Psychology of Goal-Setting: How To Make Your Goals Sticky

Reading time: 12 minutes

Have you ever set a New Year’s resolution, only to find it abandoned by February? We all have.

Why your passion fizzles out some time after you set your goal? Not because you lack willpower. But because you didn’t use the psychology of goal-setting.

Psychology can help you set better goals, stick to them, and know what to do when you go sideways.

Five quick hints:

• Set your own goals
• Write down your goals
• Keep them secret from others unless …
• Make them slightly difficult (stretch goals)
• Be very specific about what you want from them

How To Measure Your Goal Stickiness

Klein & Wesson (2001) developed a scale to measure levels of goal commitment.

Think of a current goal and answer the following to know how likely you will stick to it:

Interpretation:

• Low Commitment: Total score of 5-12
• Moderate Commitment: Total score of 13-18
• High Commitment: Total score of 19-25

Read on to find out how to make better goals so you stick to them.

Psychology of Goal-Setting

A goal is a desired future result.

But to reach that future, you need to solve three issues now:

1. Attach a plan, direction, and purpose to your goal.
2. Build a conscious ritual (and later an unconscious habit).
3. Have a plan B to keep going when things get boring or too much.

And why we fail our goals? One common reason is that humans are wired to prioritize instant gratification over delayed rewards. So we find it difficult to keep up changes over long term.

Let’s dive in deep now.

Best Goals For Best Results?

Tubbs (1986) analyzed 87 studies on goal-setting and concluded:

1. Goal Difficulty: Make your goals stretch-goals. Challenging goals lead to better performance than easy goals, as a vast number of studies prove beyond doubt.
2. Goal Specificity: Be crystal-clear about your goals. Specific goals result in higher performance than vague goals like “do your best” or having no goals at all.
3. Feedback: Take feedback at regular intervals. All researchers agree that performance feedback is a critical part of effective goal setting. Monitoring goal progress is an effective self-regulation strategy that promotes behavior change to achieve goals.
4. Participation in Goal Setting: Set your own goals. Setting your own goals can enhance performance, but only if those are more challenging than those given by others.

↠ So, for best results, set your own goals, be clear, make them slightly difficult, and monitor via feedback.

Secret Goals or Public Goals?

Should you keep your goals secret or make them public? The right answer is a clever trick, from research.

• Keep your goals secret: This research suggests goal sharing can create a premature sense of completeness, widening the intention-behavior gap. That is, telling others about a goal tricks your mind into thinking that the goal is already achieved, which cuts your motivation to take actions needed to achieve it.
• Make your goals public. This study shows publicly sharing goal-progress increases the chances of success. Another study indicates that sharing goals with higher status people can boost commitment and performance and create a sense of accountability, as these people’s opinions are valued highly by the goal setter.

↠ So, keep your goals private, unless your audience is someone you look up to and whose opinion you value.

Endowment Effect: Why Set Your Own Goals?

Goal-setting can be a fascinating mental game. Once you set a goal, you naturally become more inclined to hold on to it.

Psychologists say that by setting our own goal, we invest a part of ourselves into it, making it feel like a personal possession.

Experts call it the endowment effect—a phrase coined by Richard Thaler in 1980. It describes how we cling to things we own—a gift, a dream, or a goal—and resist giving them up.

So, set your own goals so that they become part of who you are, and you value them much more highly than what others care.

↠ So, set goals for yourself rather than letting others set them for you, or personalize the goals that others set for you so that they reflect your aspirations.

Generation Effect: Why Write Down Your Goals?

Neuropsychologists say that people remember information better when they actively generate it rather than just reading it.

This is called the generation effect. It says active generation can increase attention, cognitive effort, item uniqueness, semantic processing, and conceptual processing.

Writing down your goals helps you remember them better, act harder, and feel more attached to them.

Writing things down happens on two levels:

1. External storage: storing the information in your goal in a location (e.g., a piece of paper) that is easy to access and review at any time.
2. Encoding: the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s memory center (hippocampus), where they’re analyzed.

See these fascinating studies:

• A 1992 study in two orthopedic hospitals in Scotland found that patients who wrote out goals after hip or knee surgery (“This week I’m going to…”) recovered twice as fast as those who did not.
• Also, goal-setters who describe their goals vividly—using pictures or drawings—are 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to achieve them.
• In another study by psychology professor Gail Matthews at Dominican University, participants who wrote down their goals were found to be 42% more likely to achieve them.

↠ So, write down your goals.

Confirmation Bias: Why Can It Help Or Hurt Your Goals?

Confirmation bias is when your mind seeks out or interprets information in a way that confirms your preexisting ideas. It’s like, “Let me see what supports my existing beliefs.” It makes you:

• Reject all new data that doesn’t match the previous data in your mind, however right.
• Accept all new data that matches the previous data in your mind, however wrong.

Confirmation bias can both help or hurt your chances of achieving set goals. This is how:

• Resistance To Change: It can make it difficult to rethink, change, or modify our goals or strategies when we find new information that clashes with our beliefs. For example, a business leader may ignore market research showing a change in strategy is needed, sticking to their original plan despite proof against it.
• Motivation Through Positive Feedback It can motivate us more to achieve our goals when we get feedback that gels with our beliefs about our abilities and processes. For example, an employee who believes they are performing well may focus on positive comments from their supervisor and disregard all criticism (even the constructive ones).
• Activation of Self-fulfilling Prophecy: The beliefs reinforced by confirmation bias can lead to behaviors that ultimately fulfill those beliefs, a phenomenon known as self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, if someone believes they will succeed in their goal, their actions may align with that belief, leading to a higher likelihood of success, thus confirming their initial belief.

↠ So, take care to get diverse opinions and constructive feedback on your goals to counteract confirmation bias and increase your chances of achieving them.

The desire to have been right … stands in the way of our seeing we were wrong.

— The Web of Belief

7 Meaningful Elements of Goal Setting

1. Fulfillment of Human Need: We naturally want to set goals, as it fulfills the human need for purpose and meaning. It helps us structure our efforts of daily living into a way to fulfill our greater purpose in life. It also offers a sense of control in an often uncertain world, helping reduce anxieties about the future.
2. Grit & Commitment: Goals are useless without grit or commitment. Grit is the perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Commitment is the decision and discipline to do what it takes to move toward our goals. Both can be boosted by reducing self-criticism and negative self-talk.
3. Reward System Activation: Goal-setting starts a feeling of achievement. As we progress toward our goals, it activates our brain’s reward system. Then this reinforces positive behavior that keeps up the effort (Davron, 2024).
4. Habit Formation: Habits are the building blocks of goals. When it comes to building and sustaining new habits towards our goals, repetition is key. Of course, new habits are hard to build because we are more motivated by easy choices and instant results rather than by delayed gratification for better outcomes. Find out the 3 R’s of Habit Building, and help your brain form a new habit.
5. Self-Efficacy: Your self-efficacy is the measure of your belief in your ability to succeed. A strong self-assurance in your abilities or qualities can boost your goal-confidence, goal-perseverance, and goal-success,
6. Importance of the Journey: The journey toward your set goals helps you be more resilient and self-aware. The “goal gradient effect” is the phenomenon when people show more effort and motivation as they approach their goals. This effect is driven by the desire to close the gap between the current state and the desired state.
7. Techniques of Goal-Setting: Setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound), WOOP, or HARD goals make it more likely to achieve our goals and bear more fruits for our efforts.

Science of Goal-Setting Theory

Goal-setting theory is a well-researched idea in psychology. The first researchers wanted to understand what motivates people at work.

Edwin A. Locke, a professor at the University of Maryland, is a key figure in this. He presented it in his 1990 book, A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance.

He wrote that after studying 40,000 people from eight countries over 25 years, he found this interesting fact:

In 90% of the cases, specific and challenging goals lead to better performance than easy goals or vague ones like “do your best.”

Locke defines a goal as “the object or aim of an action” that has two main parts:

1. Content — the desired result (what you want to accomplish)
2. Intensity — the needed effort (how hard you’re willing to work to get there)

How To Set Goals To Achieve Them

• Cultivate Self-Efficacy: Self-efficacy is the belief in your ability to attain your goals (Locke & Latham, 2002).
• Identify Importance and Self-Efficacy: For maximum commitment and achievement, ensure your goals have two key factors: importance and self-efficacy (Locke and Latham, 2002).
• Define Your Direction: Goals determine the direction of your success and serve as yardsticks to measure your progress.
• Acknowledge Existing Goals: Everyone sets goals, even if they are not explicitly defined. For example, deciding not to work at all tomorrow is still a goal.
• Avoid Fuzzy Targets: Many people let their goals remain vague and distant in their minds. Clear goal-setting is essential for focus and success.
• Use Proper Goal-Setting Techniques: By employing effective goal-setting methods, you can clarify where to direct your attention and efforts.
• Understand Importance: Importance encompasses the factors that make achieving a goal significant, including the expected outcomes (Locke & Latham, 2002).

Importance and self-efficacy enhance the goal commitment by the individual.

— Locke & Latham, 2006

Final Words

Goal-setting is a practical process that helps you choose where you want to take yourself in life. The right goals prod you to take charge of your life. But with no goals, you get no direction, attention, or motivation for success.

The question, therefore, is of setting productive and valuable goals — ones that are the best real-world images of our hopes, aspirations, and dreams.

√ Also Read: Manifesting Your Reality: Power of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

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