Step 38: Stretch Goals and Failure
“If at first you succeed, try something harder.”
Stretch goals are inspiring and ambitious targets that are so challenging they exceed our current known ability to complete. In fact, stretch goals aren’t meant to be fully completed, they are meant to stretch us.
When was the last time you failed at something you fully committed to? To answer this honestly (and Tribe Leaders are honest) you must first ask yourself when was the last time you fully committed to something?
Most of us keep something in reserve. This leaves a psychological escape hatch or backdoor when can run to when things get hard and the potential for defeat arrives. By staying uncommitted we can always tell ourselves that ‘when we finally commit, things will be different’. This is an adolescent strategy of avoiding failure and leads us to only commit one foot in relationships and projects. Ironically, this failure-avoidance strategy often leads directly to the failure we are avoiding.
At Google and many other high performing organizations, they have addressed this universal human strategy of avoiding failure through lack of commitment by building failure into their goal-setting strategy. They expect a certain amount of failure from every goal. If a goal is completely met it wasn’t big enough. If you are always hitting your goals, how can you ever know how much potential is left on the table?
“A goal is not always meant to be reached.
It often serves simply as something to aim at.”
-Bruce Lee
The only way to find out your edges is to go past them. Experiencing failure is the cost of exploring potential. In addition, experiencing failure is how we learn and expand capacity and skill so the next goal-setting sequence is even bigger.
Normalizing failure in the pursuit of stretch goals is the most effective growth strategy available to you and your family or team but it requires the trust, safety and resiliency of kinship to sustain. Failure is damaging to our psychology but growth is healing to our psychology. Stretch goals will stretch you and your team.
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important
as what you become by achieving your goals.”
-Henry David Thoreau
Easy goals will be achievable and less challenging but will generate little genuine excitement and lead to no breakthroughs. Stretch goals will contain the potential for failure but also inspiration and growth as well as breakthroughs. This is where freedom and meaning exist.
The capacity and character increase from stretch goals is often more important than the goal itself. The process of commitment, failure and learning is indispensable for sustainable success. Stretch goals are the road toward what is possible in life. That road is more important than the goals along the road.
“A goal should scare you a little and excite you a lot.”
-Joe Vitale
Stretch goals are obvious in the realm of exercise. Besides requiring you to stretch to be healthy, goals only achieve results if they are slightly beyond your limits. In weightlifting it means periodically going to failure which is where the maximum growth happens.
The exercise example is also important because it includes the fact that we do not get stronger during the challenge. We get stronger in the recovery phase afterwards. The same is true for every stretch goal in every arena of your life. Whether it be a relationship or a challenging project, we only get stronger and gain more capacity in the recovery and learning afterwards.
This recovery phase is the reflection we must do afterwards to reap the benefits of the struggle. This will often include forgiveness to yourself, your family and team.
Setting goals is how we make the invisible visible. Setting stretch goals is how we transform potential into the palpable and real. There are two primary factors to consider if your team is ready to tackle the opportunity and challenge of engaging with stretch goals.
First, are you currently successful at hitting your standard goals? Are you generally winning in the arena in which you play? This confidence and feeling of being successful is vital before we take on the ‘failure’ that is inherent when engaging with stretch goals.
If you have any doubt about the level of morale and optimism on your team, you should have an authentic conversation with them about whether or not to implement stretch goals because they require full participation and engagement for the character and capacity stretch to be successful.
Secondly, are there resources not being utilized in your family or work team? Is there a surplus of time that is available or could be made available by cutting out redundant meetings or time suck activities like doom scrolling on social media?
Is there a surplus of money that is being spent on frivolous, non-essential costs that could be better used with a more valuable and inspiring stretch goal project?
Are your people underutilized and needing more responsibility and challenge?
If you are on a winning streak and have capacity that could be better used, you are in the perfect, healthy conflict position to take advantage of stretch goals.
Click here To watch the video of Step 38: Stretch Goals and Failure
Leaders Must Write and Speak
Answer these questions in your journal by really writing them down. Discuss them with at least one of your most important people and really listen to their response.
Is morale, inspiration and competitiveness lacking in your family or work team? Is the personal and professional growth flatlined or stagnant? Where is this happening?
Does your team have the resiliency and capacity to engage with stretch goals?
Ubuntu,
Philip Folsom