1: “I’m getting close to retiring and, frankly, it is scaring the bejesus out of me,” says Dennis, who is sixty-six and lives in rural Kansas.
“For the past forty years, Dennis has worked in higher education, overseeing grant programs for low-income students and serving as their academic adviser,” Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.
“I’ve worked hard to help underprepared students find success in college,” Dennis shares. “For a good number of years, I’ve been heavily focused on this task. . . I’m having difficulty coping with the change. It feels like a loss of purpose.”
Dennis was depressed. “I had worked myself into a frozen state unable to deal with the practicality or emotionality of this change,” he says.
2: Then Dennis discovered SuperBetter, a framework by game designer Jane McGonigal that transforms real-life challenges into a game.
You take actions to build mental, physical, emotional, and social resilience.
Dennis began by working on both physical and mental resilience simultaneously.
“So I got up once every hour and did at least one small thing on a project I had been ignoring,” he shares. “I noticed this started to make for pretty good evenings,”
“The projects I have undertaken,” Dennis shares, “vary from simply watering plants, organizing my laptop/reading section, and doing stretches, to larger projects like vacuuming the house, pulling weeds in the yard, or like the last three nights, deep-cleaning the carpets on the first floor. (Second floor begins this weekend.)”
Next up was a larger project: Spend time journaling his thoughts and formulating plans.
“The point of this for me is that I have been able to shift away from an inward, downward spiral and refocus my attention outward,” he says. “I was finally just now able to put together a plan for retirement and talked with my wife about it.”
Dennis’s big ah-ha? “I am beginning to consider how I change from assisting students to assisting other people in volunteer roles,” he says.
The good news? “I am becoming more excited to think about this transition,” he reports.
3: When you are faced with an obstacle or a struggle, there are three different types of goals you can pursue: A difficult goal, a do-your-best goal, and a strategy goal.
Consider two different potential obstacles: Running a marathon and getting out of credit card debt.
“Adopting a difficult goal means trying to achieve something very specific and very challenging,” Jane writes. “It’s the kind of goal you could reasonably expect to fail at, even if you try your best.
“A marathon runner’s difficult goal might be ‘I want to run this marathon in under four hours, which would be faster than I’ve ever run one before.’
“A credit card debtor’s difficult goal would be ‘I want to be 100 percent debt-free a year from today,'” she notes.
Difficult goals can be highly motivating and effective for typical or low-stakes life circumstances.
“But in a high-stakes situation, like getting out of debt,” Jane observes, “difficult goals are more likely to add to your negative stress, making it harder for you to thrive.”
The second option is to set a “do-your-best” goal. Here, you focus on doing your best and putting forth your full effort, rather than fixating on the outcome. You try to perform well, but do not define specific expectations or results to achieve.
“The marathon runner’s do-your-best goal would be ‘Try to finish this race without walking, but if you have to walk, that’s okay, too. Just do your best!’’” Jane notes.
“The credit card debtor’s do-your-best goal might be ‘I’ll pay more attention to what I’m spending and try to avoid buying things I can’t afford.'”
Do-your-best goals can reduce performance anxiety, which is good in certain circumstances.
“But generally speaking, unless your biggest problem is a crippling fear of failing to meet your own standards, a do-your-best goal is not particularly motivating or helpful,” she reasons.
Strategy goals are about learning and applying new methods that will help you succeed. You focus on discovering strategies that increase your chances of improvement.
“Instead of focusing on a specific outcome (as with a difficult goal) or a general effort level (as with a do-your-best goal), you put your attention on learning and improving concrete skills and strategies that will help you do better in the future,” Jane writes.
For the marathon runner, the goal is “to try out a new strategy in this race,” she shares. “I’ll run the first half slower than my practice pace, so I have lots of energy left in the tank for the second half of the race.”
For the credit card debtor, the strategy goal might be: “Every week for the next six months, I’m going to adopt one new strategy for saving money that I can put toward paying down my debt. This week the strategy is to pack my lunch instead of eating out at work. Six months from now I’ll be doing twenty-five things to help me get debt-free.”
Both the marathon runner and the credit card debtor succeed by learning and improving, even if their situations are tough or uncontrollable.
“Researchers have figured out that for someone operating under a threat mindset, a strategy goal is absolutely the best kind to adopt,” Jane explains. “When the stakes are high or the loss severe, a strategy mindset will increase your resilience and improve your coping abilities.”
Strategy goals help you build new strengths and capabilities by focusing on developing and practicing effective strategies.
“These strengths and abilities will be a real resource for you,” she observes. “They will help you be braver, happier, healthier, or more successful within the reality of the threat or loss you’re facing.
“Your strategies may not change that reality,” Jane notes, “but they will help you find and maximize your power to do and feel the absolute best you can, given the obstacle you face.”
Which is why Dennis succeeded: He employed a strategy goal to keep learning and practicing different strategies to increase the four types of resilience.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I focusing too much on outcomes instead of building the strategies that will help me grow through this challenge?
Action: Choose one challenge and define a strategy goal I can practice this week to build strength and momentum.
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