Category: Motivation

I wouldn’t be surprised if you are fed up with hearing about goal-setting. I am.

Goal-setting has become a personal, corporate and political fetish. Modern workers are frequently subjected to performance reviews in which they must set themselves goals to work towards. The fact that these targets are frequently idiotic or meaningless seems to be irrelevant.

Whole countries are now run on targets. Here in Britain, like elsewhere, politicians have become obsessed with goal-setting. Goals have been set for everything, from economic indicators to healthcare waiting lists and criminal activity. If it can be counted, it will be given a target.

Goals out of control

Psychologists must take some of the blame for this raging fashion for goal-setting. Throughout the 1970s and 80s a large number of studies were conducted into how people respond to goals.

Take early work by Bandura and Simon (1977). They recruited severely obese individuals who were, on average, 50% overweight. These were people who found it very difficult to change their eating behaviour. Many had been overweight since childhood.

In their weight-loss experiment, some were told to do their best to reduce their food intake. Others, however, were given specific goals.

Over four weeks dieters who set themselves specific goals were able to reduce their food intake by twice as much as those  just did their best.

This support for the power of specific goals has emerged over the years in all sorts of practical areas. For example, workers at a food manufacturing plant increased their safety performance dramatically by using specific goals. Months later injuries were down.

In another study of call centre workers, specific goals reduced sick days and increased safety and performance.

Both physical and cognitive tasks seemed to be spurred on by specific goals. In a sample of engineers and scientists, performance increased when goals were specific compared with when they were told to do their best or not given any goal at all.

The backlash begins

The list of these studies is endless and no doubt part of the power of specific goals is that they reduce ambiguity. When a manager tells someone to ‘do their best’, they leave the door open to interpretation. What another person thinks is ‘best’ could have little to do with what you think is best. Because it’s ambiguous, people make their own interpretation. So it’s better to have a clear target.

At least, that’s the theory. In reality, because humans are humans, the law of unintended consequences kicks in. There are all sorts of unwanted side-effects to badly set goals (Ordonez et al., 2009):

• Too specific: It’s easy to get stuck on a goal that’s too specific and lose sight of the overall aim. Goals should be in the service of our overall aims, they shouldn’t be our masters.
• Too many: when people have too many goals they tend to concentrate on the easy ones. If the difficult ones are more important, once again the overall aim can suffer.
• Too soon: short-term goals encourage short-term thinking. Do you want your business to be around in five, ten or twenty years? The reason it’s difficult to get a cab on a rainy day in New York is partly because cabbies do such good business that they go home early, having met their daily target. Why stop working when profits are high? That’s short-term goal-setting for you.

There is also evidence that poorly set goals may harm our ability to learn and our intrinsic motivation for a task. They may even encourage unethical behaviour as people strain to meet them.

Personal goal setting

You’ll have noticed that much of this research is in work and organisational psychology. It’s all about managers trying to get the best out of their employees.

All that said, however badly goal-setting may be implemented at a workplace or in an organisation, the basic idea is sound. If you set yourself a specific goal, you’re likely to do better, as long as the goal is a good one.

It’s worth bearing in mind the dark side of goal-setting so that you don’t stray from your overall aims. Goals can be useful, but they shouldn’t be too inflexible.

Also, when you set goals for yourself, rather than have them set by others, you have the advantage of complete control. If it’s not working, you can abandon it. If it’s no longer relevant, it can be changed. But having one or two there vaguely, in the background, is no bad thing.

There’s little doubt that goals can often improve our performance. But we shouldn’t become slaves to them, as have many organisations.

Image credit: Thomas Hawk

Success in modern post-industrial societies is all about reaching long-term goals. We’re way past the time when strength, nimble feet, sharp eyesight and quick reactions could earn a hearty meal.

Now to be successful we have to set goals and work slowly but surely towards reaching them. It isn’t easy. Partly because it’s so hard to predict how our choices will pan out and partly because goals that are worth pursuing take a long time.

We have to take an educated guess then get started on the long road to success.

Despite the importance of reaching long-term goals, I’m always amazed how few people seem to know the right psychological techniques. Encouraged by poorly researched newspaper articles, dodgy self-help authors and the like, people do all sorts of things wrong.

It’s a shame because knowing which techniques work could help you take control of your life.

Sort good from bad

The problem is the good advice is often mixed in with the bad. And the bad stuff is worse than useless; it can actually damage the chances of reaching your goal.

Have a look at this list of 10 common ways you might go about achieving your goals. Most of these should be familiar, but which ones do you think work? More to the point: which ones do or don’t you use?

1. Make a step-by-step plan.
2. Motivate yourself by focusing on someone who has achieved a similar goal.
3. Tell other people about your goal (although, compare with: Why You Should Keep Your Goals Secret)
4. Think about bad things that will happen if you do not achieve your goal.
5. Think about the good things that will happen if you achieve your goal.
6. Try to suppress unhelpful or negative thoughts about your goal and how to achieve it.
7. Reward yourself for making progress in your goal.
8. Rely on willpower.
9. Record your progress.
10. Fantasize or visualize how great your life will be when you achieve your goal.

The list above comes from a study conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman (reported in Wiseman, 2010; 59 Seconds). He asked thousands of participants what techniques they used to reach their burning ambitions. The list above is the top 10 techniques people reported.

Then he tracked them, some for up to a year, to see who reached their goals. These goals included quitting smoking, getting a new qualification, losing weight and getting a new job.

The sad truth was that only 10% of the participants actually achieved their goal. Many gave up along the way; perhaps weary, disillusioned or distracted.

One factor that probably contributed to their failure was their use of the wrong strategies. On the list above, there’s evidence that all the even-numbered strategies (nos. 2, 4, 6, 8 & 10) don’t work and may even hold us back.

Some of these we’ve covered here before, such as thought suppression and fantasising. Hopefully you already know about these dangers. In Wiseman’s study, people who used these and the other even-numbered strategies were less likely to reach their goal.

Strategies that work

On the other hand, those who used the odd-numbered strategies—like making a step-by-step plan and announcing this plan to other people—were more likely to reach their goal.

Because of the way this study was designed we can’t be sure the strategies caused participants’ success (or failure), just that there was an association. But we do know from other studies that these associations are likely to be causal.

Although not explicitly included on this list, the mental contrasting technique for committing to a goal discussed in a previous article is also likely to be effective.

What emerges is that many techniques which are often recommended in the media, non-scientific self-help books, websites and in other places are likely to be ineffective. Instead those striving for distant goals should focus on the strategies which have evidence to support them. Once again, these are:

• Make a step-by-step plan: break your goal down into concrete, measurable and time-based sub-goals.
• Tell other people about your goal: making a public declaration increases motivation.
• Think about the good things that will happen if you achieve your goal (but avoid fantasizing – see this article).
• Reward yourself for making progress in your goal: small rewards help push us on to major successes.
• Record your progress: keep a journal, graph or drawing that plots your progress.

The suggestions on this list won’t be new to you, but it might be the first time you saw them untangled from the stacks of other strategies that are unproven, don’t work, and, worse, may even be detrimental.

Image credit: Ciro Boro

Here’s a brief story about why we all sometimes get distracted from the most important goals in our lives. Perhaps you recognise it?

You are thinking about changing your job because your boss is a pain and you’re stagnating. As the weeks pass you think about how good it would feel to work for an organisation that really valued you. You think this might be a good goal to commit to but…

Work is busy at the moment, the money is OK and your home-life is also packed. And don’t even mention the economy. When do you have time to update your CV and start exploring the options?

Apart from anything else you’ve been thinking about learning a musical instrument. With the lessons and hours of practice there wouldn’t be any time for interviews.

A few months pass. You forget about changing your job and start to fantasise about learning the piano. Wouldn’t it be wonderful after a hard day’s work to immerse yourself in music?

Unfortunately everyday life intervenes again and you do little more than search online for the price of electric pianos. Then you wonder if what your life needs is…and so on.

After six months you come back full circle to changing your job, still without having made a real start towards any of these goals.

Written like this, with six months compressed into a few paragraphs, it’s obvious the problem is a lack of goal commitment; although in reality, with everyday life to cope with, the pattern can be more difficult to spot.

One major reason we don’t achieve our life’s goals is a lack of commitment. This article describes psychology experiments that suggest how we can encourage ourselves to commit to beneficial goals that could change our lives.

Reality check

In a previous article we saw some of the dangers of fantasising about the future. Here, in a series of experiments by Gabriele Oettingen and colleagues, fantasy is involved again, but this time combined with a sobering dose of reality (Oettingen et al., 2001).

The researchers divided 136 participants into three groups and gave them each a different way of thinking about how they wanted to solve a problem, in this case it was an interpersonal one.

1. Indulge: imagine a positive vision of the problem solved.
2. Dwell: think about the negative aspects of the current situation.
3. Contrast: first imagine a positive vision of the problem solved then think about the negative aspects of reality. With both in mind, participants were asked to carry out a ‘reality check’, comparing their fantasy with reality.

Crucially, participants were also asked about their expectations of success in reaching their goal.

The researchers found that the contrast technique was the most effective in encouraging people to make plans of action and in taking responsibility but only when expectations of success were high. When expectations of solving their interpersonal problem were low, those in the mental contrast condition made fewer plans and took less responsibility.

The contrast condition appeared to be forcing people to decide whether their goal was really achievable or not. Then, if they expected to succeed, they committed to the goal; if not, they let it go.

Using this technique, the same thing happens to emotions as well as thoughts. In a second experiment the mental contrasting had the effect of committing people emotionally to the goal if they thought they could succeed, or letting the goal go if they didn’t. Both those who indulged or dwelled made no such emotional investment.

A third experiment found that people in a mental contrast condition were more energised and took action sooner than those who only entertained positive or negative fantasies on their own. Once again people didn’t commit themselves to goals they didn’t expect to achieve.

Why mental contrasting is hard

Carrying out a kind of reality check sounds like a straightforward technique, but from other research we know that it’s easy to get wrong.

The positive fantasies about the future must come first, followed by the negative aspects of reality. Then it’s also vital that we think carefully about the difference between fantasy and reality. A study has found that if people don’t contrast fantasy with reality then the technique doesn’t work (Oettingen & Gollwitzer, 2001).

There’s a good reason why we need to rub our noses in the difference between fantasy and reality. It’s because we hate to have inconsistencies pointed out to us and will attempt all kinds of mental contortions to avoid them. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance: our mind’s discomfort with thoughts and actions which are incompatible with each other.

Our natural reaction is to avoid bringing fantasy and reality together because it’s uncomfortable. Suddenly it becomes obvious what needs to be done and these realisations can be depressing—we might have a lot of work to do. Worse, we might have to face the fact that our goal is unworkable.

Another reason the technique is difficult is that people dislike moving from happy to depressing thoughts. We want to keep thinking about happy things. Or if we’re thinking negative thoughts, it’s difficult to change to positive.

Hearts and minds

When done right, the strength of this technique is it forces us to decide. People have a natural tendency to avoid decisions, preferring to stay in a fantasy land where the chance of failure is zero.

Mental contrasting makes us ask ourselves if this is really a goal we want to pursue. If not we should forget about it and move on to something else. If we expect to succeed then it forces us to commit our hearts and minds to it, making us act now with energy and focus.

And if we imagine failing then we should anticipate regret. A vague goal you don’t care about is a goal to which you’re not committed. Deciding to do one thing, rather than another is always a kind of risk, both cognitive and emotional. The time we expend pursing one goal is time that can’t be spent pursuing others.

By contrast, if we never fully commit then it’s difficult to achieve anything. What the mental contrasting technique forces you to do is choose. Making a choice—a committed choice—is the first step along the journey to realising your goals.

Image credit: Angie Torres

We all have fantasies about the future. It’s only natural to dream happy dreams about how things might go right.

We often hear from self-help gurus that just this type of happy dreaming is a good source of motivation. If we can picture our future success then this will help motivate us.

Loosely speaking there is some truth to this: positive thinking about the future is broadly beneficial. But psychologists have found that visualization and fantasy can be tricky customers and research carried out by Oettingen and Mayer (2002) shows why.

Fantasy versus expectation

The researchers wanted to see how people cope with four different challenges that life throws at us: getting a job, finding a partner, doing well in an exam and undergoing surgery (hopefully not all at the same time).

Across four studies the researchers examined how people thought about each of these challenges. They measured how much they fantasised about a positive outcome and how much they expected a positive outcome.

The difference might sound relatively trivial, but it’s not. Expectations are based on past experiences. You expect to do well in an exam because you’ve done well in previous exams, you expect to meet another partner because you managed to meet your last partner, and so on.

Fantasies, though, involve imagining something you hope will happen in the future, but experiencing it right now. This turns out to be problematic.

The researchers found that when trying to get a job, find a partner, pass an exam or get through surgery, those who spent more time entertaining positive fantasies did worse.

Take those looking for a job. Those who spent more time dreaming about getting a job, performed worse. Two years after leaving college the dreamers:

• had applied for fewer job,
• unsurprisingly had been offered fewer jobs,
• and, if they were in work, had lower salaries.

On the other hand those who entertained more negative future fantasies were more likely to achieve their goals. Similar results were seen for the other goals.

Although positive fantasies were associated with failure, positive expectations were associated with success. People who had positive expectations about finding a partner, recovering quickly from surgery and passing an exam, did better than those whose expectations were negative.

Recall that expectations are built on solid foundations while positive fantasies are often built on thin air.

Why positive fantasies are dangerous

The problem with positive fantasies is that they allow us to anticipate success in the here and now. However they don’t alert us to the problems we are likely to face along the way and can leave us with less motivation—after all it feels like we’ve already reached our goal.

It’s one way in which our minds own brilliance lets us down. Because it’s so amazing at simulating our achievement of future events, it can actually undermine our attempts to achieve those goals in reality.

This isn’t to say that thinking positively about the future is problematic or that fantasy in itself is dangerous, just that a certain type of positive fantasy thinking is associated with poorer performance.

So that’s a warning about the dangers of visualization and fantasy in goal-achievement, onto more positive findings about motivation and success in future posts.

I expect.

Image credit: balt-arts