I’ve been writing a fair bit about motivation and different strategies that have been proposed for helping people stay on track. But there’s another side to the issue that is often overlooked: knowing when to give up. As Kenny Rogers sang, you’ve got to know when to hold ‘em and keep trying but you also have to know when it’s a lost cause and you should disengage.
As described by psychologist Charles Carver and Michel Sheier,1 there’s no simple, linear relationship between goals and effort. Intentions can tell us where to direct our efforts (whether we want to approach a positive goal or avoid a negative goal) but emotions shape the intensity of our motivation. Those emotions can be influenced by our basic personality (whether we’re an optimist or pessimist), past experiences (perceived self-efficacy) and how things are going. If it’s an approach goal, such as losing weight, then when we see we’re making progress we feel happy, eager and excited. But when things start to go bad, we may experience anger. That anger may help us stay on track and maybe even intensify our efforts. But too much failure and we’re likely to end up feel depressed, sad or beaten. Those feelings are associated with giving up.
In our society, we tend to think of giving up as a bad thing. But there are many situations in which giving up is actually a good and healthy thing. Not every kid in Timbits Hockey has the natural ability to make it to the NHL, just as not every woman can look like Angelina Jolie. We’ve all known people who have pursued goals to the point of damaging their families (e.g., the guy who persists in an unrealistic dream of becoming a golf pro) or well-being (e.g., someone addicted to booze, alcohol, gambling or sex). Sometimes, walking away is actually the smart and sane thing to do.
What shapes our ability to let go? Carver and Sheier point out that goals such as perfecting your golf game are often inputs into how you define yourself (e.g., as being athletic or successful). The key to disengagement without despair is finding some other way to support that definition or vision of yourself. Sometimes, this can be accomplishing by scaling back from a lofty goal to something more realistic (e.g., abandoning dreams of competing on the PGA and focusing instead on winning local amateur tournaments). Other times, it may involve shifting from one activity to another. That could mean shifting your attention to something you already do (e.g., from golf to curling); other times it may mean stepping outside of your existing framework and developing new goals.
We live in a society that glorifies stories of success through perseverance and vilifies giving up. It’s especially acute when it comes to behaviours that we see as socially unacceptable, such as addictions, being overweight or, for the Tea Party types, poverty. “Try, try again,” we admonish, “Never say never,” “Quitters are never winners and winners never quit,” and so on and so on. But not only is it important to “know when to fold ‘em” but to “quit when you’re ahead,” and to “stop beating a dead horse.”
Take-away message/bottom line
To live a healthy life, we need to know when to persist at something and when to disengage and direct our energies elsewhere.
1 Carver CS, Scheier MF. Engagement, Disengagement, Coping, and Catastrophe. IN Handbook of Competence and Motivation, Elliot AJ, Dweck CS, eds. 2005;New York:Guilford Press. pp 527-547