Specific Goals
Goal setting is something I’m intimately familiar with as I do it all the time for my clients and myself. I would like to start of on a note of agreement with Dr. Halvorson in that more specific goals are more likely to be accomplished than vague goals. However, I can’t really comment on her work as a whole as I’m not familiar with it. I would also like to add that the advice “being specific” is probably not specific enough. For goals to be more likely to be achieved, they have to be specific in the right way, mainly being “operationalized” into behaviors that can be changed. Operationalized here simply means that you state the goal in a way that relates to measureable and monitored. So for example, someone looking to set goals to do better may say to him or herself “I want to be smarter!” or “I want to be a better student!” but this doesn’t help because this goal is vague in terms of describing what the actual end goal is. To operationalize these goals, we would have to start listing actual behaviors such as “I want to be increase the amount of time I want to study everyday”. Eventually, you would probably also want to go further and define what constitutes studying so its not something like being in the library but actually focusing on the task.
Long & Short Term Goals
With the above in mind, one can go about creating goals. However, since your asking for long-term (resolution type) goals, it’s important to consider what role the short-term goals play in this. In fact, I would go as far as to say that most people don’t achieve long term goals simply because they don’t have short term goals that they can meet along the way to the long term goals. For example, someone looking to spend less money this year is likely to give up that goal or not keep up with it because he or she has to wait 365 days before the actual reward from the achievement of saving money is received. Instead, a person is much more likely to be successful if there are short-term goals that mediate the long-term goals, such as “I will spend ____ amounts of money a month so by the end of the year, I will have spent less money in the year than previous years”. This provides more immediate contact with the good feeling of accomplishing the goal (end of each month) and provides a way to either adjust the goal or strategy to reach the long-term goal if the goal on the monthly basis is not being met.
It is also important here to mention that when selecting goals, they are much more likely to be successful if they are realistic. For example, if someone is looking to increase their time spent studying each day and previously they only studied 20 minutes a day, a short-term goal of 5 hours of studying each day would not be the best choice. Instead, the 5 hours goal can be the long-term goal (say over a few months or a year later) and the short term goal should be something closer, such as “I will study 60 minutes a day by the end of this month). Off course, this starting point and initial goals will vary across people and the different behaviors they are looking to change. To make sure that the goals are realistic, it is often important to get a baseline on the behavior that you are looking to change. A baseline is simply how you are currently doing in regards to your goal. For budgets, this can be related to how much money you spent in the previous year or previous month and for studying, it could be how much you typically study in a day.
Monitoring Goals
Monitoring the goals has been implicit in everything I have said above but its usually an under emphasized point. Monitoring goals makes it much more likely that you will achieve your goals. Monitoring goals can tell you information such as are the goals being achieved, if you change your strategy (study in library instead of at home) whether that changes how effectively your meeting your goals and finally in the end, monitoring the goal will eventually tell you if you reached your goal. Moreover, monitoring can in itself serve as a strategy, typically called “reactivity” in psychology. People’s behavior changes when it is observed, specifically when observed closely. I do this for many of my own goals that range from getting enough sleep to making sure I studying and exercising everyday.
Another “factoid” about monitoring is a more general statement about all human behavior. This fact is that behavior is variable and no behavior occurs the same way 100% of the time. Even the most talented musician will miss a note every once in a while, even though probably much less than a beginner musician. The idea is that to reach the goal, the variability in the behavior has to be lowered over time but not to try to eliminate it all together, as that is virtually impossible. Instead, one should focus on making sure that even with the variability, the behaviors are moving towards the goal. The picture below highlights this. The straight black line is the “goal line” which is mapping out the path to the goal. The blue lines with data points on it is the actual behavior.
In this chart, it’s apparent that some of the data points were well below the line but if you look at the overall trend, the behavior is staying with the goal line. The rule of thumb used in psychology is typically 4 data points below a goal line is when you start to reevaluate your strategy because it seems like your falling off the goal line. This is fairly arbitrary but pragmatic rule of thumb. In any case, it would be helpful to set up some rules for yourself such as “if I don’t lower my spending in the first 2 months, I will adjust my strategy” will be helpful.
Random Tips
Other things that make it more likely you will achieve your goals are the following:
· Making sure the goal is something you value; you might start on a goal and realize half way that it’s not something that is vital to what you want.
· Make the goals public. This strategy has been shown in research to increase the likelihood the goal will be successful.
· Expect difficulties and small failures, there will always be stones in the road that we trip over but you have to learn to expect these and keep going towards the goal despite these small set ups (i.e. someone on a diet may give in and eat ice cream one day and as result, feel like they failed at their goal. In this case, the person can easily see this as a minor set back and continue the next day to start up on eating healthy again). In this case, it’s important to keep the eye on the big picture in light of small setbacks (see variability discussion above).
· Do a resource analysis. This is another crucial step overlooked but can make or break a goal plan. For example, someone looking to eat healthy has to make sure that the healthy food is available, which requires changing grocery shopping habits, having money for healthy food (which typically costs more, have time to prepare the food, etc. All of these factors among others might not come up directly when focusing narrowly on the goal related to behavior (eat healthier) but will ultimately determine how likely one is to eat healthier.
Some helpful Questions to Ask Yourself When Creating and Setting Goals:
What is my goal?
What is the value in this goal?
What is the operational definition of this goal?
What are some short-term goals that will lead to this long-term goal (Operationalized as well)?
What will I do to achieve my goal (strategy used)?
How will I monitor my goal or changes towards my goal?
How will I know when my goal is reached (if it is a static goal)?
Thats all I have for now, I’ll try to post in the future about “self-management” or “self-discipline” as a more general topic that focuses a lot more on the specific strategies, which I purposely did not cover here as it would get too lengthy.
-Imad
