Are anti-goals the answer to achieving your ideal life?

Rather than setting goals that focus on what you want to achieve, anti-goals are about avoiding things you don’t want in your life.

Goal setting is nothing new, but recently, the idea of anti-goals has made its mark.

Rather than working towards things you want to achieve, it’s all about identifying and taking steps to avoid what you don’t want to happen.

In other words, imagine what you don’t want your life to look like a year from now, and do what it takes to achieve that vision.

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Where did the anti-goals idea come from?

The concept gained traction in 2017 when a successful US entrepreneur called Andrew Wilkinson detailed how he designed his perfect day by fixating on what he hated. It went viral.

Rooted in inversion philosophy, anti-goals are based on the idea that – in Wilkinson’s words – “problems are best solved when they’re reversed. That it’s often easier to think about what you don’t want than what you do”.

In championing this, Wilkinson was also mindful that, even if you achieve a “do want” goal, you might not wind up satisfied, particularly if you’ve had to sacrifice things or you’ve suffered, to get there.

As a result, instead of thinking about what his perfect work day might look like and striving for that, Wilkinson envisioned his worst possible day and went on a mission to avoid that.

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Should you accentuate the negative?

Coach, hypnotherapist and psychotherapist, Katie Lowndes says we’re probably more familiar with some aspects of the anti-goal approach than we think.

“In some respects, I think that’s often how we set goals anyway,” Katie says.

“If goals are traditionally all about moving towards something you want in your life, many times you only know what you want by knowing what you don’t want, often from past experience.”

But the anti-goal movement takes this one step further, so that – for example – a goal might look less like “I want to be happier, healthier and wealthier” and more like “I don’t want to be moody, tired all the time and struggling to pay the bills”.

“The problem is,” Katie say, “based on the law of attraction, where your thoughts go, energy flows.”

Renée McDonald is a counsellor, psychotherapist and a coach.

She agrees that focusing on the negative could back fire.

“Our brains are not only already wired to focus on the negative, we’re less likely to achieve what we want with negative-reinforcement wording,” Renee says.

“There’s a reason why we set goals and why we might do better when we go to a coach – because it’s already starting from a point of strength.

“So, while I can see where the anti-goal idea is coming from, thanks to the way our brains work, once you start consciously focusing on what you’re trying to avoid, you could end up with the very things you don’t want – and then some.”

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How to make an anti-goal work for rather than against you

Katie says that if deciding what you don’t want helps you put your finger on why you want to set a goal, that’s useful.

“It could work as a stepping stone between understanding what your motivation is and setting some positive goals from there,” she says.

For example, acknowledging you don’t want to develop type 2 diabetes if you’re in a high-risk group could be the “why” you want to set some goals around improving your diet and exercising more.

“In goal setting, having a ‘why’ that’s personally important to you, is key,” Katie says. “Bearing in mind that if you set a goal purely because someone else says you should, that’s not usually motivating enough to achieve it.”

After Wilkinson detailed what his worst work day looked like – full of meetings, a packed calendar, feeling tired – he did set some “never” or “no” goals to help him avoid it.

These included “never scheduling an in-person meeting if email or phone would suffice”, “no more than two hours of scheduled time per day”, and “never scheduling morning meetings to allow for sleep-ins”.

Some say the ideal approach may be combining goals and anti-goals – the traditional goal keeps you focused on what you want to achieve, while using the anti-goal approach can help you identify and avoid the rough patches you might encounter while you work towards that goal.

That way, you’ll achieve your “do want” goals while avoiding what you don’t want along the way.

Written by Karen Fittall.