Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (7 page)

Once Tim became aware of what he was doing and stopped thinking of himself as a quitter, he began to get referrals and then interviews until he was finally able to redirect his career in the way he wanted. Tim's behavior is hardly unique: Cultural pressures may be invisible, but they are powerful and omnipresent nonetheless.

A Bit of Clarification

Although we all use the word
goal
, a more specific discussion of the term is in order. What are goals anyway, and why are they important? Since goals direct our actions, human beings, by definition, are goal oriented. At the beginning, the original human goals—which we all continue to share—were simpler than the ones that crowd our minds in the twenty-first century. The human to-do list was once short but essential and focused on staying alive; finding food, water, and shelter; having sex; and belonging to a group. Now, at any given moment, each of us has an array of goals to which we devote varying degrees of attention. Some of them are so simple that we perform them without even consciously thinking about them. (If the goal is to drive to work, we have a series of interim goals—getting out of bed, showering, getting dressed, grabbing some coffee or breakfast, gathering the things we need for the day, locking the door, starting the car—that help propel us forward to achieving this goal.)

A goal may be intrinsic or extrinsic. An
intrinsic goal
emanates from within the individual—sparked by the mental image we have or want to have of ourselves as well as our own immediate desires. As
Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci
write, “
The most basic distinction is between
intrinsic motivation
, which refers to doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable, and
extrinsic motivation
, which refers to doing something because it leads to a separable outcome.” Not surprisingly, intrinsically motivated goals garner the lion's share of creativity and effort.

These intrinsic goals can be abstract personal strivings and pertain to the development of the self (goals such as becoming more empathetic, standing up for oneself, making new friends, becoming more cultured, and achieving inner peace) or concrete (e.g., the goal of acting in such a way as to be perceived as intelligent or as a good worker). Extrinsic goals, on the other hand, have their origin in the outside world. They may be things someone else wants us to do
(be a conscientious student, become a lawyer like Dad, be a better spouse) or may emanate from other nonsocial cues in the environment. As Ryan and Deci note,
“Extrinsic motivation has typically
been characterized as a pale and impoverished (even if powerful) form of motivation that contrasts with intrinsic motivation.” In later chapters, when we focus on mapping goals, answering the question of whether a goal is intrinsic or extrinsic to you will be key to your understanding of whether you need to quit and, more important, where you want to head next.

Some goals are short term and decidedly concrete (pick up dry cleaning, buy cat litter, drive kids to school, send Uncle Dave a birthday card, pay bills). Others are mid-term goals, sometimes combining concrete and abstract goals (get more exercise to stay healthier, save money to move to a better school district, work on controlling temper so family dinners go more smoothly). Still others are long-term achievement goals (go to law school and become a partner in a firm, make lots of money, buy a boat and sail to Fiji, find the right mate for the rest of one's life). Psychological theory has classified achievement goals by dividing them into three useful categories: Mastery goals are focused on the development of a skill or an area of competence or expertise. Performance-approach goals focus on attaining competence or expertise relative to other people. Performance-avoidance goals avoid incompetence in comparison with others.

Each of us, over the course of life, will have a mix of both performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals. We choose some goals because of the promise they hold—some desired state or outcome. These are called approach goals because we initiate actions to effect or get closer to that desired outcome. The formula here is “If I do X, then Y will happen,” with X and Y being, respectively, whatever action and whatever result you wish. Approach goals can be either concrete (“If I smile at her and engage her interest, she'll go out with me”) or abstract (“If I learn another language, people will think I am more cultured”). Similarly, we choose avoidance goals to dodge an unwanted outcome. The formula here is “If I don't do X,
then Y won't happen.” It's why some people never smoke and others stop, for example. Both approach and avoidance goals play an important role in human life, not to mention the lives of lower species, including the dog or cat that may be sitting at your feet as you read, or the gazelle that decides to stay thirsty when it sees the lion at the watering hole.
As John A. Bargh and his colleagues'
work has shown, for the most part, human beings automatically and often without consciousness classify and evaluate whatever comes into view on a positive or negative dimension; it's built into the survival of our own species and that of other species.

Andrew J. Elliot and Todd M. Thrash
have suggested that approach and avoidance could equally be used to describe a person's temperament. Doing so yields a different and perhaps more effective model of personality when it comes to goals than the “big five” characteristics used in psychology. Elliot and Thrash argue that people with approach temperaments have a sensitivity to positive and desirable goals, show emotional and behavioral receptivity to these positive goals, and are inclined to pursue them. People with avoidance temperaments, on the other hand, are inclined to respond to the negatives inherent in any situation, choose goals on the basis of avoidance, and focus on the negative cues in their environments.

Approach and avoidance temperaments aren't synonyms for looking at the glass as half full or half empty—an optimistic or pessimistic point of view—but a much broader life approach that operates across affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to situations, events, and even people and relationships in the world. In fact, the orientation—either approach or avoidance—is so fixed that it actually crosses over from one domain to another, as can be seen in a series of experiments Elliot and his colleagues conducted and are consistent across the life span.

Imagine two people, each of whom has the goal of forging a friendship. One of them is motivated by approach, drawn to the goal of making a friend because of the satisfying social connection, the shared intimacy, the way friends help open up a person's social and emotional understanding. The other person is motivated by
avoidance; he or she seeks friendship to avoid the social isolation of being alone, not wanting to feel unpopular, rejected, or out of sync in a world where people have friends. If these two people were to try to forge a friendship with each other, what would follow is a reasonably predictable script of misunderstandings and disappointments. Even though the goal (making friends) is ostensibly the same, the “why” behind the goal is startlingly different. Shift this example to a more intimate relationship—boyfriend and girlfriend, lovers, or husband and wife—and the importance of the motivation becomes all the more apparent.

The distinction between these two motivations
and what happens to the people with one orientation or the other is enormous. As Elliot notes,
“avoidance motivation is limited
in a structural sense, in that by its very nature it can only lead to the absence of a negative outcome (when effective) or the presence of a negative outcome (when ineffective).” More tellingly (and perhaps depressingly), “thus,
avoidance motivation is designed to facilitate
surviving, while approach motivation is designed to facilitate thriving.”

Switching into “survival mode,” even when there's no danger—thinking the lion might be at the watering hole can leave you dying of thirst—not only can mean lost opportunities for growth and development but may even propel a person or an animal closer to the very thing he or she seeks to avoid.

What makes some people approach-oriented and others governed by avoidance? The answer, friends, is childhood—yes, back to the nursery—and upbringing, especially attachment to parents or caregivers. We'll return to this subject in the next chapter.

Conflicting Goals

Given the complexity of human nature and desires, all goals are, unfortunately, not created equal; nor are they always compatible with each other. For women and men alike, the ongoing cultural dialogue about having it all is, of course, about conflicting
goals—balancing the need or desire to work with the goal of being an attentive and available parent, fulfilling one satisfying aspect of life without sacrificing another, being in close relationships without losing sight of ourselves and our own needs. Understanding the harmful effects of conflicting goals—such as emotional distress, the loss of general well-being, and a negative impact on health—is another reason that being able to consider real goal disengagement is an important life skill.

Psychologists Robert Emmons and Laura King
conducted a series of experiments to examine the effect of conflicting personal goals. Participants were asked to compile a list of fifteen goals, which could be motivated by either approach or avoidance. (Examples of avoidance goals given by the participants, who were college students, included avoiding dependence on a boyfriend and avoiding spreading malicious gossip.) Lists in hand, they were then asked to answer which goals were in conflict and, then, whether succeeding in one goal “had a helpful, harmful, or no effect on another striving.” Finally, the participants were asked about ambivalence—whether succeeding at one goal over another would make them unhappy. Emmons and King followed up with this group a year later.

Not surprisingly, the results revealed that people were most ambivalent about goals that were in conflict with other goals. Both conflict and ambivalence were associated with loss of psychological well-being and health problems.

In a second experiment, after they filled out the goal lists and noted conflicts and ambivalences, the participants filled out mood reports twice a day for twenty-one days. They listed both positive (happy, joyful, pleased) and negative (unhappy, angry, anxious) emotions. These were then correlated with self-reports on health as well as health records from the prior and current years. A third experiment had the original participants from the first study report on their thoughts and actions, prompted by beepers that went off at random intervals.

What Emmons and King found reflects on both the cost of conflicting goals and the value of goal disengagement. First, they
found that when there's conflict between personal goals, people ruminate more, but do less, about the goals—another variation on the “stuck” theme: “Conflict appeared to have an immobilizing effect on action and was associated with lowered well-being.” As the researchers explained, besides leaving people stuck, conflict between goals also hurt people's psychological and physical health.

It turns out that conflict between goals without disengagement can literally make you sick, not to mention profoundly unhappy. The story of Linda and George demonstrates what conflicting goals look like in real life.

Linda, age sixty-two, and George, sixty-five, have been married for eighteen years, and while their living arrangement is unconventional—she lives in San Diego and he's in San Francisco, so they've always commuted—it's hardly unique. They own a place in Colorado together. It was a second marriage for each of them, and when it started, both still had children under the age of majority where they lived. The children are now grown, but Linda's and George's work and habits still keep each partner in his or her own home base. They live parallel lives that connect for weekends, long vacations, phone calls, and e-mails. Their plan, though, is to live together when they both retire.

Although their life together is free of the daily stresses that most couples living together are familiar with, it's hardly stress-free. While George spends freely, Linda is much more focused on saving and the future. Over the years, their different attitudes toward money have sparked enormous arguments. Linda initiates these confrontations, usually after she has discovered a financial matter that George decided on his own. (He has sold off furniture and other valuables, used money earmarked for retirement for other purposes, and overspent on his hobbies and other interests). In the past, Linda has been momentarily energized to find a solution, but she gets tired of fighting with him and life goes on, which leaves the conflict between them unresolved. But as retirement nears, these tensions have become more constant, particularly once Linda discovered the enormous amount of credit card debt—over six figures'
worth—George had accumulated. He is strapped for cash because of the high cost of interest on this debt.

Linda has tried a number of approaches—going to a counselor, among them—but George remains resistant to her suggestions. Since he has earned this money, he wants to be free to spend it as he sees fit. He gets angry if Linda suggests that they have mutual oversight on spending. She is frightened for the financial future, is worried about retirement, and suffers a great deal of emotional distress. But her striving for financial security isn't her only goal; emotional connection and being part of a family are important to her as well. She is also afraid of spending the rest of her life without a partner. So, when she considers leaving George, those other goals pop into play and she remains effectively stuck—still made actively unhappy by her fears and his actions, but unable to do anything about it.

Conflicting goals leave people stuck without the hope of resolution unless disengagement is a possibility. The particulars of Linda's conflicting goals can be switched with others—work satisfaction versus monetary reward, family stability versus having your emotional needs met by a true partner—but it all comes down to the same thing.