Science of Goal-Setting, with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

You don't have to have that one big P purpose. You can have the purpose of being an amazing entrepreneur or an amazing manager, leader, but also maybe an amazing spouse, an amazing parent, an amazing runner, whatever it is that you want to be. And you can have all of these things and pursue them at the same time.

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is Hello Monday. It's our show about the changing nature of work and how that work is changing us. Folks, deep breath here. We are so hard on ourselves. Yes, you, even if we don't know each other, I can tell you for sure that you are hard on yourself. And I am too. We're always chasing these goals and sometimes we know why we're chasing them. A lot of times though, those goals come from external places, expectations set by other people. And sometimes we work so hard day in and day out without ever stopping to ask, do I even want to be chasing this goal? Am I going about it in the right way? Instead, we just beat ourselves up and we think that working harder is going to be the way to get to those goals. Well, I'm here to tell you, first of all, that you are capable of achieving anything you want. And second, it might be time to reexamine some of those goals. And maybe it would even be a useful thing to reexamine them in the context not of why you need to accomplish them, but how— how you work. When you really understand how you work, you'll also have a much better understanding of what you want to achieve. Our guest today is Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She is a neuroscientist. She studies at King's College, but that's not what she started out doing. She started out in tech, a high-flying overachiever like so many people I know. Anne-Laure studies the way humans use their brains to set goals. She's the founder of Nest Labs. It's a productivity school for knowledge workers with a focus on mindfulness and mental health. And she has a new book out that's great. It's called Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. On today's episode, Anne-Laure is gonna unpack for us how you can use curiosity to understand yourself better and to put yourself in line with the goals that you most want. And she'll talk about how we can use tiny experiments on ourselves to make progress toward those goals. Here's Anne-Laure.

And it's a very privileged place to be in life when you get your dream job straight out of university. At the same time, the flip side was that I didn't even know it was called like that at the time, but I was suffering from imposter syndrome. I was always wondering if someone at some point would realize that they had made a hiring mistake, that I did not belong there with all of these smart people working on these amazing projects.

Yes.

And so, I was the yes girl. I would say yes to absolutely anything. You needed help with the project, I was here and I, I would do it. And if that meant canceling plans with friends or deprioritizing my health or my sleep, I would do that. In order to be successful and make sure I kept that dream job. And it worked for a while, but at some point, and I wish I could tell you that I realized on my own that something was wrong, but I didn't. It took a health scare for me to finally realize that my priorities were out of whack. So one day I woke up, I was brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, and I noticed that my entire arm had turned purple.

Mm.

So I went to the Google infirmary 'cause we had that on campus.

Wait, wait, what, what year are we at at Google?

That was 2016.

Yeah. Okay.

So Google infirmary, I go there, show them my arm. They say, you need to go to the hospital. So I go to the hospital in Stanford. The doctors look at my arm and they say, you need to have surgery as quickly as possible because you have a blood clot in your arm that is threatening to travel to your lungs.

Oh goodness. Oh goodness. Yeah.

And how did I react in that moment?

I said, "One second, let me check my calendar." It's hard to respond to that, but I think back to who I was in the late 20s of my career when I was striving and stretching and goal-oriented, and I too might have just checked in with my boss to make sure that deadline could just stretch.

Yes, exactly. I didn't want to let anyone down.. And I wanted to make sure that all of the projects I was working on were going to launch successfully, even if I did the surgery. And so I had this almost like an out-of-body experience. You know, when you see yourself doing something so absurd?

Yeah.

You, you're not even sure this person is you. Yes. And so that was the trigger for me. That's really what triggered the questioning of my priorities, my, my my work, my career, my life, and where I actually wanted to go. Right.

You know, some people, when they get curious about that, they read some books. Sometimes they do a deep dive on the internet to try to learn more. You just signed up for a PhD program, right?

The reason, yes, the reason why I went back to retrain as a neuroscientist was because I finally allowed myself to ask the question, what am I actually curious about? If you let go of the traditional definition of success, if you remove from the equation the idea of having a good job that is going to make your parents proud and your friends proud, what is something you're curious about that you would like to explore even if nobody was watching? And it happened so that in my case, it was the brain. I had always been fascinated with why we think the way we think and feel the way we feel. So yes, I did go back to university to study neuroscience.

You keep using the word curious. And reading your work, I felt like I shifted my relationship to that word. I began to understand how that word in itself could be a tool for me. I wonder if you wanna talk a little bit about that.

I love that you're saying that because a lot of people think, when they think about being curious, there's almost this idea of, only being playful, a bit floaty almost, and just following whatever you're interested in. And sure, curiosity can look like that, but curiosity can also be more systematic and more structured. The kind of curiosity that scientists have when they're faced with uncertainty, when there's something they don't understand. Yeah. And they ask themselves, what's going on here? And what kind of experiment can I design around this to try and get an answer?

Let's talk about your first book, Tiny Experiments. This book has a real goal. It has a purpose for people. What do you hope people can learn from it?

It's funny you're using the word purpose because I actually explore that topic in the book. A lot of us have a lot of anxiety around not having found our purpose.

Mm-hmm.

Because in today's world, everything keeps on changing so fast. We're changing, and that creates a lot of unpredictability as to where we're going and what we want, what our career might look like. This book is a bit of an invitation for people to let go of this need for knowing what your purpose is, of this need for linear goals, of this need for a clear path. And it's an invitation to instead experiment, try new things, see what works and what doesn't, and trusting that your path will emerge if you keep on experimenting.

You know, we so often go into our life journeys with a sense that there is like one capital P purpose. It is static, it is not changing. Somehow it equates to what is known, and it feels to me like you're introducing this idea that maybe that's not true at all.

We've all been raised with this idea that purpose is something we should all have. And, uh, in today's society, especially with social media, this is exacerbated in the sense that a lot of people are showcasing the life that they're living, the purpose that they're following and how they're contributing to the world and have a big impact. And so when we don't have that yet, when we see other people who have found their purpose and we haven't found ours yet, we might feel like, does my life have any meaning if I haven't found my purpose yet? And I'm not saying that— there's a lot of research showing that having a purpose can actually have a very positive impact on your mental health and your sense of well-being. But I wish we didn't suffer so much while trying to find it.

Well, that suffering, it's funny that you began by framing that suffering around the way that social introduces this collapsed context where you look around and everybody else has it figured out. Maybe we should begin by just agreeing that everybody else doesn't have it figured out.

Absolutely.

That we're probably not entirely in isolation on that front. And then this next step, this idea that Maybe purpose is a bit more elusive and something that shifts and changes, and the experiments unlock a flexibility around what we can perceive as purpose.

Absolutely. So first, you can have several purposes in life. You don't have to have that one big P purpose.

Yeah.

So you can have the purpose of being an amazing entrepreneur or an amazing manager, leader, but also maybe an amazing spouse, an amazing parent, an amazing runner, uh, whatever it is that you wanna be. And you can have all of these things and pursue them at the same time. Second, your purpose doesn't have to be your purpose for the rest of your life. Yeah. It can be that at some point you feel like you've explored everything you wanted to explore within a given space and you're ready to move on. And that should be considered completely fine.

Yeah. Why is it that we're so uncomfortable with that idea?

We're social creatures, and from an evolutionary perspective, we wanna be perceived as useful by our tribe.

Yeah.

Which means we wanna be perceived as people who know what they're doing. And so admitting to other people that you're not quite sure what you're doing, you're not quite sure where you're going, you're just exploring, you're just figuring it out. Doesn't feel very safe.

No. Yeah. And that social safety piece is critical. I'm curious what your neuroscientist lens has done for you as you're thinking about this.

Understanding from a neuroscience perspective that whenever you have anxiety, when you're faced with uncertainty, is it's really just your brain trying to protect you. Yeah. It's your brain trying to make sure you're going to survive. If you think about our ancestral past, the more certainty you had, the more likely you were to survive. So you wanted to know everything about your environment. You wanted to know where the resources were. You wanted to know what was that weird, strange noise in the bushes over there, who were your friends and your enemy in the tribe. And the more information you had, the more, the safer you felt. The problem is that our brain hasn't changed that much, and it's great at helping us survive. But in today's society, I think most of us, we don't want to just survive, right? We wanna thrive. And that's when that survival mechanism gets in the way.

Well, it's funny that you say that the more information you had, the safer you felt, because I would say just the opposite in 2025. The more information that I have, the less safe that I feel because I don't possess the filters to determine what information can be helpful to me.

Exactly. We were not designed to have access to so much information at the same time. And so that creates a sense of panic. We don't really know what we should do with that information and which information we can trust. And so it creates more uncertainty.

Right. And the curiosity becomes in some ways an alleviation tool for the panic.

Absolutely. It's really a way to reconnect with yourself and knowing that you won't be able to explore everything. Choosing a strand, choosing a path where you might want to see where this is going and where, again, very different from a goal. With a goal, you have a specific destination in mind. If you don't get there, that's failure. With an experiment, you just wanna learn something new, and as long as you learn something new, that is success.

So to be a bit controversial, are you saying that we should take goals off the table?

No, goals can be very helpful when you're in a problem space where you know exactly what you want to do and you actually, you just need to show up and do it.

Sure.

So, if you're in that exploit mode where you just need to execute, having the goal and doing the thing, that's perfectly fine. But in lots of situations and in today's world in particular, that approach doesn't work anymore.

You talk about creating an anthropology of your life. How is this helpful and what does it even mean?

There might be a temptation when you hear about tiny experiments for the first time to just jump right in and design your first experiment. Sure. But any good experiment always starts with observation. You need to know how things are, the current situation, in order to start imagining what could be different and what you might want to experiment with. So, I recommend a little exercise that I call self-anthropology. The reason why I call it like that is because I'm encouraging people to pretend just for 24 hours that you are an anthropologist with your own life as your topic of study. And what an anthropologist does is that they observe and they take little notes without any judgment, and they just ask questions like, why do people do things like this? Why do they care about that? Why do they spend their time and their energy in this way? And you can do the same thing. So taking your typical day in your life, just, you can do that on your phone, create a little note and take, take little notes. What gives you energy? What drains your energy? Did you just have a conversation with someone where you just can't stop thinking about it? You're really curious about it. Or were you stuck in a meeting where you just wanted to go and hide in a corner? That's also important information. Based on that, based on that little anthropology of your life, you can start seeing patterns and you can start feeling curious and ask yourself, okay, is there something I might wanna experiment with here?

Yeah. Well, so as I think about that, what I think about is how poor we often are at reflecting for ourselves on how we use our time and where our energy goes. And so the crucial aspect of that experiment is paying true attention, real attention to what we miss, right?

Yes.

Are there other ways that we can do that?

You really need to pay attention to your energy levels. So we've been taught, most of us, to treat time as the most important resource in our day.

Yes.

And I wanna argue against that and say that your energy levels and how you feel, the more intangible type of factors, the signals that your brain and your body are sending you are more important. Than just time. And ideally, if you can, and I know not everyone has this type of flexibility where you can do that with everything, but ideally, if you have a little bit of flexibility, trying to organize your work in a way where your creativity and the types of tasks that you work on are aligned with your energy levels.

We had a writer on the show, a woman named Elizabeth Gilbert, who talked about how much you could get done by giving yourself the best hour of your day.

I love that.

And it didn't take more than that, right? And you're right that so often we think about time in terms of quantity rather than quality. You know, it's kind of in alignment with how we think about productivity, right? Like we live in a moment where because of the way that knowledge work has evolved, productivity has become summed up by whether or not we got through all of our Slack and all of our email and whether we can point to the to-do list that has everything checked off. But sometimes you get to the end of the to-do list and you realize you've been so busy, I haven't produced anything.

This is really the old definition of productivity that is based on factory work where you need to produce little widgets, right?

Yeah.

When we're in that mindset and we just focus on going through the to-do list, we don't give ourselves enough space to think about, well, first, do we actually need to do everything that's on that list? Because sometimes people put stuff on that list that might be outdated, not aligned with the actual priorities of the company and the business. And maybe we can just remove them. Or are we the right person to do this? Maybe there's another person who's more qualified to do this. Or today we can say maybe AI would do a better job and we could focus on something else instead of spending all of this time on it. So, we don't give ourselves the space to be intentional with our work.

Right. How do you, since you bring it up, how do you think about AI and our relationship to it as we're trying to understand this for ourselves?

I think AI is an amazing thinking companion.

Yeah.

I don't think it can replace the thinking. It can't do the thinking for us. But if we work with AI hand in hand, we can actually produce better work faster, which is, should not always be what we aim for. And it can actually make it more fun, I think.

Talk about the fun piece. That, that is requiring my curiosity.

Well, there really aren't that many people that I can pester nonstop with all of my questions and that won't tire of answering and where the conversation can go in really any direction and they will actually have the knowledge to be able to keep going.

Right.

And that's really fun if you're someone who's naturally curious. If you're the kind of person who you, falls into Wikipedia rabbit holes, loves exploring on the internet. AI is basically that on stories.

Right. So if you go back to the person that you were when you were at Google and you were in those final days, and then the time afterwards when you continued to work in a startup environment, what, first of all, might you do differently today?

I would give myself more time to explore and figure out what I might be really curious about.

Yeah.

It took me a few years to get to a point where I'm not rushing anymore.

Yeah.

And I think the reason why I was rushing so much when I was in my 20s came mostly from a sense of insecurity and of wanting to prove myself. To others. And nowadays, whenever I find myself in a space of uncertainty where, and that happened when the book came out, for example, a lot of people ask me, so what's next? What's next? And I had no idea. In my 20s, I would've panicked and probably said yes to the first opportunity that came on the table just so I would have an answer to this. And now I'm okay saying, I don't know, I don't know. So that's what I would've changed, just taking the time and not rushing.

Right? I wonder if any of us can truly learn that in our 20s or if that's something that experience has to teach us to some degree, right?

Yes.

And at the same time, I think about so many of our listeners right now who are in in-between positions, and they legitimately don't feel like they know what's ahead and how uncomfortable that is. How can we stay in the "I don't know" longer? How can we own the, I don't know?

There are two sources of uncertainty. There's a source of uncertainty which is actually based on reality, which is financial uncertainty. And then there's uncertainty that is based on the fear of how we're going to be perceived and the fear of not knowing where we're going. So what I would recommend first is asking yourself, what kind of uncertainty am I facing right now? If it's the kind, the first kind, financial uncertainty, it is completely okay to take a job so you allow yourself more time for exploring and figuring out what you might actually want to do. It is okay to remove that source of uncertainty, and I think that should be completely okay too. Because sometimes we tell people, again, you have to follow your passion, you have to find your purpose, but you know, sometimes you just have to pay your rent also. And so I think that's okay. If it is the second type of uncertainty where you're just a bit scared of not knowing and what people are going to think if you don't know where you're going, take a deep breath, and remind yourself that this is just your brain trying to protect you.

Do you know how many people I've seen take the first job that comes up after a big shift in career, whether it be a layoff or resignation, or just you come to the end of a startup, whatever it is, right? And you think, OK, I am going to take this time, and I am going to really be methodical about figuring out what comes next. You're so uncomfortable that the first thing that comes, you take it. And I'm here to tell you that almost never works well for people. It almost never, people almost never come out of that happy for having made that decision.

100%. And this is where it really comes with having this sense of self-awareness and honesty. The problem is when people take a job just feeling like, oh, I'm just going to take this and, you know, work there a couple of years while I figure out something else. And then you lose yourself even more in the process. So really, the experimental mindset is really about, again, looking at your life and at your internal world with true, honest curiosity.

Yeah. And it's about developing maybe a framework for understanding your internal world.

Yes.

Often we just bypass it with the assumption that we know ourselves, we know what we're thinking.

And we really don't know. We really don't know. And I don't think we ever get to a point where we know. And it's really, again, more about catching yourself when you're telling yourself a nice story and saying, oh, I'm doing the thing. Oh, it's my brain trying to protect me again. Thank you, brain. I know what you're doing here. But let me actually look at this and be honest and have this conversation with myself.

OK, so what else have you learned about the brain and the tricks it plays on us as we try to navigate our careers?

I was trained as a cognitive neuroscientist, and so for me, there was at first a temptation to look at any way we navigate challenges from almost like shoulder level up.

Yep. Uh-huh.

The reality is that our emotions are as important as our cognitive processes when it comes to the way we navigate decisions. And so if you really want to understand how you're making decisions, why you're making decisions, You have to know that you can't lie to yourself and think that you're being rational. You have to be honest with yourself and know that yes, you're trying to be rational, but there are a lot of emotions at play. There's this fear, this, um, we want to belong, we don't wanna miss out, we wanna be loved, all of this.

Right. Um, now that you know this, have you personally become better at it? Is knowing it enough?

So knowing is enough to become better at it. You never become perfect, right, at it. It's really about noticing whenever those emotions are at play and again catching yourself. And so I really see this as a little dance and noticing when you're veering too far on one side and just letting your emotions run the show, or lying to yourself and thinking that you're being fully rational about the decision.

You know, it brings me back to the way that thinking about your life and your career as a set of experiments creates a system that you can continue to come back to and continue to come back to. And, you know, I had a guest on the show not so long ago who was, who had been the lead hostage negotiator for the United States government. And I asked him, hey, in the moments, the most stressful moments, the moments that are really life or death, how do you overcome your nerves? How do you overcome your emotions and trust in yourself that you can do it? And he said, well, that's the moment where I step away from the question of my emotions and my nerves and I work the system, right? I know the system. It feels to me like your book introduces a handful of systems that we can put into place to navigate an uncertain future. I wonder if you might've, Walk me through one in particular, the head, the heart, the hand.

What's really interesting is that whenever we experience resistance or we face a challenge, we might be tempted to try and ignore it or use willpower, push through.

Yeah.

And just get over it, which is what a lot of people have been taught to do as well. But what if instead you looked at that resistance, at that challenge, with curiosity. And this is what this little tool is all about. So the idea is that whenever you're feeling a little bit of resistance, maybe you're procrastinating and you're not doing the thing that you feel like you should be doing.

Sure.

Instead of blaming yourself, ask, where is the problem coming from? Is it coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand? If the problem is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not fully convinced you should be working on this thing. And so you're resisting, you're procrastinating. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, this thing doesn't look like it's going to be very fun. Again, resistance.

Yeah.

And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, although you think you should be doing this and you feel like it would be fun, you don't believe that you have the right skills, the right tools, or the right support network in order to do the thing.

You've just mapped out every reason I don't do all the things I'm supposed to do.

Well, the great thing is that when you're systematic, when you have a tool to know where the problem comes from, you can also be systematic in the way you solve the problem.

Right.

So, if the problem is coming from the head, then you can tell your team, hey, and I know, a bit uncomfortable, but hey, I've been procrastinating with this because I don't think we should be working on this in the first place. Doesn't feel aligned, can we go back to the drawing board and maybe brainstorm together, figure out a better way to do this? If the problem is coming from the heart, then make it fun. Grab one of your favorite colleagues and go and do a little coworking session together. Go to a coffee shop you like, make it fun. And if the problem is coming from the hand, then raise that hand, ask for help. That could be mentorship, that could be coaching, that could be an online course, but get the training and the tools that you need in order to do the task.

That was Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Check out her new book, Tiny Experiments. Sign up for her newsletter. You'll be glad you did. And I want you to take away some concrete things from this episode. First up, lean into curiosity. What if you studied yourself like an anthropologist? You know, taking careful notes on what brings you joy, or just what slows you down, it can unlock the tiny experiments that are gonna show you so much more about the richness of your own life. Second, humans get caught up in this capital P purpose. Anne-Laure introduces this idea that maybe there are a lot of different purposes, and maybe they shift and change during your life. You need to take the pressure off here. Be open to so much more than you're thinking. Third, the uncertainty here can be just so uncomfortable. Uncertainty writ large is uncomfortable. That's why I love Anne-Laure's tool, the head, the heart, and the hand, right? Is your concern here a logical concern? Is it an emotional concern? Or does it concern what you are actually capable of? Understanding where it starts is the first step to unpacking it and living with just a bit more certainty. We're going to talk about all of Anne-Laure's work, her tips and tricks, so much that we didn't even cover on the episode at this week's Office Hours. So I hope you'll join me and our senior producer Sarah Storm. As usual, we go live every Wednesday afternoon at 3 PM Eastern. You can find us on the LinkedIn news page, or you can just click the link in the show notes. Now, if this episode meant something to you, and I really hope it did, you might want to share it with a friend who can use it. Send a text, an email, whatever works for you. And while you're at it, you can always drop us a note at hello@linkedin.com. I love to hear from you. Thanks for joining us this week. I will be right back in the studio with more Hello Monday next week.