As its international women’s day I thought I would share a client story of how one amazing woman persisted through difficulties to overcome a huge challenge. Her story gives an insight into what top performers draw upon to help them through difficulties and demands and healthily achieve goals.
Meet Marjorie (not her real name), a middle-aged woman, successful in business, a high-achiever, a single-mum with a disabled daughter at home, and little history of exercise.
And Marjorie had an aching goal – to get fit. With this goal in mind, Marjorie went to a personal trainer.
However, Marjorie’s experience of doing the exercise was like this:
- Felt time pressure
- Dissatisfaction with her progress and abilities
- Disagreements with trainer
- Loss of interest
- Sense of being under more pressure
- Experienced stress reactions
- Felt ill more often
- Experienced dysfunctional emotions
- Negative sense of self
She was not feeling good and was put in contact with me.
The psychologist comes in
What I wanted to understand was why was exercising so hard and leading to distress? This meant trying as best I could to understand her context, her background and importantly, her goals.
What Marjory shared is not uncommon and she highlighted these goals as being important for her:
Achieving – success – proving abilities – being better than others – meeting certain standards of appearance
Her sense of value was contingent on meeting these goals. They are self-validating goals in that she felt she had to prove or demonstrate these features.
In the moment, Marjorie’s exercising and trying to ‘get fit’ did not lead to achievement, success, she described her abilities were poor, she perceived others as way better, and she thought she looked awful and was a sweaty mess.
Getting fit, therefore was a threat to her self-validating goals.
In the moment of exercising, she experienced a discrepancy between her goal of getting fit and meeting these self-validating goals. And when there is a large discrepancy between goals it can often lead to distressing mental, emotional and physical reactions.
Gain = when you meet/achieve self-validating goals = hugely rewarding.
Pain = when you do something that feels far away from these goals = hugely distressing.
This resulted in certain behaviours like excuse-making – avoiding – self-handicapping (time, injury, illness) so that she did not have to exercise. This protected her self-esteem and she felt rewarded when she decided not to exercise.
The paradox and investigation
The problem was that the thought and action of NOT exercising made Marjorie feel worse about herself.
The paradox was that avoiding exercise satisfied her self-validating goals but NOT exercising led to distress. Why was this the case?
Marjorie and I explored the core reasons behind wanting to get fit. What she feared from not getting fit. We did a deep investigation of what was important in her life. What she eventually discovered was a powerful innate value:
To be able to offer care and support for family
To be there for her family and able to offer continued support, particularly for her disabled daughter, as she was getting older was paramount. This was stronger than any goal. It was an innate Value that had deep, personal meaning for her. This was deep below the surface, but she had not been aware of this strong Value before.
Avoiding this Value and not living in alignment with this Value led to her feeling distressed. Not getting fit meant that there was no match or alignment with this Value. With this Value recognised she could see where her distress was coming from.
She recognised that the goals she put high-value to (achieving, success, etc.) were self-validating, and that this Value had more motivating importance. The self-validating goals were at surface-level, the tip of the iceberg. The Value was the deep foundation that kept her afloat and buoyant.
The outcome
Marjorie went back to exercise. She shared that it was tough, effortful, horrible some days, challenging every single time. But in those moments of challenge – she brought her VALUE to mind.
So, she persisted. She was prepared to be with and feel the difficult mental, emotional and physical reactions she got from not meeting her immediate self-validating goals.
Over time, she developed tolerance to these. She could feel the uncomfortableness when she perceived her self-validating goals as not being met. Yet, she was now learning to ‘be with’ that uncomfortableness which offered her a perception of control. With a feeling of more control, the unpleasantness she experienced while exercising got less and less.
She held true to her VALUE and persisted in the face of these difficulties.
She is now preparing to run a 10km race for charity.
The psychological science – how top performers get it done
Self-validation goals are motivating in the moment, but they are fragile. In the face of challenge, difficulty, demands – people with self-validating goals withdraw, make-excuses, lose motivation, they avoid – they feel threatened.
People with high-value to self-validating goals put attention to tasks that can be easily achieved, not to tasks that require persistence and self-regulation (managing of feelings of distress). Tolerance to distress gets lower and they do not feel in control, and this vicious cycle leads to more distress.
The best performers still have goals. They want to achieve, be successful, are prepared to show abilities, and maintain good appearance, show themselves to be better than others in competition.
But they are also prepared to fail, to make mistakes, to see the weakness in their abilities, to appear authentic, and are prepared to see others win and achieve.
They can do this comfortably when they know and hold true to living in alignment with their VALUES.
In the moment, people with goals contingent to self-validation will do what they can to protect self-esteem. They will choose actions with a chance of success and what is immediately rewarding, and learn to avoid activities they think they may be poor at. This may not be in alignment with their deeper core Values. Which could lead to a negative sense of self and wellbeing.
What the top performers know is that Values offer persistence and self-regulation. By knowing their Values, and what is truly important to them, they are more prepared to keep going through the tough stuff so that they live in alignment with it. They are more set up to manage the difficult mental, emotional and physical reactions that are inevitable in high performance environments because their actions have deep reward that emanate from a core Value.
What are your core Values? Can you identify them?
Leave a comment if you would like some helpful prompts to help you discover your innate Values.