The Decoy Goal

Most people approach change head-on. They decide what needs to stop, or start. Then they white-knuckle their way there, fighting against themselves to stay on track.

I’ve found another way, which I call the decoy goal.

A decoy goal has nothing to do with what you actually want to change. But once you commit to it, the real change follows quietly behind it.

The smoker who decides to run 3km every second day stops thinking about quitting cigarettes. Instead, they think about the 5am alarm on Thursday morning. Suddenly every cigarette becomes a performance decision, not a willpower battle.

Join a football team that plays every Saturday morning if you want to drink less. Friday night now comes with an 8am consequence. You never made a rule about alcohol. You just changed what the morning after demands.

If you want to spend less time on your phone, don’t obsess over deleting apps or tracking screen time. Start painting. Or rock climbing. Something that needs both hands and your full attention. Your phone isn’t banned or restricted. It just doesn’t fit.

That’s the trick.

The thing you want stops feeling like a decision. It becomes the natural result of something else entirely.

You chase the shadow.

And the object follows.

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Three things that inspired this week's post:

• Eating healthy is an ongoing goal for me. But my decoy goal is breaking 20 minutes on the 5km rowing machine, something I haven't managed in over a decade. When I think about the ice cream in the freezer or staying up past 10:30 pm, I don't think about eating well. I think about that bloated feeling when I sit on the Concept2 machine at 6am the next day. Works every time.
• A client told me she'd been trying to cut back on wine for months. Her strategy wasn't to drink less. She started training for a charity 10km run. She's down to two glasses a week without once telling herself she's on a diet.
• A friend spent six months trying to post on LinkedIn consistently. Same excuses every week: no time, no ideas. Then he joined a public speaking class. He now posts once a week, which is modest, but consistent. He told me the class forces him to think about how he communicates. The posts are a byproduct.