Mini-Choices Are Way Better Than Big Beautiful Goal Setting
Conventional thinking about goal-setting talks about dreaming big, reaching for the stars, never giving up, leaning in, getting gritty, and never resting. It’s about keeping yourself ravenous and parched. But this kind of “driving force” energy, effective as it is for many people including myself, is actually, in the long term, an energy that takes more than it gives. You are putting yourself in a constant state of less than and not enough. And feeding off this kind of hunger can become limiting or even addictive, feeding off a scarcity mindset of what we haven’t become yet or don’t yet have, as opposed to an abundance mindset of what we already are and have.
As a coach, I work with clients to understand how different states of energy lead to different states of being. But first, a la “physician heal thyself” I had to face my own recalibration. Hunger pangs and parched throats are the body’s ways of signaling for help. They are survival mechanisms. So I wondered what it would be like to shift from a survival mechanism, to something more gentle, maybe something closer to feeling snackish. Embracing snackishness is a tasty tidbit that I’m going to call “Mini Choices.”
In essence, it’s about taking advantage of what the actual snack industry has done with devastating success, about engineering snacks and candy that are easily at hand, bite sized so you can eat a lot without realizing it, and full of chemicals (sugar) that signal pleasure to our decision-making center, the brain.
So Mini-Choices is about easy, simple, bite-sized choices that give our brain’s reward center constant mini dopamine surges. Most importantly, Mini-Choices isn’t just breaking down a larger goal into component parts. Let’s say you’re with a toddler who has learned the letters A, B and C. In the moment, you’re not thinking that learning the letters is in service of a grand goal of becoming international best selling novelist. You wouldn’t even be thinking that the current goal is to read their first chapter book. The entire goal, in that moment, is simply to add one more letter to their repertoire. In the moment, a Mini-Choice is not in service of anything more (though it will surely lead to places as Dr. Seuss tells us), Most importantly, it’s something that can be done now.
Say a person, me, wants to perform stand-up comedy. A dream-big approach to the goal would be, I want to become as famous as Atsuko and get my own Netflix special. Conventional, scarcity based thinking will constantly remind me of how short I am of the goal, with the idea being that this awareness will drive me forward. And even though a scarcity mindset can create a push, our brains are more wired to respond to pleasure.
So here’s how Mini-Choices make abundance possible. It’s simple: set a goal that is so small and so ridiculously easy that you would scoff at it. Something that you could do right now with barely any effort and with the resources you currently have. A goal of getting a paid gig, way too big. A goal of going to 10 more open mics, too big. But how about, researching a potential app to take notes for possible material? That’s easy, so easy it almost feels like cheating. That’s how you know it’s the right calibration.
It doesn’t matter that the success was so simple and easy, my brain still feels pretty satisfied. And the brain wants more of what feels good. Building on the constant rewards of Mini-Choices, after I find a good notes app, I might actually jot down some ideas.Might actually piece together 4 minutes of new material. Might actually go to a late night open mic since (once I’m refreshed just a few weeks from now) I no longer have to wake up at 5:30 AM. So every step along the way becomes a guaranteed success. Instead of a series of multiple failures with one possible success (or even a crowning failure, because, seriously very few people get a Netflix special) at the end, it will look be a continuous string of enjoyable successes.
