An ADHDers Guide to Movitation Part II: Goals
We’ve all absorbed a lot of messages about goals over our lifetimes, and felt a lot of guilt around them. Not setting them, setting them, failing to achieve them or having other people lecture us endlessly about how they’re the key to unlock our issues! We feel the drive to do something, we set a goal to achieve it and… oh shit… where did the motivation go? They’re essential, and they don’t work for us.
So to start off with, let’s check in with the standard view of goals by the relatively modern method of letting an LLM summarise the topic for us!
The Importance of Goals
Goals are essential for personal and professional growth. They give us purpose, focus, and motivation, pushing us to overcome challenges and strive for excellence. Without goals, we may wander aimlessly, lacking direction and a sense of accomplishment. Goals help us determine what we want, set milestones, and measure progress. They create a roadmap for success, allowing us to track growth, celebrate achievements, and continually strive for more. Setting and pursuing goals unlocks our potential, expands our comfort zones, and leads to fulfilling lives.
Those sound important! But, is it true? As with most “common knowledge”, the answer is “a little bit”.
I think we can do better than vague moralising about the utility of goals. Let’s dig in!
Good and Bad Goals
There’s been a lot of work on goals over the years, but it can all be pretty well summarised in the relatively modern “2x2” structure. We categorise goals along 2 axis: mastery vs. performance and approach vs. avoidance.
Mastery Goals involve a focus on personal growth, skill development, and the continuous pursuit of knowledge. They only look inwards at ourselves and how we’re doing relative to ourselves.
Performance Goals focus on how we perform relative to other people. This can be very direct “I want to come 1st” or more indirect “I want to achieve a standard expected by other people”.
Approach Goals are targeted at achieving a positive outcome e.g. “I want to get promoted”
Avoidance Goals are targeted at avoiding a negative outcome e.g. “I don’t want to get fired”
This leads us to 4 categories of goals: Mastery-Approach, Mastery-Avoidance, Performance-Approach, Performance-Avoidance.
Decades of research into these different types of goals has led to a pretty clear hierarchy:
✅ Mastery-Approach goals are by far the most successful: improving performance, satisfaction, well-being, problem solving and a host of other positive attributes.
✅/❌ Mastery-Avoidance and Performance-Approach have mixed positive and negative effects. They both generally improve performance, but by the same or less than mastery-approach goals. However, they also increase anxiety and reduce well-being. They tend to get stuff done, but you’re not happy at the end.
❌ Performance-Avoidance goals are pretty uniformly bad. They are tend to reduce performance and cause anxiety and reduced well-being.
How do we Set Goals?
A lot of goals are set for us, by parents, managers or other authority figures. A whole other set of articles could be (and have been) written on how authority figures can set goals well. But these aren’t the goals we’re concerned about. We want to talk about the goals we set for ourselves!
It’d be nice to just say “great, I’ll only set mastery-approach goals now!” and get on with our lives. But it’s not that simple.
The goals we set ourselves are a product of our circumstances and beliefs. In fact, the major components that determine what type of goals we create are (time for a callback) Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness (or Self-Determination). We have to get self-determination right to let ourselves set good goals.
Goals for ADHDers
Lets recap!
Goals can be good, or they can be bad - both in terms of achievement and well-being
The types of goals we pick are related to our level of self-determination - higher levels of self-determination leads to better goals.
And from the previous part of this series we know that ADHDers motivation is more strongly impacted by self-determination
I couldn’t find any salient research directly linking all of these pieces together, so we’re into the realms of hypothesis here. But here’s my model of how the system works, based on the research we do have and my observations from coaching:
ADHDers are more sensitive to reductions in self-determination, meaning we’re also more likely to create goals that are more performance and avoidance oriented. How many times have I said to myself “I don’t want people to think I’m lazy” or “I don’t want to get fired”. Classic Performance-Avoidance goals.
These goals make us less successful (reducing competence), making us more likely to be controlled by others (reducing autonomy) and making people trust us less (reducing relatedness). This makes us even more likely to take on bad goals… and… a downward spiral.
What do we do?
There are 2 places we can try and break the spiral:
Improving our autonomy, competence and relatedness
Reshaping our goals to be more mastery-approach
We’ll go over more details of how to improve autonomy, competence and relatedness in future articles. Don’t miss out.
But right now we can focus on how to set ourselves up with more mastery-approach goals!
Creating Better Goals
Performance -> Mastery: Is this goal a “should”, “must” or “have to”? This might mean it’s a bad goal - what is it that you want? Focus on that.
Performance -> Mastery: Does it matter if noone notices you’ve met your goal? Do you want to lose weight so you look better to other people, or because you want to feel healthier? Focus on what you want to happen, not how other people might view what you do.
Avoidance -> Approach: Are your goals about avoiding mistakes or being more perfect? Try to figure out what the positive effect is and reframe the goal around that. “I won’t spend any money on amazon this month” is less effective than “I’ll save $100”.
Next Up
We’ve still got a few (we all know I’m really not sure how many) parts left to this exploration of motivation and ADHD. So if you want to make sure you see it when I get round to writing it:
