Right Goal, Wrong Path

We make poor choices and mistakes. It’s part of the human experience. Sometimes we can beat ourselves up when it happens. Looking back at these bad decisions, we wonder why we made them. What were we thinking?

It can be helpful to zoom out and to look at the goal or intent as separate from the challenging behavior. Most of the time the goal is a good goal! Here are some examples of right goal, but the wrong path:

Stealing:
Goal = feel secure/safe
Not so good path = taking something that does not belong to them

Substance Use:
Goal = feel confident or comfortable
Not so good path = using too much in a way that hurts self or others

Binge Watching or Doom Scrolling

Goal = feel distracted
Not so good path = burn several hours a day watching shows or reading “news”

Staying in a Harmful Relationship:
Goal = feel loved, cared for

Not so good path = sticking it out and enduring a lot of pain when not a lot of good evidence to support this decision

We are all growing all the time. We can get mad at ourselves when we make decisions that seem less smart. I think it is important to be gracious to ourselves. When we have patience, treat ourselves with kindness and understand that we have the right goal, but can do better on behavior or path, then we don’t get lost in a loop of self-punishment/harm/beating ourselves up. We instead step outside of that loop and allow ourselves to walk to a new place and a new way of doing things.

One way to start this process is to identify the goal of the behavior (what do I really want here? What am I hoping to feel or accomplish?) and then finding other, healthier, ways of making progress towards that goal. These healthy steps might feel uncomfortable at first, especially if we are so accustomed to the unhealthy steps. This happens because our brains tend to like some things that are bad for us, and the predictable more than healthier choices. The good news is that this changes with time and consistency. For example, we might eat pizza all the time, but then start eating salad every so often and over time, our bodies will start to crave salad like it craves pizza (true story!).

The other benefit to being kind to ourselves is that it enables us to also be kind to others. We tend to judge other people as we judge ourselves. Having grace for yourself allows you to then extend that grace to others. And we all know the golden rule: Treat others as you would like to be treated.

Life is a journey. Making mistakes and bad decisions is a core part of the process and it is how we learn. Oftentimes we have the right goals and just need better behavior to get to the destination we envision. It’s okay not to know the answer to the right path to take, either. We can get there one step at a time and we can support each other in the process as well. 

Can you recall instances where you had the right goal but chose the wrong path? What advice would you offer a friend in a similar situation?