Dr. Christian Ehrlich serves as a Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes Business School, focusing on Organisational Behaviour and Positive Psychology. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Kaiserslautern on work motivation. He’s the author of the book “Happiness Through Goal Setting.” His major research areas focus on work motivation, goal setting, self-development, and subjective well-being.
His work has been published in a variety of academic journals, including Personality and Individual Differences and the Journal of Positive Psychology. Since 2003, he has had his own consultancy. Through it, he offers training on motivation, goal setting, and leading people through positive relationships.
1) Your latest book, Happiness Through Goal Setting, is focused on critically examining why we pursue our most important goals. Why is this type of introspection so important, and how do we benefit from doing so?
There is a phrase in the English language; it’s also a phrase in the German language, which says, “doing things for the right reasons.” If we would look into other languages, we will probably find similar passages. My research has shown that if we do things for the right reasons, whatever the right reasons are—that will positively impact our well-being. So it will not only improve the betterment of the goals we pursue, but also our overall well-being as human beings. That’s why critically examining goals is so important, and that’s the benefit we are getting out of it.
Apart from the science, you need to remember that if you’re not feeling happy, you should be asking yourself, “What can I do to change this?” Remember back to the reasons you gave yourself of why you are doing the things you are doing. Do you like those reasons? Or are they a bit fishy to you, or don’t sound good anymore? For instance, do you want to get a new promotion because you think you can better impact your organization? Or do you yearn for it because you want to look better than your colleagues or friends?
If you are not really feeling happy at the moment, then reflect on why you’re doing the things you do. If your current reasons for doing things don’t feel right, it might be an important lever for you to think about modifying your reasons for doing what you do. It’s a good way to become happier—aligning or changing your reasons for doing something so they fit with what you want rather than being strongly driven by the things you don’t want, or you want to avoid. That is the underlying theoretical basis of my Goal-striving Reasons Framework.
2) You have researched the potential risks of overly valuing happiness and dedicated a section of your book to it. With this in mind, how much effort should we put into setting and reflecting on our goals?
If we focus too much on the overall goal of being happy, then that might not be the right way to pursue happiness. Happiness should be a byproduct of what we are doing, and if we have the right goals, happiness will likely come from them. Like Sonja Lyubomirsky says, “it’s like trying to lose weight and stepping onto the scales every 10 minutes.” Overly worrying about happiness just doesn’t help us in that sense. A different example, maybe more to real life, is having sexual intercourse and overly focusing on “I want this orgasm”—it’s just not helpful. It puts more pressure on you and doesn’t improve the outcome. Just enjoy the moment, and everything else will happen.
If you do things for the right reasons, then happiness is a natural byproduct. A friend of mine once said, “Well, we drink orange juice because we like it. The fact that it has vitamin C, and is good for us, is a byproduct.”
3) In your research, you have found that making your goals more fun and pleasurable does have significant upside. What are the benefits of making your goals fun, and what is a useful strategy to do just that?
The starting point is that if you look at people’s goals, they’re normally set by the head. The goal is normally something people find worthwhile or important, which doesn’t always align with enjoying what they are doing. But having fun with important goals is not mutually exclusive. It’s just a matter of how much effort you put in figuring out how you could get the goal accomplished in the best possible way to get the most fun out of it.
Let’s say you have a big goal to achieve, and it takes you normally half a year, or a year, to achieve it—the more of a drag it is, the more you need to push yourself through it and the more you need to use willpower, the less the likelihood that you are actually going to stick with it. In other words, the more you enjoy your goal, the more the likelihood that you get it done.
When we are in a positive mood, as the broaden-and-build theory would say, that’s where we’re most resourceful, most optimistic, where we see more opportunities, where we have our best ideas. For many academics (and many other types of people), whose business is about solving problems, having good ideas, pushing things forward—fun almost becomes a necessity. We bring ourselves into positive states because we know that’s where we have our best ideas.
A useful strategy to make your goals more fun is simply to take an extra minute in terms of that question, how do I get the most fun of things? The example I always give is if people think, “I need to exercise a bit more, I need to go for a run twice a week,” then you could ask yourself, “how can I enjoy that more?” We can accomplish our goals in a variety of different ways, and those different ways will have an impact on how much we enjoy what we do. If the end result is the same, why not pick the way that is the most fun?
4) In the research you have done creating The Goal-striving Reasons Framework, you have come to discover that altruistic goals often are one of the best ways to increase our happiness. Why is this, and how can we use this concept to our advantage?
Helping others feels good. I really like the phrase: the helper’s high. You can see in kids from the age of seven to ten, if they help someone else, they cannot hide the proudness and elation derived from the act. It’s the same with adults. The only difference is we have more of a poker face nowadays. We can hide this reward from others. We don’t wear it on our sleeves, but it’s the same. It really does something good for us. Since altruism is good for us, the next question is obviously, “How do you build it into your daily life?” It all comes down to acts of kindness.
I think as psychologists, we have the duty to tell people, it is a bit more than just remembering to be kind to others. Yes, be kind to others, but do it in a smart way. For example, does the size of the act matter? Does it make a difference if you give someone three pounds or fifteen pounds? Research has given clear answers to some of the questions about benefiting from kindness.
Since we know kindness is mutually beneficial, we can look at our goals and ask, “how does that benefit someone else? What is the impact I’m having on someone else?” For these types of questions, I quite heavily draw on cognitive job crafting or cognitive reframing. People have a choice in how they look at things.
The more we understand how our goals help others, the more sensitive we become to the impact we’re having. We try to get more feedback on outcomes. We are more interested in the effect we have had on people’s lives afterward. The latter is one of the reasons why I didn’t exclusively stick with the approach-avoidance dimension in my Goal-striving Reasons framework. It tells us something about a person if their goals go beyond self-interests—if they have transcending-type goals.
5) Throughout your years of researching happiness, what insight and/or discovery has surprised you the most?
It is striking to me that we all have these positive psychology interventions. We know what can help us to become happier. Why is it still such hard work for people to use these tools? If these interventions really make people happy, why is it that people aren’t using them more to get happier? And even the people who know all this stuff—like me! I sometimes sit there on a Monday afternoon, knowing what will make me happier, but I still have to push myself into doing the thing. I know this stuff, but still, it is not a natural thing that flows. I have come to compare it more and more to that notion that if you want to be physically healthy, you need to run or exercise. Physical health sometimes requires the need to push yourself. It’s the same for our mental health. That, to me, is one of the most puzzling things. Why is happiness so tricky? Even for the people who write about it, research it, believe in it. Even we say, “Well, we have to work on it a bit.”