Goal Complex and the Complexity of Goals

  Achievement Motives are continuing dispositions that direct people’s behavior in situations where they want to reach a personal goal. They reflect on whether one is more motivated by wanting to succeed or by not wanting to fail, influencing the goals they have and how they face and engage with challenges. Success Orientation, or hope for success, is an approach tendency. Someone who has this hope is drawn to challenging tasks and perceives them as an opportunity to show their abilities and improve their skills. They enjoy learning and believe in their personal ability to succeed. Achievement motives connect to cognitive hope, which involves agency (a goal-oriented energy) and pathways (the ability to discover more than one way to reach goals), as well as a person’s strong self-efficacy and persistence. On the other hand, Failure Avoidance, or fear of failure, is an avoidance tendency. People who experience this are motivated to protect themselves from the feelings of shame and incompetence that are brought up from failing. Someone with this style of motivation does not pursue success; they try to prevent negative outcomes. Performance-avoidance and mastery-avoidance goals tend to accompany fear of failure as people stay away from situations in which they may be challenged and their weaknesses may be shown. The motive is associated with anxiety, self-doubt, and defensive strategies like setting low standards for themselves.  

In seasons one through five of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith Grey tends to be torn between Success Orientation and Failure Avoidance. Meredith’s hope for success is portrayed in her wanting to prove herself as a capable surgeon, even though she has a complicated background. Some of the approach behaviors that can be seen are how she takes on extremely challenging situations, high-stakes procedures, and complex surgeries. For example, during the episode where a man comes in with a bomb in his chest, she is brave enough to be the one to hold the bomb stable for hours until she is instructed by the bomb squad to remove her hand and run. When she is recognized by the attendings for her mastery, surgical instincts, and resilience, she experiences a strong sense of satisfaction which builds her motivation to continue showing her strong capabilities. Meredith often demonstrates a firm belief in her abilities to learn from the mistakes she makes and especially her successes, demonstrating a hope-based agency and goal persistence. However, she does also have moments of Failure Avoidance motivation, mostly in the aspects of her personal life and not in her career as a becoming surgeon. Meredith portrays a fear and hesitance to form close attachments and take emotional risks in an effort to protect herself from rejection or shame of not getting or maintaining them. One way that this fear of failure shows in her professional life is when she gets in her head about her mother’s legacy and renowned reputation. When Meredith experiences this she gets stuck in a mode of comparing herself to her mother and feels she will never live up to the expectations that come from her and those that knew her mother. When Meredith perceives herself as failing or falling short of these expectations, it comes at a negative emotional cost. She withdraws from situations to avoid her feelings, withdraw, become defensive, and have an avoidance oriented response. Towards the end of the fifth season Meredith attends therapy and has a more balanced achievement profile. She accepts her mistakes fully and sees them as a part of her opportunity to grow and she learns to implement both primary control (persistence) and secondary control (acceptance) more regularly.