I confess to having a personal favorite follow through strategy. I further confess that the reason that this particular strategy appeals to me is that I love paradox! I just get a kick out of things that logically shouldn’t work but actually do work.
If you’re already familiar with follow through strategies, you may have already guessed that I’m referring to the Going Too Far strategy.
Going Too Far is a way to make yourself act in accord with a given intention by threatening to deliberately violate that intention in a bigger-than-life way unless you act in accord with it.
It doesn’t make sense, but it works!
On the surface, Going Too Far doesn’t seem to make logical sense. If you’re already doing a lousy job of following through on a particular intention, why in the world would you ever think that threatening to do an even lousier job on purpose would be a way to actually get the job done?
Yup, it doesn’t make logical sense. But trust me, it works!
Going Too Far works because as much as we allow ourselves to violate our intentions all the time, it feels totally unacceptable to violate our intentions on purpose. So, by threatening to require yourself to deliberately violate your intention in a big, big way if you violate it at all, you paradoxically make it feel a whole lot more necessary to act in accord with your intention.
I personally use the Going Too Far follow through strategy often. If I’m not acting in accord with my intention to keep working on a writing project I started, I require myself to stand up, put my hands in my pockets, and stare at a blank wall to demonstrate in a bigger-than-life way that I’m being a slacker. I rarely have to do this more than once to bring my behavior in line with my good intention.
A paradoxical way to revive a failing intention
I’ve heard from dozens of people who have used the Going Too Far strategy to revive good intentions that were failing. For example, Dan, a chronic smoker with a perfect record of always resuming smoking within just a few days of promising himself that he was going to quit for good, finally did quit after using the Going Too Far strategy. Instead of promising himself that he wouldn’t smoke at all, Dan promised himself that whenever he gave in to the urge to smoke, he’d smoke two cigarettes back-to-back. The threat of having to deliberately double up on doing something he already intended to stop doing felt even worse than not smoking the cigarettes he craved! So, Dan just quit smoking.
There’s (always) a catch
In case it’s not obvious, like other follow through strategies, Going Too Far requires you to follow through on a little promise in order to follow through on a big promise. For example, in order to finally make good on his big promise to quit smoking, Dan had to make good on his little promise to smoke two cigarettes if he smoked any. Had he been unable to keep his little promise, he wouldn’t have kept the big one.
Enrollees in the Follow Through Master Program can learn more about Going Too Far and six other follow through strategies in the Follow Through Strategies course.