By Carl Chinn, LMHC (New York) and LPC (Texas) · Licensed therapist since 2012 · Reviewed October 2026
Do your goals look something like this?
Make X amount of sales.
I need to get X.
I won’t be happy unless X happens.
X would really make me feel validated.
I want to make X per year.
Each of these kinds of goals can lead to stress and anxiety rather than helping you feel motivated and confident. The reason isn’t the X, at least not on its face. The reason is that in each of these wishes, the goal is something that isn’t within your control to get. We can’t guarantee customers, getting stuff, making things happen, receiving words of validation, or making something in the future happen. Each of these goals is about describing an ideal outcome that we want to receive.
Who’s in control of your goal?
What these kinds of goals, as stated, tend to do is motivate what’s called an external locus of control, Julian Rotter’s 1966 term. An external locus of control means that we tend to believe our experience is controlled by factors outside of us. When we believe this, there’s very little we can do to affect our situation. It requires other people or the world itself to change around us in order for our experience to change. The problem: that rarely happens, and when it does, it’s usually unrelated to us wanting it to be that way. So how do we try to take control?
Can you make lasagna appear?
Let’s think about it from one of the perspectives above, to see what the goal could be with a concrete example before making a mental health example. Let’s say you really want X, and X is lasagna. We want lasagna to appear in front of us, but try as we might, we can’t get lasagna to simply manifest in front of us. We rage against the world, describe how unfair it is that lasagna is not here despite our desires, but still, it doesn’t appear.
If we want lasagna, it perhaps requires us first to know how to make lasagna, and so you go on a quest to learn. Perhaps you watch YouTube videos, you ask a relative who makes a mean ziti for tips, you check out a cookbook, something to learn how to make lasagna. After that, you realize you’re going to require some ingredients, so you make a list and go to the grocery store to get the things on the list. You come home and set up your kitchen and go about mixing and layering and the rest of it to make the lasagna. And finally, after some work, lasagna appears. Or does it? When the lasagna comes out of the oven, are you looking at just lasagna? Might you also be looking at a conversation with your mom about her favorite recipe, a cookbook with a cool aesthetic, the desire to try to conduct an experiment, a trip to the grocery store, a chat with a vendor who knows your name at the farmer’s market, and an hour of work, all wrapped together in layers of deliciousness, that also happens to taste like lasagna?
The latter. If we say “I want lasagna,” we make the goal into a received thing that the world might give to us. If we say “I want to go on an adventure to find/create lasagna,” it becomes an internal offering that we give to ourselves. We only get what we give. The willingness to go on an adventure to find something is an internal locus of control: the motive force, the thing that changes things, in this example, is within us.
You can’t DoorDash a career
That’s fine for lasagna, but what about real world problems? Can’t I just DoorDash lasagna? You can. But you can’t DoorDash a career, or a long term partnership with mutual respect, or learning a new skill, or many other things that we may be too afraid or anxious to get started on. And they work the same way. When you look at a marriage of 20 years, you do see a person staring back at you, but you also see arguments, victories, intimacy, validation, collaboration, struggles, sickness, amazingness, and many jokes and laughs. That doesn’t just materialize. You offered each of it along the way.
When you want a relationship, consider what you’re willing to offer another person. Offer it, with boundaries, and see what they offer back. If you’re both better off on average, and your long term goals continue to align, repeat for 20 years. We can’t manifest the trophy at the end, and you wouldn’t want that anyway. If you could wake up tomorrow with a soul mate who fell in love with someone else, because you woke up in that someone’s body without their memories, would you want that?
It’s perhaps easier to say yes to lasagna being that way because it’s concrete, but most of the goals that cause us stress are not that way, even money. When economist Jay Zagorsky followed thousands of Americans through a long running national survey, the people who received an inheritance saved only about half of it, and more than a third ended up with no more wealth than before, or less. Part of being financially successful and staying that way is the habits and skills you develop along the way.
Your career is no different. What is the work you’re willing to offer the project you’re looking at? Wanting it to be done and behind you cheats you out of the experience of knowing how to offer, which almost assuredly will offer you more than the quick win, in the long term.
Switch X from a noun to a verb
The key to making long term goals stick is to switch X from being a noun to being a verb. “I’m willing to do X for a year to see what comes next,” instead of, “At the end of a year, I want X.” Whatever you get, the noun, is a direct byproduct of the verb that you offer. You don’t get the outcome without the input. You have control of the input. You don’t have control of the output. If you get better at the input, the output will get better. There isn’t another way to get the output, the result, better than that. The process leads to the result. Perfectionists often struggle with this and define many of their goals as outcomes that need to be nervously micromanaged, instead of defining processes that would organically scale into habits that achieve outcomes.
So what do the goals from the top look like as verbs?
- Make X amount of sales. Becomes: make X calls a week.
- I need to get X. Becomes: I’m willing to learn what X takes.
- I won’t be happy unless X happens. Becomes: I’ll keep doing what I value on the way to X.
- X would really make me feel validated. Becomes: I’ll offer work I’m proud of.
- I want to make X per year. Becomes: I’m willing to build the skills worth X, for a year, and see what comes next.
That’s the first way to rightsize a goal: make it something you do, not something you get.
What helps
Different types of therapy can help you change this in your life, whether it’s relationships, work, trauma, parents, or the existential void of it all:
- Cognitive therapies like REBT and CBT: can ask you to notice how absolute thinking leads to absolute results, and that incremental, reasonable expectations lead to action steps you can actually do.
- Solution Focused Therapy: can help you reverse engineer individual measurable steps from the finish line back to the part of the race you’re actually in.
- Schema Therapy: may help you recognize how you might be struggling with a pattern from childhood where your parents may have been overly accommodating, or the reverse: your parents were very needy and you became very accommodating.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: asks you to question the value in what you’re seeking, and to notice that the value of a quick transaction, wanting something and getting it, isn’t the same as the value in something you cherish.
- Internal Family Systems Therapy: might ask you to look at the team of personalities you call a self, and at how one of them, a manager type, sets ridiculous deadlines and tries to micromanage results to keep you safe.
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy: can help you recognize that balancing the emotion mind, which wants the result right now, takes a reasonable mind that can cut those desires up into manageable steps.
If this sounds familiar, perfectionism is a focus area in its own right, and when the goal that won’t arrive is a career one, it often shows up as work stress.
Each of these approaches is practiced by therapists who list in the Become The Way directory. If you’d like to learn more about any of them, you can browse and book a consultation directly.
About the author
Carl Chinn, LMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist who has practiced since 2012. He writes about therapy, attention, and decision-making at Become The Way. Read Carl’s full bio.
This article is for general information and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional mental health care, and reading it does not establish a therapist-client relationship. If you are in crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US, 24/7 by call or text), your local crisis line if outside the US, or call 911 if in immediate danger.
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