Tired of setting New Year’s resolutions you inevitably won’t follow through with come February?
Do you find identifying and setting goals to help you improve at your work from home job challenging?
Forming goals is just one part of the equation; the other half is to identify the outcomes you want to avoid. These are sometimes called your anti-goals.
What are anti-goals? What are their benefits, and how do you make your own? Let’s find out.
What Are Anti-Goals?
As its name suggests, anti-goals, also known as avoidance goals, are an inversion of one’s goals and aspirations. They are outcomes you don’t want, and would do best to avoid.
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, popularized this way of thinking with his quote: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”
Forming these helps you figure out the things you don’t like and find ways to overcome or avoid them.
Additionally, unlike goals, which can be influenced by peers or social expectations, your avoidance goals are unique to you.
For example, one of the things I want to avoid is spending most of my time at work.
Thus, my anti-goal is to avoid unnecessary overtime hours at my job.
The Benefits of Having Anti-Goals
Still on the fence about setting your own anti-goals? Here are some of the advantages of making them:
We’re More Inclined to Pursue Goals to Avoid a Negative Outcome
With the numerous guides for setting and achieving goals, you may be wondering why you even need to set avoidance goals in the first place.
For starters, our brains are naturally wired to avoid danger, pain, and suffering. This natural instinct helped our ancestors survive and remains with us today in the form of negativity bias.
Research shows that framing an incentive to help us avoid pain and suffering increases our motivation to pursue it.
Between working hard on your online work from home job to avoid missing out on paying your utilities or to gain a promotion, which is a more effective motivator?
It Helps You Focus on the Process, Not Just the Outcome
When we create goals to fulfill, we sometimes fixate on achieving them as quickly as possible.
However, doing so means we’ll never be truly content and satisfied since we’re constantly chasing new goals.
Setting anti-goals prevents this by helping you define the things you don’t want – so you can better enjoy your journey towards your goal.
It Helps You Be More Flexible and Adaptable
Achieving avoidance goals requires flexibility and adaptability. It requires being open to new ideas, adjusting current ones, and reflecting on your previous mistakes.
These help you improve your ability to think on the fly and focus on the factors you can control in your life.
How to Make Anti-Goals
Now that you’ve seen its benefits, how do you start making anti-goals for your career?
Describe What a Bad Day Would Look Like
Start with the outcomes you want to avoid. Be specific and honest about these since this is your opportunity to reflect on your fears and concerns.
An example of this is constantly stressing and experiencing a creative block in your online design job.
Outline Your Anti-Goals
Once you’ve identified the worst that could happen, it’s time to match it with an anti-goal.
Going back to my previous example, the appropriate avoidance goal for this will be: “I want to avoid missing my breaks at work.”
Imagine What Would Happen if Your Anti-Goals Became a Reality
To further motivate you to abide by your anti-goals, visualize what would happen if they came to be.
How will this affect your personal and professional life? What about your relationship with your loved ones?
This step is vital as it gives a sense of urgency to beef up your avoidance today.
Take Action
Finally, it’s time for you to put your anti-goals into practice.
Returning to our example about avoiding stress and creative blocks, it helps to take your breaks to rest and regain your strength.
The Secret to Career Success? Turning Your Fears Into Motivators
Although they may sound a little complex, anti-goals are essentially finding ways around outcomes you don’t like to achieve your goals.
These aren’t meant to supplant your career goals; they’re actually meant to support them.
By utilizing our mind’s natural negative bias, we can better motivate ourselves to improve without too much difficulty.
Speaking of which, is landing an online job one of your main goals this year? If so, Remote Staff is here to help.
Our jobs list contains plenty of available positions for you to choose from. These range from online transcription jobs to engineering and architecture jobs.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up here. Good luck!
