There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed that’s common among narcissists and people with low self esteem and it makes it so you never feel like you’ve achieved anything or you can never do well enough to deserve something. I’m talking about the moving of the goal posts.
For example I’m sure some people have experienced this either in school or in a work environment where a teacher or leader promised a certain outcome if specific criteria were met.
Say you’re in sales and your manager sets your yearly revenue goal at a million dollars as a floor and if you hit $1.1 million then you get a bonus and if you exceed $1.25 million then you win a vacation.
You’ve broken down the activity needed to reach your goals and what pace to maintain each quarter, each month, each week, and each day.
The halfway mark hits and you’re pacing to achieve your goals by October so you’ll be getting a great bonus this year as well as your vacation. At your check in review with you manager he tells you that they need to “adjust your goals and targets” because due to market conditions your sales look inflated and are actually just in line with expectations.
Now your adjusted annual floor with the updated information is that you need to hit $1.5 million as your floor and $1.7 million as your bonus and then $2 million as your target if you want the company paid vacation.
This is where good people bet on themselves and start looking for a new job because what the hell was that meeting?
As a manager or a company if you set a target too low for a star, you should be adjusting next year based on your entire sales team’s metrics and not punish the high achievers.
For narcissists the moving of the goalposts is a control tactic to make sure that the victim of the narcissist never actually satisfies the conditions agreed upon.
As a child, being told to put away your laundry becomes: “well your bed still isn’t made” or “you didn’t color code your shirts correctly” to let you know that you in fact did not actually do what you were supposed to do and there’s always more.
Oftentimes this is accompanied by them gaslighting you and changing the narrative to remind you that they did in fact tell you that you were supposed to clean your entire room, not just put your laundry away.
“Hey son I’ll be proud of you if you get all As and Bs in school” turns into “why did you get so many Bs?”
It leads to you feeling like you’re never enough and the run around makes you feel crazy and disoriented. In my experience it leads to withdrawing and giving up because if no matter what you do you will not be doing anything well enough, what’s the point in trying?
That’s the real danger of moving the goal posts.
A lot of people move the goalposts on themselves and turn little agreements with themselves into overdoing it and then not wanting to cascade into that sequence again.
It makes all or nothing and perfectionism the primary mechanism to get anything done. You can’t do one load of laundry, you must do all of the laundry. You can’t write one paragraph, you must write the entire paper. You can’t just do a few exercises, you must do a whole body workout.
In my experience you will have a lot of things to do everyday that really have no ending. Like I can’t just say “I’ve done my allotted amount of parenting today, check that off of my to do list.” That’s crazy. Or you can drive yourself crazy by doing every single dish as it becomes dirty instead of batching it each day.
Much of daily life and work do not follow a satisfactory linear process and ending like trying to find a value for x in an algebra problem. You do that specific problem once and it’s done.
The skill here is finding how to turn these continuous things into discrete activity goals. Doing the dishes becomes every time I fill the dishwasher, I run the dishwasher and call it good for the day. Writing a paper becomes committing yourself to writing a paragraph today and allowing yourself to feel no shame about not writing anymore until tomorrow.
It’s basically trying to find the minimal viable action that delivers the best results. You aren’t going to be a better runner by running everyday and each time you set out to run a certain distance you change your mind mid run or keep increasing the mileage after you hit your distance goal.
The way I approach these things depends drastically on what it is, but take exercise for example. If you’re really early into training, the main goal is just to show up and do something. You don’t want to kill yourself early on and then be injured or too fatigued to progress.
If you’re training for a marathon from zero, you don’t start out by trying to run 26.2 miles as a first run. You ideally are going to work on strengthening your posterior chain as well as build up resilience in your ankles, knees, and hips before you even attempt to run a 5k at a race pace.
Breaking that example down discretely, your goal is to show up and do what your training plan says to do each day. Nothing more and nothing less. Some days the plan is to do nothing and even if someone else is doing something it doesn’t mean you should also.
You are building your own life, don’t worry about how others wish for you to do that. They have their own lives they should be worrying about. Maintain your own goalposts and celebrate when you hit the mark because you deserve to add that to your body of proof.