The UnScripted Mind
Join your host Professional Counselor, Jim Cunningham, as he dives into the complex world of mental wellness. From anxiety and depression to resilience and recovery, "The Unscripted Mind" offers candid conversations and expert insights, encouraging listeners to confront their own journeys while gaining tools and perspectives that promote healing and understanding—one unscripted conversation at a time.
The UnScripted Mind
The Art of the Grind: Reveling in the Routine
Tune in as we dissect research-backed benefits of setting process-oriented goals and adopting a growth mindset, drawing insights from Carol Dweck's pioneering studies. We discuss how these concepts can supercharge your motivation, enhance your performance, and lead to greater overall satisfaction. Packed with practical tools and fresh perspectives, this episode aims to help you redefine your own metrics for success, build resilience, and recognize the tangible victories in your daily life. Don't miss this chance to change how you view your path to happiness and fulfillment.
The goal of The UnScripted Mind Podcast is to give you fresh perspectives, practical insights and tools you can use to give you more choices, self-awareness and control of your feelings, reactions and behaviors.
How do you define success? Money, followers on social media, promotions at work, a nice car, a new house, personal achievements, maybe successful children? But what if we were playing the wrong game but we just didn't know it? What if there was another way to define winning, an easier way to be happy and less stressed. Stick around, that's the topic on this episode of the Unscripted Mind.
Jim Cunningham:Welcome to the Unscripted Mind, where our goal is to give you fresh perspectives, practical insights and tools you can use to give you more choices, increase your awareness and have better control of your feelings, reactions and behaviors. I'm Jim Cunningham, a licensed professional counselor and have better control of your feelings, reactions and behaviors. I'm Jim Cunningham, a licensed professional counselor, and today I want to challenge the notion of what success really means. Society, media, advertisements, other people all are trying to define who we should be, what we should be, what we should have, and telling us how to be happy. But what if this is the wrong game? What if we're chasing the wrong things? What if we're actually making things worse instead of better? Let me start by using the story as an illustration. Once upon a time, there was a man who was sleeping in his cabin when suddenly, god wakes him up and he tells him that he has a job for him to do. So he takes him outside and he shows him this very large rock in front of his cabin. And god explained to the man that his job was to push on the rock with all his might. Well, this was a faithful man, so he did just as God asked. Day after day, year after year, he toiled from sunup to sundown, pushing with all his might, and every night the man returned to his cabin sore and wore out feeling like his whole day had been wasted and that he was a failure. Finally, one day, the man was so discouraged, frustrated and angry he called out to God and said I've worked hard and faithfully every day, putting all my strength into doing what you've asked, but after all this time, the rock hasn't even budged. This is ridiculous. I've wasted so much time To this. The Lord responded compassionately. He said when I asked you to serve me and you accepted, I told you that your task was to push against the rock with all your strength, which you did, but never once did I mention to you that I expected you to move the rock. Your task was just to push. And now you've come to me. Your energy is spent thinking that you failed. But is that really true? I mean, look at yourself your arms, your back, your neck are all strong and muscled. Your hands are calloused from constant pressure and your legs have become massive and strong. Through opposition, you have grown so much and your abilities now surpass anything that you had before, even though the rock never moved.
Jim Cunningham:See, I think this is the problem we also have we get so tied to outcomes. We lose sight of the true victories in life. I think this story is a powerful reminder that our focus should be on the process, not the outcome. When we become fixated on the end result, we often miss the growth and the development that's happening within us, in fact, right in front of us. The man in the story became stronger, more resilient and more faithful, even though he didn't achieve the outcome he thought he needed to, and he missed the real, tangible successives that were right in front of him. There's a lot of research that supports this idea Studies that show that focusing on immediate tasks and setting process-oriented goals can lead to better performance and greater satisfaction.
Jim Cunningham:For example, one study found that individuals who set learning goals which are process-oriented performed better than those who set performance goals which are outcome-oriented than those who set performance goals which are outcome oriented. Another study demonstrated that focusing on mastery goals, which emphasizes the process of learning and improving, leads to higher intrinsic motivation and better long-term outcomes. So I've talked about Carol Dweck's research before. I mentioned it in a previous podcast called the Echo of Our Words, but her research illustrates that those who embrace challenges and see effort as a path to mastery are more likely to achieve success in the long run. She explained that growth mindset encourages resilience and persistence, helping individuals overcome obstacles and continue progressing despite setbacks.
Jim Cunningham:If you remember the studies, she had two groups one with a growth mindset and one with a fixed mindset. The fixed mindset was focused on the outcomes and in this case it was about doing well on a test. The growth mindsets were about also taking a test, but looking at it a little differently, in that those people worked hard for success, whereas the fixed mindset group was focused on the outcomes because they were labeled as smart. And so what she found is through this research is that those who were in the growth mindset process oriented enjoyed the challenges. They appreciated them. Those that were in the fixed mindset did not appreciate the challenges because it might negatively impact the outcome which was their grade. So the other problem focusing on outcomes is that it creates stress and anxiety. If you take care of the little things, the outcomes and the big things will take care of themselves. Let's the outcomes and the big things will take care of themselves. Let's consider a different example to illustrate this.
Jim Cunningham:I want you to think of basketball. You're at the foul line, time has expired and you can win the game if you simply make a free throw. Winning is the outcome you want. But if you focus exclusively on the winning, what will happen if you miss? Well, everybody's going to be disappointed, you're going to have failed, you will have lost the game for the team, everybody's going to be unhappy and you're going to look foolish. That's not what coaches teach you to focus on.
Jim Cunningham:When a player steps up to the line, the best advice is to focus on the mechanics of the shot, not whether or not the ball is going to go through the hoop. The proper stance, the grip on the ball, the fluid arm motion, the follow through all these mechanics need the player's full attention and that's it. And if you execute the mechanics, the shot is going to go in. The rest will take care of itself. If you focus on the outcome, though, am I going to lose the game for the team? You're going to create so much stress and anxiety you aren't going to be able to function. Your chances of making the shot go way down.
Jim Cunningham:It's the process that makes you successful, not the outcome. We think of all of our professional sports heroes and we see them winning Super Bowls and world championships, and we focus on just how they performed in that moment, but we forget the process it took them and the years of work it took them to get there. So the outcome is just the icing on the cake. It's secondary. The advice is the same for people who have test anxiety. They worry about the grade they might get instead of realizing that if they only focus on the studying, the grades are going to take care of themselves and they're going to have a whole lot less stress and anxiety.
Jim Cunningham:So focusing on the process rather than the outcome is also beneficial, because goal setting can be fraught with problems, even when we successfully achieve those goals. So one problem with goals is that they are binary you either succeed or you fail. Most of us fail, and we know this because we think of new year's resolutions and how often we have all these great ideas only to not follow through. So we set ourselves up for failure, because it's a binary construct and there's no middle ground pass or fail. The second problem with these binary type of goals is what happens when you achieve the goal. For most of us, we stop. I'll give you an example, or a couple of examples.
Jim Cunningham:Many people set goals like they want to lose 20 pounds or they want to run a marathon, but once they've achieved these goals, they often stop the behaviors that led to their success. This phenomenon is well documented in research. Also, a study by Wilson and Brookfield found that individuals who focus solely on the goal of weight loss often regain the weight they had lost once the goal was achieved. Another study showed that marathon runners frequently struggled to maintain their fitness and motivation after completing their marathons. Now don't get me wrong. There are good aspects of setting specific goals. It's important to acknowledge that setting goals does have positive aspects. When it's done correctly, goal setting can lead to numerous benefits, such as increased motivation, improved performance and higher achievement levels. The problem comes when the outcome becomes the goal in and of itself.
Jim Cunningham:James Clear in his book Atomic Habits and if you haven't read it, I would highly recommend it. It's probably one of my top five of all time. But he points out a better way to approach this is to focus on changing our identity, not specific goals. So what does this look like? Well, instead of setting a specific weight loss goal, like I want to lose 20 pounds I decide that my new identity is to be a healthy person. Instead of deciding I want to complete a marathon, I decide my new identity is that I'm a runner. Now, that makes a huge, huge difference. This changes the whole success-failure paradigm. So if I decide my new identity is as a runner, then all I have to do is ask well, what do runners do? Well, they run, they eat healthy, they take care of themselves, and sometimes they also run marathons. But marathon is part of the process. It's not an end in and of itself. So his suggestion is that you don't have to be perfect. When you start changing the identity mindset, you start enjoying the process because it's incremental and not all or nothing.
Jim Cunningham:So if I want to change my identity to being a runner, all I have to do on a daily basis at several decision points throughout the day and again, this doesn't have to be all the time, it's two or three times a day. I just ask myself what would the future version of me do at this point? Ask myself, what would the future version of me do at this point? Would I go eat a cheeseburger, would I have a salad? Would I sit on the couch and watch a movie, or would I do something active? See, the beauty is that I don't have to be perfect, which gives me a lot of reasons to beat myself up if I fail. Every day, all I have are these small decision points, and every time I choose something based on the new identity, then that's a vote for the future me. And if I do this enough, by default I become that guy, even if I'm only making one or two of these decisions a day.
Jim Cunningham:So where do you start? Well, I would first challenge you to first figure out who is that new person you want to be. This might be might sound easier than it actually is. It could be a role model or even a fictional character. It doesn't really matter, as long as you have a good sense of who that person is, what their values are and what kind of decisions they would make. So you can use that. So I would say, as you go about your day, remember this. So I would say, as you go about your day, remember this focus on the next step, the next task, the next effort. The process is the destination. Trust that the outcomes will take care of themselves. Embrace the process and let it transform you, one micro decision at a time.
Jim Cunningham:Again, we don't have to be perfect as we go through this process and see. That's where the real sustainable magic and happiness can exist. The storms, the trials, the heartaches, the disappointments are all part of the process that's going to make you bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, just like the guy pushing the rock. Unfortunately, most of us are so focused on trying to avoid the storms, the trials, the heartaches and the disappointments, and if we try to avoid those things, the outcomes are never going to be as great as we ever hope. Right? Somebody once said we don't become who we want to become. We become what we do every day. So don't start measuring your value by successes. Trust the process, not the outcomes. See, it's not your achievements that matter. It's who you become in the process that matters. It's about your identity, a new identity, maybe a new perspective. So stop obsessing over outcomes and start embracing the process, and I think if you do that, you'll find what's really truly important in life. I think if you do that, you'll find what's really truly important in life.
Jim Cunningham:Thanks for checking us out on the Unscripted Mind today. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who might need it. Also, please subscribe, follow us and leave a review, and if you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, please include that also. Until next time, remember life doesn't come with a script, so embrace the unexpected, cherish the unplanned, always stay curious and have an amazing day. We'll see you next time on the Unscripted One. Thank you.
