#1077 - Chris Bailey - Why Some Goals Feel Effortless (and others hurt)

What It Covers

Chris Bailey, author of *Intentional*, explains why goal achievement depends on aligning intentions across multiple time frames with personal values. Drawing on academic research and Buddhist monk interviews, he outlines how procrastination stems from emotional aversion, why SMART goals underperform, and how a layered "intention stack" predicts which goals feel effortless versus which get abandoned.

Key Questions Answered

• •The Intention Stack: Goals sit within a five-layer hierarchy — daily intentions, plans, goals, priorities, and values. When each layer aligns with the one above it, motivation increases substantially. A fitness goal framed around "cardiovascular longevity to play with grandchildren" connects to the security value; the same goal framed around appearance connects to the face value. Misalignment between goal framing and personal values creates persistent headwinds throughout the pursuit.
• •Schwartz's 12 Core Values: Researcher Shalom Schwartz identified 12 fundamental human motivations — self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, face, security, tradition, conformity, humility, universalism, and benevolence. Everyone carries a distinct combination, with some values dominant and others near-zero. Identifying your top two values and deliberately reframing goals to connect with them converts aversive obligations into intrinsically motivated pursuits without changing the required actions.
• •Goals as Predictions: Treating goals as fixed targets converts them into expectations, which then produce disappointment when circumstances change. Reframing every goal as a prediction about where current actions will lead allows for ongoing editing without psychological failure. 92% of New Year's resolutions collapse partly because people attach rigidly to the original framing rather than revising the prediction as new information arrives throughout the year.
• •Six Procrastination Triggers: Tasks generate aversion — and therefore procrastination — when they are boring, frustrating, unpleasant, distant in time, unstructured, or meaningless. Structuring an unstructured task is the lowest-effort fix. For tasks that remain aversive after editing, "aversion journaling" — writing down exactly why a task feels ugly and what could reduce that ugliness — consistently surfaces tactical adjustments that lower resistance enough to begin.
• •SMART Goals Underperform: SMART goals originated in a 1981 management review article, not peer-reviewed research, and the acronym has shifted meaning repeatedly since. Google Scholar searches reveal that "realistic" goals limit potential because challenging goals produce higher output than easily attainable ones. Criteria also overlap — measurable goals are inherently specific. Goal-setting research supports value-aligned, challenging, editable goals over the SMART framework used in most corporate and personal productivity contexts.
• •The Rule of Three: Each morning, mentally project to the day's end and identify three — and only three — things to have accomplished by then. The constraint forces prioritization. Scaling the same rule to weekly intentions, then cross-referencing those against an active goal list, creates vertical alignment across the intention stack. Daily intentions feed weekly plans, which feed goals, which connect to values, building intentionality as a compounding skill over time.