Why You Shouldn’t Care About Your Results

From the time you were a little kid, you’ve been trained in a way that’s counterproductive to success because you were trained to work for results. 

You were, I was, the majority of us were. And I believe the mental conditioning we got is detrimental to your ability to succeed.

Here's why:

When you play a sport, you’re taught to play to win. Winning is good and losing is bad. When you take a test, you’re supposed to get an A, or at the very least, pass. Passing is good and failing is bad.

Then as you get older, you look for similar results: at work, you’re trained to hit quotas and perform to certain standards, and anything less is a failure.

If you have a relationship and you break up with someone, the relationship was a failure. You start a diet and expect to lose a certain amount of weight by a certain time and if you don’t the diet is a failure.

Or let’s say you’re someone like me, a coach. I’m supposed to say, “I can get you the best results!” 

…right?

Here’s the truth:

I don’t care about your results.

Yup, I said it.

Have I lost my mind? Do I just suck as a coach? Or am I on to something?

Rather than your results, here’s what I care about:

I care about your effort. I care about your resilience. And I care about your consistency.

I don’t care about your results for two big reasons:

Number one: if you are putting in effort and you are consistently learning, growing, and improving, you will get results.

Here’s an example of this approach at play: 

Let’s say you’re an entrepreneur and your goal is building an email list of 1,000 subscribers in 6 months. If you’re focused on hitting that goal by any means possible, you might start running some ads and you load your site with pop-up banners and discounts to bribe people onto your list.

Yay, you hit your goal…but you’re probably going to end up with a lot of people who don’t even bother opening your emails and definitely don’t care about what you’re offering.

Using a short-sighted approach like this is a pretty big waste of time if you ask me. Sure, it sets you up for short-term “results,” but it will have you banging your head against the wall when you can’t figure out how to move forward.

Instead, let’s say you’re focused on the process of building an audience. Rather than asking, “How can I get people to listen to me and buy from me?” you ask, “What do people need that I can give them?”

You share helpful tips related to your niche, make some informational videos, and offer advice when people ask you questions rather than trying to sell them something. When something isn’t working, you troubleshoot your process and figure out how you can learn and grow from it.

Maybe at the end of 6 months you only end up with 300 people on your list, but if you keep up this process, you’ll hit 1,000 eventually. Most importantly, those 300 people are all people that like you and care about what you have to say.

By focusing on your process, you’re setting yourself up for long-term success.

Here’s the second big reason I don’t care about results:

If you hit a goal but your process is faulty, your results won’t be sustainable.

Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight, and you want to lose 10 lbs. in a month.

You stop eating bread and pasta, start exercising every day, cut out all sweet treats, and stop eating out. By the end of the month, you’ve lost 10 lbs, but you hate how restricted and deprived you feel and you’re ready to crack.

So you allow yourself a piece of bread from the basket at your first meal out, then proceed to finish the basket, order your favorite appetizer, devour your entire entree, dessert, and a bottle of wine.

The next day, you feel crushed to see the scale up, beat yourself up for having no control, and swear the whole diet off.

This is why I care more about the process than the results: 

Whether you hit a goal or not is NOT the determining factor in your success; your effort is.

In my book, you can fail to hit a goal and still be a success. You can also hit a goal and still have failed to improve yourself.

You also might not get the results you initially intended, but rather find yourself on a different but equally or perhaps even more desirable path. For example, when I founded Ritual Coaching in 2016, I intended to focus on coaching fitness and nutrition, but in 2018 I decided to switch that focus to mindset. 

Did I fail to create a fitness business? Absolutely. But what I did create, and continue to invest my time and effort into, is something even more meaningful and deeply aligned with my interests and abilities.

I had a fitness coach reach out to me who he asked me about my goals for my business. I proceeded to tell him that I don’t really think about my goals on a day-to-day basis. I think about my process. I ask questions like, “What is the work I need to do and what’s the level of effort I’m putting in? How am I learning and growing? What do I need to think, feel, and do in order to remain consistent and resilient?”

He told me, “I hate process... Not everyone's strengths are suited for process.”

I couldn’t disagree more.

Everyone is suited to focus on the process and learning to focus on their effort and growth, but as I said earlier, this is not what we are taught. This coach’s feelings toward goals and results are a factor of his upbringing. He and most everyone else have been programmed to seek out concrete results as a measure of failure or success.

The problem with results-oriented thinking is that it can create extra obstacles for you, like beating yourself up if you don’t hit a goal, and not seeking out alternative paths for growth.

Does that mean I don’t set goals, or ask my students not to? Nope, we still work toward goals (or rather, North Stars). We just don’t use them as measuring sticks for success.

If getting your process down sounds appealing to you, you can read more about how we do things in Food Body Self® here.

A mindset in which you choose to focus on your process rather than your results can help you make more intentional decisions and select ways of thinking that remove obstacles so that you can strive toward goals on a path with less resistance and more purpose.