Supercoach - Michael Neill [24]
An impressive statistic—if it were actually true.
In researching an earlier project, I discovered that there was no record of the study ever having been done at Yale, Princeton, or any other Ivy League university. Tony Robbins reported he had first heard the story from Zig Ziglar; Zig Ziglar couldn’t remember where he’d first heard it, but he thought it was from . . . wait for it . . . Tony Robbins!
Now that’s not to say that either of these people is dishonest or that goals are “bad.” But in a world where there’s nowhere for you to get to, the trick to goal setting is to fully involve yourself in making things happen without investing your self-worth or emotional well-being into their achievement.
I first learned this distinction from supercoach George Pransky, and it helped me to understand this secret at a much deeper level. In order to share the distinction with you, I’d like you to imagine that there are two separate elements involved in creating anything you want in the outside world:
1. The first is mental and physical involvement— the extent to which you put your creative and physical energies into the creation of that outcome.
2. The second is emotional investment—the extent to which you put your happiness, self-worth, and well-being on the line in your pursuit of an outcome.
There are essentially four ways in which these elements can combine in relation to any goal, problem, or circumstance you can imagine in the world:
Low Investment/Low Involvement
Low investment/low involvement is when you don’t particularly care (or even know) what happens, and you’re doing pretty much nothing to influence the outcome in any way.
Someone who doesn’t care about sports will be unaffected by the outcome of an athletic competition. Someone who has no interest in a relationship, job, or world situation not only won’t care how those things are going, they will do little or nothing to attempt to influence how things go in the future.
On the plus side, low investment/low involvement is an extremely low-stress and relatively easy way to be; the downside is, you miss out on both the fun of creation and the potential impact you could be having on your life and the world.
High Investment/Low Involvement
One of the few fistfights I’ve ever found myself in came when I misguidedly suggested to a British soccer fan that his team’s loss that day to their cross-town rivals didn’t really merit the amount of moral outrage he was expressing at the pub that night. This is, in fact, the lot of all true fans—their moods rise and fall with their teams’ fortunes, yet apart from cheering loudly and offering up the occasional fervent prayer, there’s nothing they can do to affect the outcome.
This is the high investment/low involvement dilemma—you care too much and do too little. While in some situations this is necessitated by circumstance (that is, it’s unlikely your favorite team will ever let you onto the field to kick the game-winning field goal), the lack of action is more often due to learned helplessness and emotional paralysis—it seems as though there’s so much to be done that you wind up feeling overwhelmed and doing nothing.
High Investment/High Involvement
Graduates of motivational seminars, social crusaders and political activists, and high-flying entrepreneurs and careerists tend to pursue their goals from a high investment/high involvement point of view. They work long hours, take massive action, do whatever it takes, and then ride the emotional roller coaster up through the thrill of victory and down into the agony of defeat. One minute they’re on top of the world; the next they’re down in the pits of despair.
In fact, how well they’re doing often comes down not so much to whether you happen to catch them in an up or a