Lessons - Unlocking Fulfillment: Aligning Personal Values and Goals for Lasting Success

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode, we'll feature concise and insightful, actionable conversations and tactics, providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. Golden Grounds is a buzzword people throw around, but people don't actually understand how impactful it can be in your life. What's going on Scott here? Today I want to speak about Golden Grounds. I find this is a very important topic that is a buzzword people throw around, but people don't actually understand what it means or how to apply it to your life or how impactful it can be in literally all areas of your life. Golden Grounds is aligning with who you are as an individual and aligning literally everything you do in your life with what you're supposed to be doing. All the work you do, the relationships, the hobbies, the sports, the activities, everything, it has to align because when it aligns, it feels good, it feels right, it feels like it gives you energy. But I would say that 90% of people are not aligned. 90% of people do not have golden grounds across all the different areas of their life, which is why so many people are very unhappy. And I know that business people fire off the definition of golden grounds with ease. And what they say is it's the alignment of individual goals with the goals of an organization. So this is in a business context, but nobody really argues against that because employee company alignment simply makes sense. Why? Because congruence is just a fancy word for least resistance. This means that there's no friction between teams and departments when their goals are in sync. Everyone is clear on their objectives and the direction of the business and their actions reflect that understanding. Now, I often think about the idea of congruence on a personal level because wouldn't it be nice if in your life, everything was just in sync. If it didn't feel like there was a struggle between deciding whether or not you wanted to spend extra time with your family or spend more time on a side project or go on a trip and travel to see your parents that you haven't seen in a few months. I think that when we look at ourselves closely, we aren't that different from a business or an organization or made up of all these different moving parts. We're just really bad at aligning it because we have all these different conflicting priorities. And I think that our physical being very easily falls out of alignment with our mental, emotional, and our spiritual selves. But when we are in alignment, when we are in congruence, when our various parts are connected and working together, we find the path of least resistance. We find the space of least resistance. And when you're in this space, you know it, and when you're not, everything is tough and life is tough. So I want to break down some ideas that I have, that I've researched and I've incorporated into my own life on how to find congruence. And it's actually simpler than you think. So first, let's talk about motives. We all have implicit motives. When I started down this congruence rabbit hole, after reading a fascinating study published in 2017, it was titled Enhancing congruence between implicit motives and explicit goal commitments. It was a controlled study of German students. The idea was to see if increasing goal congruence improved well-being. But we have to define a few terms first before I go further. First, I'm going to teach you and help you understand what implicit motives means. So you'll find an excellent breakdown, but if you go on Google, but the idea is this. Implicit motives are the unconscious drives or proclivities that lead us to take action. Now we might be motivated by a desire for power or autonomy or intimacy or achievement. But these can all work in harmony with our conscious goals. Explicit goal commitments, on the other hand, are those goals that we've set for ourselves consciously. They're often career oriented. What job do I want? What salary am I aiming for? How will I get there? But we set these goals across all walks of life. When both sets of goals implicit and explicit align in congruence, it creates a strong sense of identity and clarity of purpose. We know what we want and why we're doing it. So what does congruence congruency mean in practice? It's a lot of these terms come straight from psych theory. It's hard to picture exactly what I'm talking about in real life, so let's bring it back to the everyday. Take a moment and consider your life right now. Do you wake up in the morning with enthusiasm or dread? Are you doing what comes naturally to you? Are there any areas of your life where things don't point fit together like pieces of a jigsaw that just won't go into place? As humans, we tend to lean more toward one of three implicit motives, power, affiliation or achievement. We develop these in very early stages of our personal development. Maybe your childhood was particularly turbulent. So you've leaned into power as a way of protecting yourself or maybe your parents were particularly nurturing. So you found solace in affiliation. Whatever the case, these implicit motives form the foundation of who we are and what drives us forward. So now imagine your main implicit motive is affiliation or intimacy. You're going to be best suited to a job where you can nurture and help others. And therefore, the most congruent career goal you can set is the one that gives you the opportunity to do that. So that seems basic, but why do we misalign ourselves? It's fair to ask if our implicit motives are so integral to us as people, why don't we always align our explicit goals with them? And the answer is simple. We form implicit and explicit motives at different stages. implicit motives are much more affected by the way we're socialized. The societal pressures we feel, the stories we hear and the beliefs we internalize. So imagine you're someone who deeply values control. You've gravitated towards problem-solving autonomy and a sense of mastery, but since you were a child, you've been told that the only way to guarantee success is to become a lawyer or an accountant. So that's what you set out to do. The issue here is obvious. Even though these are incredible jobs, people can absolutely thrive being a lawyer or an accountant or a doctor or whatever, they require a different set of skills than those inherent within problem-solving and control-oriented careers. You're not even starting from the same place as somebody who's chosen their career consciously with congruence in mind. Keep in mind that we can talk about any aspect of life when it comes to congruence. I'm just using career paths as the most obvious example because this is the spot where people are misaligned the most. And then to follow up to this, maybe you may be asking, why do we need congruence? I hate personally, I hate putting any human in a box and sometimes topics like this can feel a bit prescriptive. Of course, there will be control-oriented people who are drawn to the medical field or affiliate-oriented people who thrive in a work-from-home job. What research has suggested, though, is that for the most part, people who align their goals with their implicit motives are going to experience more satisfaction. Why? Put very simply, it's because our implicit motives determine what success and happiness mean to us in different situations. There's a few studies by Brunstein, Schulteis and Grassman, amongst others, that can back this up and you can go look up these studies if you want, but an achievement-oriented person is going to find satisfaction in the completion of a task while an affiliate-oriented person may find the same level of satisfaction in being part of a team. Think of these motives as the compass for how you measure success in different aspects of your life. The compass was set a long time ago, it's not moving. What you need to do is orient your goals in the same direction. Now, if you don't, the risk is that you run out of resources, both physically and emotionally, to continue pursuing your goals. We've only got a limited amount of energy. Research shows that incongruing goals will drain our resources while congruent ones energize us. So, the interesting thing about implicit motives is that they're unconscious. You don't decide what to value more or less. You just do, and it stems back to your childhood experiences. But psychologists, as they do, have been brainstorming ways to measure and understand these unconscious motives. One of the most popular methods is the paying Shulthai's picture story exercise, or PSC. It's where you're asked to construct stories based on different images. The themes that come up in the stories give an indication of what you value in life, and then also there's a trial and error approach where I think this is what most of us spend our lives doing. We try a relationship, or a job, or a hobby, and if it doesn't fit our motives, it becomes clear pretty quickly. We're drained, we're unfulfilled, and we're just absolutely itching to do something else. You can't get out of this thing fast enough, and I'm guessing if you're watching this, you pursued your fair share of goals at this point. So what I suggest is that if you don't have some professional who's actually helping you map this out, take out an old-fashioned pen and paper, sit down, and reflect using these prompts. Of the goals you set for yourself over the years, personal business relationships, etc., which energized you, which took effort, but became second nature after a while. Are there any common themes between those goals? Which goals made you feel drained, uninspired, pressured? What do those goals have in common? You'll quickly find out, despite our unconsciousness, we do have motives that affect which goals work out and which don't. For example, you might realize through this exercise that all of your people-based goals were the ones that energized you while all of your recognition-based goals were the ones that drained you. Every time you worked to strengthen a relationship, you found out it not only enriched but motivated you. It'd be fairly safe to assume that your main implicit motivation is affiliation. Once you understand what success and happiness mean to you, what drives or motivates, what energizes you, and the opposite as well, what detracts, what basically sucks the life force out of you, setting goals becomes way easier. You won't be wasting energy on something that isn't congruent with who you are because that's what InconGruency does, it waste your resources. In that study of German students that I mentioned earlier, it was actually found that the more these students were educated on their implicit motives, the more their goal congruency increased. Their satisfaction indicator is increased as a direct result. Here's the bottom line, at its heart, goal congruence isn't a new concept. It's just reminding us to stay true to ourselves while also striving for what we want out of life. When you can align your goals with your implicit motives, you're going to experience higher levels of satisfaction due to an efficient use of resources, physical and emotional. Personally, I'm setting myself a goal in 2023 to spend more time and self-reflection about the past goals that I've set so I can optimize for what I'm doing in the future, and I think you can tell all of us about what works and what doesn't. Goals are rarely easy to meet, but there's such a thing as too much resistance, and it usually means we need to step back, reassess and realign.