Your view of personal goals can affect your relationships
The authors of this short but interesting paper show how what you think about your goals -- whether it's to improve yourself or to do better than others -- can affect whether you reach those goals. these different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people, including those you work with, live with and love.
The study looks at two different kinds of goals, "mastery" and "performance" goals. This, in itself, is a good thing to think about and how your goals as a couple or family fit one of these two categories. People with "mastery goals" want to improve themselves. For instance, they may want to get better grades, make more sales, or a skater who wants to land that triple toe loop. They want to master their subject.
People with "performance goals" are try to outperform others -- they try to get a better grade than a someone else, or be Sale person of the Year. They want to do better than others.
P. Marijn Poortvliet, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Céline Darnon, of France's Clermont University, are interested in the social context of these goals -- what they do to your relationships. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these goals. Both kinds of goals can be useful in different contexts. But when and where you have one of these goals can have a deep effect on your relationships.
Poortvliet's work focuses on information exchange -- whether people are open and honest when they are working together. "People with performance goals are more deceitful" and less likely to share information with coworkers, both in the laboratory and in real-world offices he has studied, Poortvliet says. "The reason is fairly obvious -- when you want to outperform others, it doesn't make sense to be honest about information." You don't say, "My intention is to win, to beat you, and this is how I'm going to do it." Nor are you likely to develop a way of expressing yourself that supports openness and sharing, if winning, besting, is your goal.
People who are trying to improve themselves are to the contrary quite open. Poortvliet says. "If the ultimate goal is to improve yourself, one way to do it is to be very cooperative with other people." This cooperativeness can help improve the work environment, even though the people with these goals aren't necessarily thinking about social relations. What they do realize is that they will more likely reach this goal by cooperating, rather than competing. "They're not really altruists, per se. They see the social exchange as a means toward the ends of self improvement." Other research has found that people with these self-improvement goals are more open to hearing different perspectives, while people with a performance goal "would rather just say, 'I'm just right and you are wrong.'"
Poortvliet says it's not always bad to be competitive, "For example, if you want to be the Olympic champion, of course it's nice to have mastery goals and you should probably have mastery goals, but you definitely need performance goals because you want to be the winner and not the runner-up." We all do, some time, need to win. What game would you play where you always lose? How would you feel? Winning is sometimes OK. But how goals affect the social environment and your interactions with others is an important thing to think about. "If you really want to establish constructive and long-lasting working relationships, then you should really balance the different levels of goals," Poortvliet says -- thinking not only about each person's achievement, but also about the team as a whole. The two critical parts to this are: Awareness, and balance. Being aware of what kind of goal you have, and having a balanced set of goals. Appropriate goals, and behaviours, at appropriate times. You can see how this would affect a relationship, how the wrong goals, or a poor balance of goals, would drive a couple apart.
Being aware, and self monitoring, is a good way to keep these goals balance. In the workplace a manager can use different techniques to make sure the workplace has a balance, and therefore is welcoming to cooperation, and encouraging of a little competition. That might make a good goal for a marriage or relationship too.
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Dr. jim Roche is a Registered Psychologist and Registered Marriage and Family Therapist. He is a Clinical Member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and has served as a board member of the British Columbia Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. He has over twenty years clinical experience providing couple, marriage and family therapy. His offices are located in Burnaby, near Lougheed Mall, and Downtown Vancouver. His Burnaby office is convenient to Coquitlam. Port Moody, New Westminster and Maple Ridge. His practice focuses on therapeutic interventions based upon Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and the work of Dr. John Gottman.
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