Share Your Goals

As I was weeding this morning I looked up and I have to admit I was a bit overwhelmed by the weeds in the garden. I stuck my head back down and focused on the patch I was working on. I have a goal of one bucket of weeds a day. It’s a big bucket; it usually takes me 30-45 minutes to fill it . As I was pulling those little buggers I was think how hard it is sometimes to deal with a goal when the end seems overwhelming difficult to reach. Like getting a huge amount of debt paid off, or saving a whack of money for an emergency fund, or weeding the whole garden, if you let the goal become a monster you’ll just throw in the trowel and run and hide.

Sharing your goals improves your chances of reaching them. Writing down your goals, sharing them with friends, and sending your friends regular updates about your progress can boost your chances of succeeding. Studies show that people who merely thought about their goals and how to reach them succeeded less than fifty percent of the time. People who wrote goals down, and enlisted friends to help them by sending regular progress reports succeeded closer to seventy-five percent of the time.

Giving up a goal takes both a psychological and physical toll. If you begin doubting whether you can reach your goal, you may be on your way to what psychologists call an “action crisis.” This is the crucial point at which you decide whether to keep going or give up. Research shows with an action crisis comes production of the stress hormone cortisol, which is your brain’s way of sounding a body-wide alarm in response to the internal conflict. The problem is, the extra cortisol doesn’t help your performance, and may contribute to giving up sooner.

Your inner voice is a potent goal-achievement tool. Reacting impulsively can get in the way of goal achievement, Your inner voice is an effective way to control impulses. Telling yourself “Keep going, you can do it,” really does help keep you moving, and sidetracks the impulse to give up because the activity is getting harder.

Being specific can help you reach your goal. Research suggests that being more specific and less flexible may be more effective in goal achievement.  Specific steps, accomplished in strict order, seem harder to do at first, but ultimately lead to greater goal achievement than an ambiguous plan.  Flexible plans may seem much more appealing upfront, but specific plans will get you where you want to go.

Clenching helps with physical goals. No, not your teeth, your first! Clenching your left (but not right) fist can prevent you from choking under high-pressure situations. The effect was studied across three experiments with athletes as test subjects, and the results were consistently significant. The researchers believe that left fist clenching primes the right hemisphere of the brain, aiding automatic skill performance.

Slow and steady. Our brains use the neurotransmitter dopamine as an internal guidance system to reach goals and the dopamine signal in the brain gets stronger as the goal gets closer. So breaking big goals down into a series of smaller goals will keep your motivation stronger.

Rushing out of the gates can burn your motivation up too fast. When your brain is in a hyper state of arousal about wanting something, dopamine floods your brain’s reward circuits.  To succeed, find the happy motivation balance that keeps you moving forward without tripping on your brain’s in-built foibles.