Determination: How to Set Goals and Go After Them

Fight Your Fear and Win
by Don Greene, Ph.D.

We've all been there: that make-it-or-break-it moment of our careers — on the brink of a deal, poised at the starting gate, under the spotlight waiting to speak or perform in front of our peers. At this point, where everything seems to be on the line, most of us experience one overriding reaction-fear-and this fear can have negative physical, mental, and emotional consequences on how well we do our job.

Don Greene, Ph.D., a renowned sports psychologist, teacher at the Juilliard School, and "stress" coach to top executives and entertainers, has spent decades studying fear and its effect on performance. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Greene shares the proven techniques he has used with Olympic athletes, Grand Prix drivers, the Vail Ski School, Golf Digest Schools, the New World Symphony, and Merrill Lynch traders to help them perform their best under pressure.

In his years of working with Olympic and professional athletes, network news anchors, classical musicians, actors, dancers, trial attorneys, brokers, and CEOs, Dr. Greene discovered that there were certain commonalities in people's responses to high-pressure situations. Untrained, these individuals' reactions were allowing fear to take over and affect decision-making, poise, and display of skill. But Dr. Greene found that by applying methods such as the centering technique, these same people could work through their fear and perform better than ever before.

Fight Your Fear and Win begins with a self-assessment performance survey that will allow you to pinpoint your own reactions to stress: how you handle distractions, how you are affected by nervousness, your mental outlook, your response to fear, and your ability to bounce back from failure. After completing this self-assessment, the book takes you through the seven essential skills required for optimal performance:

1. Determination
2. Energy
3. Perspective
4. Courage
5. Focus
6. Poise
7. Resilience

Interspersed with true stories from Greene's wide variety of experiences training everyone from the San Diego S.W.A.T. team to singers at the Metropolitan Opera, each chapter includes a series of mental and physical exercises that will help you track your progress. This simple twenty-one-day plan will make a profound difference in the way you approach challenging situations, and allow you to think more clearly and creatively under pressure. Whether you are giving a closing argument in a courtroom, making a presentation at work, auditioning for a role, or stepping up to the first tee, Fight Your Fear and Win is the ultimate tool to conquering your fear and achieving success when you need it most.

Chapter 1

Desire is the key to motivation, but it's the determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal — a commitment to excellence — that will enable you to attain the success you seek.

— MARIO ANDRETTI

One Sunday morning Ed McMahon, a client of mine who works on Wall Street, attended the 8:00 a.m. mass at his church without his wife and kids because he wanted to make the 10:00 a.m. tee-off time he'd set up with his golf buddies. He sat in the back, letting the priest's words wash over him, thinking about some of the reading he'd been doing from books I'd given him.

And suddenly, he was envisioning his funeral mass.

He could see his casket at the front of the church. It was as though he were suspended above it. Who is sitting in the pews? he wondered. Who will deliver the eulogy? What will be said about me?

"It caught me off-guard, I can tell you," he said. "I didn't go to mass to think that deep! It's programmed into me to just sit there and say thank you."

But in the month Ed and I had been working together, he'd been doing, in fact, quite a bit of deep thinking. At forty-six he was at the top of the pyramid, the senior guy on the equity trading desk at Merrill Lynch. He had a nice home and nice things. He was happily married, with four kids — two of them out of college plus ten- and seven-year-olds. On every front, he was doing enviably well. And yet he couldn't help but feel something was missing. He'd been the guy from Brooklyn without a college education who'd fought his way to the center of the ring. Now that he'd won, he was almost sorry the fight was over. The challenges he handled day-to-day felt predictable. More and more, it felt to him like he was just going through the motions, fast and furious but not really accomplishing anything. He didn't know what he'd rather be doing, though. That was the problem. He knew he was in a rut but couldn't jump-start himself out of it.

Sure enough, when Ed took the survey, his Determination score came up short. He was low on motivation. His commitment was flagging. And despite having achieved so much, without a new goal with real meaning, he lacked the will to succeed.

What Is Determination?

Determination is drive. It's the mind-set that impels you to make things happen. It's the strength, the power, of your intent. And it's the mental foundation on which the other six skills are built. No performance can go well without your having true grit — the determination to perform at the outermost edge of your capabilities. Success cannot be achieved without it.

People who lack determination usually do so for three reasons. One, they lack intrinsic motivation. Or to put it differently, they're missing the drive from within — the passion, the fire. That fire is ignited by a goal or desire. Those short on motivation have nothing driving them forward — no dream, no well-defined goal, no unmet desire or need.

Two, they're short on commitment. They're unable to vest themselves in the pursuit of any one thing. Commitment to a goal is rarely 100 percent — most of us have multiple priorities, after all, such as work, family, and a social/leisure life. But those lacking commitment can't even prioritize. They're immobilized by their options: They have so many, they can't pick one to start on. They're unable to decide which route to take because they can't decide which is the best one. Or they want to keep all their options open. Either way, they're stuck at the crossroads, incapable of taking action.

Finally, those who lack determination lack what I call will to succeed. This differs from intrinsic motivation in that it's more a function of the external pressures pulling us rather than our innermost dreams driving us. Perhaps we're seduced by our culture or socioeconomic group to make money or to gain status. Perhaps we want to prove something to our peers or win the approval of a certain group of people. Our will to succeed is affected by what we perceive to be others' definition of success.

Everybody knows what a lack of determination feels like: It feels like a rut. Like treading water. Like going through the motions. Like the engine is idling, instead of in gear.

But it seems that not many people know how to get out of this rut, how to come by the mind-set that moves mountains. Even the highly successful ones, sooner or later, run out of gas and have to wonder, Is this it? Is this all there is?

Many of my clients, like Ed McMahon, are at the top of what Abraham Maslow, founder of psychology's Human Potential Movement, termed the Hierarchy of Needs. They've taken care of baseline needs like food and warmth; they've moved beyond those to acquire physical security, like a house; they've managed to answer the human need to belong, to feel loved by family or friends, recognized by their peers; and they've even achieved a certain level of self-esteem. If you imagine these needs stacked up into a pyramid, then they are close to the pinnacle.

Yet like Ed, they're not all that happy, having achieved these things, because the fun is in the achieving, and now — well, now what? is the question they can't answer. David*, forty-one, an administrative department head, came to me because he thought his poor self-confidence was hurting his career; in fact, his career was hurting his confidence, because it wasn't what he wanted to do with his life. Career crises, marriage crises, crises of faith, crises of confidence — all are often just symptomatic of a fundamental absence of meaningful goals. While this abyss seems to yawn widest in midlife (because the quest for spouse, house, and kids is over and the career is on autopilot), it can open up at any time. Tom*, thirty-one, was a computer programmer who was floundering in midlevel management because he lacked a plan to move himself toward his dream of forming his own software company.

All these clients, you might say, were accustomed to feeling driven, but without something to shoot for, they couldn't summon any drive. Without something to aim for, they no longer enjoyed playing the game. It's as though they're out on a golf course with no holes. What's the point of driving the ball well? What's the point of even playing? Golf is defined by its holes. Without them, it's just hitting balls into the woods — not much fun in that.

There is something more to go after, however. There is one need they have yet to answer — what Maslow identified as the need to self-actualize.

History continues to be made because of the innate drive in humankind to stretch our limits, test our capacities, and exploit our talents to their fullest. Maslow studied highly functional individuals like Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer, not the dysfunctional types Sigmund Freud documented, because he wanted to understand the makeup of fully actualized individuals, those who continually achieved and redefined their goals in order to tap the furthest reaches of their potential. What set of qualities, what kind of psyche, he asked, led some people to keep pushing the envelope of the possible? And how could the rest of us come by that mind-set?

One of my life goals has been to translate Maslow's findings into concrete exercises that my clients can use to mobilize themselves out of ruts. And what I've found, in working with individuals poised on the brink of self-actualization, is that they often need help formulating their mission. Tapping one's full potential is a mission that's so big, so amorphous, and so daunting that most people don't know how to get a handle on it. But if we can break it down into a manageable task, our resolve strengthens. Our commitment grows. The power of our intent outguns the force of our fears. With clear goals to pursue, our intrinsic motivation fires up, and we find ourselves brimming with the will to succeed. I've seen this process happen with my clients over and over again.

Determination, in other words, is really a function of having clear goals — whether they're short-term assignments or long-term dreams. My goal in this chapter is to help you figure out your long-term mission, the so-called big picture; I've got two exercises that can help you zero in on your priorities. Then I'm going to give you the goal-mapping tools to break it down into intermediate and short-term goals. Once you have your goals and game plan in place, you will find that intrinsic motivation, commitment, and will to succeed develop all by themselves. Do the exercises, and you'll have both the dream to go after and the tools to make it come true.

But let's begin small. Let's get you in the habit of setting small goals, working out short-term strategies, and racking up modest successes. I want you to see just how powerful a clear goal and a straightforward game plan can be in terms of building your determination.

Copyright © 2002 by Dr. Don Greene, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Don Greene, Ph.D., was a nationally ranked high school diver who graduated from West Point. He served in the U.S. Army's Special Forces as a Green Beret and went on to train the San Diego Police S.W.A.T. Team in counterterrorism. Dr. Greene was the sports psychologist for the U.S. Olympic Diving Team, the World Championship Swimming Team, Golf Digest Schools, and the Vail Ski School. He now lives in New York City, where he specializes in mentoring people in a wide variety of professions through everyday and extraordinary stress: financial traders, attorneys, professional athletes, performing artists, salespeople, and more. His previous book, Audition Success, was the all-time #1 bestseller at the Juilliard School bookstore.