonder in their faces—that they'd understood something about the words and their meaning, or the characters and their emotions in a firsthand and direct way that was a revelation—and when the bell went off signaling the end of class, they looked surprised, just as I did. They sat for a moment and then, with some reluctance, got up. It was as though a spell had been broken.” That, too, is a description of the experience of flow.

The optimal experience of flow
depends on other factors than the “autotelic” nature of the activity. Among them are these:

• •
  That the goal be clear, free of contradictory demands. What we need to do should be obvious.
  
• •
  That the challenges of the goal and our skills be in balance, unlike ordinary life, where a too-demanding situation may produce frustration or anxiety or an unchallenging task boredom.
  
• •
  That there be immediate feedback. We know immediately how well we're doing and are secure in the knowledge that what we're doing is right.
  
• •
  That we are totally concentrated on the activity without distraction.
  
• •
  That we are fully immersed in the activity, unaware of everything that lies outside of it.
  
• •
  That there's no thought or concern about failing.
  
• •
  That we experience a falling away of self-consciousness in a literal way; we're not thinking about how other people see or judge us, nor do we worry about impressing or influencing others.
  
• •
  That we experience a distortion of time.
  

The work you do, the activities and interests you pursue for self-fulfillment and pleasure, the relationships you're in—in short, many of the goals you've just mapped—can be evaluated in terms of flow. One of the important lessons to take away from Csikszentmihalyi's work is the balance between the challenges of the goal and your skills. Understanding that flow emanates from balance runs counter to the cultural view of what makes people successful and happy. It's another potent argument for letting go of the folk wisdom of “The higher the bar, the higher the jump.”

Think about the activities you engage in as well as the goals you've set for yourself in terms of flow. What revisions can you make to your life so that you experience flow more frequently? Just on the basis of flow, are there goals you should be pursuing more aggressively? What changes can you make to the way you do your work or the work you do?

One woman, now in her midforties, describes how she revised her goals: “I'd ended up in marketing pretty much by accident; being an assistant was the first job I landed right after college, and then I climbed up the corporate ladder without thinking much about what I did and didn't love about my job. I was happy enough, you see, and making enough money and being able to travel too, which was great. But then the company changed hands, and I was
fired and I finally had to sit down and ask myself, ‘What's next?' There weren't a lot of jobs around I was actually interested in, and I started thinking about starting my own business. I realized that what I really liked was the planning and troubleshooting more than actually implementing the marketing plans, and that's how I got into the consulting business, working one-on-one with small companies. It's the brainstorming that gets me jazzed.”

The woman is not using the word
flow
, but she could have. Many of the other stories we've told, especially that of Jill the lawyer, who left her job as a litigator to become a teacher, have to do with flow and the individual need to experience satisfaction and a deep sense of connection to work and other activities.

In addition to viewing your goals, realized and unrealized, in terms of flow, it's important to see whether attaining them is possible. That, too, pertains to the question of balance.

Mastering Mental Contrasting

With the first part of goal mapping completed, it's time to review your goals to see if they are attainable. Keep in mind that a range of factors determines whether a goal can be reached: having the necessary time, energy, and other resources; having the right level of skill and appropriate strategies to attain it; and whether it's in conflict with other important goals.
The skill we should rely on
to determine whether we should set and try to implement a goal or disengage from it is, as we've mentioned, called
mental contrasting
.

Mental contrasting requires that you have your desired future in mind while you focus on the real-life factors that may impede its realization. It's a mental exercise that requires you to hold your vision of the future in your mind at the same time that you realistically appraise the present. The balance of future and present is absent from the two other possible ways of thinking about a goal: positively about the future alone (indulging) or focusing solely on the negatives in the present reality (dwelling). According to the
research by Gabriele Oettingen and colleagues,
both indulging and dwelling yield only moderate goal commitment
, even if there's a good chance of succeeding. Similarly, indulging in the future alone or dwelling on present obstacles actually keeps people committed to a goal that has scant chances for success; they can disengage from this goal only through mental contrasting. In addition, mental contrasting facilitates realism about both short-term and long-term goals and their possible implementation.

A short-term goal might be knocking it out of the park on that forty-minute presentation your boss has asked you to give at the corporate sales meeting; he's given you the opportunity to decline or accept the invitation to present. The conventional way of dealing with this challenge might be to give yourself a pep talk (“You can do it, Dan!”), reminding yourself of other times you've successfully met other challenges, or simply imagining the enthusiastic applause and your boss's smiling face when you're done talking. That indulging approach, of course, glosses over any of your habits of mind or propensities that might stand in the way of resounding success. On the other hand, you might be filled with dread and find yourself unable to summon up anything other than the vision of a tongued-tied you standing in front of graphs and a PowerPoint chart, looking out over a sea of bored faces; this is dwelling.