14: Goal-Setting and Achievement
with Dana Fonteneau
Transcript Highlights:
When we think about 'career,' we often also think about the word success, or fulfillment, or even the word, happiness... One of the things that I find complicated is that there are so many external pressures to define what success means - what's your experience both as a cello student, as a cellist, and now in your work with helping musicians with the word success?
I’ve actually changed the focus from success to achievement. And with that, I've also changed it from achievement to fulfillment. So I look at fulfillment as a confirmation that I have learned from success and failure, and that achievement is the byproduct of fulfillment.
In the beginning, success had been defined for me based on how I saw it modeled or how I saw people react if they reacted positively or negatively to the things that I achieved. I looked at external sources to define success, and that wasn't very fulfilling. It was a bit hit or miss. I would achieve things and it didn't quite feel right and I didn't know why. I assumed that success would mean I would feel good. So I actually really help people understand the difference between goals, achieving those goals, and how success is feedback that something's working well, and how failure is feedback that something needs to get learned from. Both success and failure are feedback systems toward achievement. And achievement are goals that are set that ultimately are fulfilling and inspiring.
Kellogg:
What are some examples of how that failure can then help one with achievement?
Fonteneau:
Oftentimes when we're not conscious of how we set goals, when goals are set for us, or we're told that we should do something - we should do that competition, or we should do that audition, or we should win that job - because that's what other people have done and that’s what signifies success. We don't often take the time to discern, Is that truly meaningful? Is that truly inspiring? Is that actually congruent with what we want to do, How we want to make impact, What we want to learn and grow, etc. So setting a goal toward achievement is definitely self-created, self-designed, self-informed, and sometimes we have to learn by trial and error. We try things out and we see that that didn't fit or that looked great on paper, but that didn't really feel very good or that wasn't the right place or the right colleagues or the right collaboration. And so we learn from the bumper cars of feedback. And not everybody does, but for those who do, they tend to have a more fulfilling adventure.