Category: Motivation

It feels daunting when we draw the bow across a violin for the first time or start learning to samba, or pick up our first stuttering words in a foreign language. The ultimate goal of being able to dance, speak French or play the violin seems a long way off.

There is a strong temptation to give up and try other goals, perhaps less challenging ones. So how do we motivate ourselves to keep going?

Consciously we can use these 11 goals hacks described in a previous article. But our unconscious also chips in to change our perceptions and help us on our way, as revealed by an ingenious new study (Huang et al., 2012).

Collect 1,000 t-shirts

In the study participants were told they were going to be involved in an ongoing effort to collect 1,000 t-shirts to send to refugees in Haiti. They were told about the desperate state of refugees there, including their lack of basic clothing.

Then they were split into two experimental groups* by being shown two different pictures of the project’s progress so far:

• Some were shown two full boxes of t-shirts, suggesting there was lots more work to do and,
• The others were shown 10 full boxes of t-shirts, suggesting they were much nearer their goal.

Crucially, each group was asked to estimate how many t-shirts had already been collected in these boxes.

The group that were shown the two boxes simulated the feeling we get at the start of a big project, i.e. that there is still a lot of work to do.

So how did the participants cope with this? It turned out that they over-estimated the number of t-shirts that had already been collected. In fact, in comparison to an unmotivated control group who thought there were, on average, 92 in the box, those who were committed to the task estimated there were 220 t-shirts.

This over-estimation made them feel that the goal was more attainable.

Almost there?

The group that were shown the 10 boxes were simulating the experience of being close to achieving our goal.

So how did participants keep themselves motivated when there was much less work to do? You guessed it: they under-estimated the number of t-shirts in the box. The control group guessed an average of 617, while the motivated participants guessed 424.

By under-estimating their progress when they were near the end of the task, highly motivated people are able to push themselves on harder towards the end when the temptation is to slack off.

The experimenters checked this finding using other tasks. They got the same types of results again. When people are highly motivated to achieve a task, they over-estimate their progress at the beginning and under-estimate it at the end. This helps provide us with the psychological energy to keep us going through the task.

This effect has been most noticeable to me towards the end of large projects. Even when I’m nearing the finish line, it feels like I’ve still got a fair way to go. Then when I’m finished it takes me by surprise.

Automatic motivation

This finding is heartening because sometimes these subtle cognitive biases work against our best interests, like in the Dunning-Kruger effect and the worse-than-average effect, but here they’re working for us.

In both cases participants’ minds were warping what they were seeing to give them extra motivation. Although strictly speaking they were less accurate, it’s all in the service of achieving something more important: reaching that vital goal.

This is one great example of the way our cognitive biases can be extremely handy for us.

This finding is fascinating because it’s demonstrating how sometimes getting precise information about our progress can actually reduce motivation.

For example if you’re on the running machine at the gym and you’ve just started your workout, then the fact that the display tells you exactly how far you’ve got to go leaves no room for these helpful unconscious biases to operate.

Sometimes it really is better not to know. Instead let your unconscious give you a helping hand on towards your goal.

[*Please note that I have simplified the design of the study for clarity]

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They say that if you can believe it and dream it, then you can make it come true.

It’s clearly not that easy. Indeed psychological research shows that wishful thinking can damage our drive to reach goals:

“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.” (From: Success! Why Expectations Beat Fantasies)

Now a new study has found that:

“…fantasies about an idealized future may indeed lead to poor decisions. Such fantasies create a preference for information about pros rather than cons, particularly when people are not yet serious about pursuing the realization of the future.” (Kappes & Oettingen, 2012)

This creates a problem:

“Turning away from contradictory information allows idealized fantasies to be enjoyed untarnished, but may lead to shunning potentially helpful resources for decision making. Simply dreaming it, then, is not the key to making dreams become true.” (Kappes & Oettingen, 2012)

Worse, daydreaming can actually sap your energy:

“The present four studies indicate that positive fantasies about an idealized future diminish energy, which should hamper achievement on such tasks.” (Kappes & Oettingen, 2012)

That’s why if you’re serious about reaching a goal, indulging your fantasies too much is dangerous. There’s nothing wrong with a little positive thinking within certain boundaries:

“Fantasies that are less positive–that question whether an ideal future can be achieved, and that depict obstacles, problems, and setbacks–should be more beneficial for mustering the energy needed to attain actual success.”

This is just as true of individuals as it is of society in general:

“If you dream it and believe it, it becomes reality. [That philosophy] contributes to the economic bubble that we just saw explode in enormous ways” (Cohen, 2009)

As Barbara Ehrenreich says in her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America:

“We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”

Image credit: Robert Couse-Baker

We all know about the destructive forces that envy can unleash because it’s…

“…a hostile emotion that often prompts aggressive behaviors. Its antagonistic nature is exemplified by the many publicized crimes and intergroup conflicts attributed to it; the countless literary tales of assassination, murder, and sabotage provoked by it…” (van de Ven et al., 2011)

But psychologists have identified two types of envy, which I explained in a previous post on why envy motivates:

“We tend to feel malicious envy towards another person if we think their success is undeserved. This is the type that makes us want to strike out at the other person and bring them down a peg or two. However when another’s success feels deserved to us, we tend to feel a benign envy: one that isn’t destructive but instead motivates.”

Benign envy is the kind which raises you up rather than making you want to pull the other person down. Here are four ways that this type of benign envy can be useful.

1. Benign envy motivates

Benign envy can motivate, as long as you compare yourself to the right person. If he or she is in your league, then they can push you on to greater achievements:

“Relevant superstars provoke self-enhancement and inspiration when their success seems attainable but self-deflation when it seems unattainable.” (Lockwood & Kunda, 1997)

So stick to being envious of people who are doing a bit better than you. For motivation envy beats admiration (see: why envy motivates).

2. Benign envy feels good

Benign envy is the norm: most people automatically compare themselves with people doing better than themselves. And when we see other people doing better than us, it can give us hope, which makes us feel good.

Here is what Simon Latham says in his book “The Science of Sin: The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You)“:

“…comparison can provide information on how a task is done. If you have the good fortune to observe a skilled performer, you watch, you learn and so you perform better […] Envy can change your expectations about what it is possible to achieve. In other words, it can change your perceived likelihood of success.”

3. Benign envy makes you more creative

People who are doing better than us can spur us on to be more creative. In one study on creativity:

“…participants were exposed to comparison targets who either threatened or boosted self-evaluations and then completed a performance task. Participants exposed to the threatening target performed better than those in a control group, whereas those exposed to the nonthreatening target performed worse.” (Johnson & Stapel, 2007)

4. Benign envy makes you smarter

In the same way as it can make you more creative, being envious can make you smarter. Blanton et al. (1999) found that students who compared themselves with others tended to do better in school.

Similarly, these sorts of upward social comparisons can make women better at maths:

“…women’s math test performance was protected when a competent female experimenter (i.e., a female role model) administered the test.” (Marx & Roman, 2002)

Envy can change your perspective

So envy isn’t all bad, as long as it isn’t destructive. It’s natural and beneficial to compare ourselves upwards with people doing a bit better than ourselves as long as we don’t let the green monster out of its cage.

Image credit: Daniel Horacio Agostini

Most of us have a strong fear of failure.

It’s partly because we don’t want to look bad in front of others but it’s also about how we see ourselves. We are afraid to fail because it damages our view of ourselves, our self-esteem.

To protect our self-esteem, psychologists have found that people use all sorts of self-handicapping strategies (from McCrea, 2008):

• Not trying very hard.
• Procrastination.
• Listening to music or using another type of distraction.
• Drinking alcohol and taking drugs.

The beauty of not trying too hard is that, should we fail, we can always say that it doesn’t reflect our ability. In some ways it’s a rational strategy. If you succeed you look especially gifted, if not then your excuse is already there.

Indeed people with high self-esteem seem to be more prone to self-handicapping (Tice & Baumeister, 1990). If you can succeed without really trying then you must be super-talented. So the more a person is convinced of their own talent, the more they like to prove how easy it all is for them.

The problem with self-handicapping is pretty obvious, i.e., you don’t give yourself the best chance, so you don’t get the best result. Sure enough self-handicapping behaviours are associated with lower motivation, less persistence at difficult tasks, less self-guided learning and lower performance in general.

Dangerous excuses

The methods of self-handicapping above are pretty obvious, but there is also a more insidious type of mental gymnastics that will cause problems. This is when you make excuses for a poor performance afterwards.

In a series of experiments McCrea (2008) tested the effect of these explanations on participants’ future motivation. What they found was that making excuses made people feel better about themselves because they were shielded from lowered self-esteem. But, on the other hand, the excuses reduced the motivation to prepare properly in the future.

The line between an excuse and an explanation is a fine one, but generally excuses reduce motivation because they tend to:

• Blame others rather than ourselves.
• Make poor outcomes seem better in comparison.
• Lower expectations for the future.
  

So the first step in avoiding self-handicapping is noticing and cutting out the most obvious self-defeating behaviours, like not trying very hard. On top of this it’s important to try not to make excuses as they will reduce motivation. It will mean taking a hit to your self-esteem, which will hurt in the short-run, but will allow better performance in the long-run.

Image credit: Matthias Weinberger

Search around for advice on how to commit to a goal and one commandment comes up again and again. Apparently you should make your goals public and this will increase your commitment to them.

In theory when you tell your friends that you intend to, say, dig over the garden, or quit smoking, or take up carpentry, it should increase your accountability. You’ve told a friend, so in theory you are more committed to it.

Also people like to remain self-consistent; it gives us a stronger sense of self. So if you didn’t stick to your publicly stated goal it would damage your sense of self.

All these things are true in theory but what about in practice?

Motivation

Unfortunately the mind sometimes has a nasty habit of sabotaging our best attempts to control ourselves. Recent research by Gollwitzer et al. (2010) suggests that, in fact, making our goals public can have precisely the opposite effect from what we intend.

Across three experiments the link between making goals public and actually working towards them was tested. What they found in every study was that when participants had shared their goal with someone else, instead of increasing their commitment, it reduced it.

When they had shared their goals with another, participants put less effort into studying, trying to get a job and taking advantage of opportunities for advancement.

Illusion of progress

So, what’s going on? How can we explain the fact that publicly committing to a goal can reduce our striving towards that goal?

One possible explanation is that the very act of showing off our goal to others gives us some sense that we’ve taken the first step towards reaching it.

In a fourth study Gollwitzer et al. found evidence for just this psychological mechanism. Participants who had made public commitments towards a goal felt they had made more progress than those who hadn’t.

It seems that publicly committing to a goal has a similar effect to fantasising about reaching it (see: Success: Why Expectations Beat Fantasies). Both give us some sense that we have taken the first steps when really we’re going backwards.

So the next time you read this widespread advice about publicly committing to a personal goal, ignore it. Not only does it not work, it may well harm your chances of successfully reaching your goal. If you’re really committed to them, it’s probably better to keep your goals private.

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On average each of us has 15 personal projects ongoing at any one time. It might include planning a trip to Europe, spring cleaning the house, getting a new job or any number of other goals.

Plus there’s all the stuff we’re doing right at the moment like working, shopping or reading.

But, to what extent do all these thoughts about goals interfere with one another? Do you get distracted while working on your resume by thinking about your trip to Europe?

Psychologists have known for a century that incomplete goals rattle around in our minds until they’re done. It’s called the Zeigarnik effect.

Specific plans free the mind

The down side is that we can be distracted by incomplete goals while we’re trying to pursue another goal. And according to new research this is precisely what happens unless we have made very specific plans.

In a series of studies researchers found that while trying to enjoy reading a novel (amongst other tasks), participants were frequently interrupted by intrusive thoughts about an unfinished everyday task (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011).

But when researchers told participants to make very specific plans about that unfinished goal, while reading they experienced less intrusive thoughts about the other activity. In fact the intrusive thoughts lessened to the same level as a control group. This finding was repeated in the lab with other activities.

Making plans helps free up mental space for whatever we are doing right now, allowing us to be more efficient in the long term.

Specific goals include the how, what, where and when of whatever we want to achieve. For example if you’re planning a trip you might decided that during a quiet moment in the evening after supper you’ll draw up a list of hotels and flights to discuss with your partner. Then you can book them online on Saturday morning when you’re fresh (make sure, though, that you focus on the process and not the outcome).

If the plan is specific enough, it is automatically activated when the right circumstances arise. The rest of the time our minds should be freer from the other 14 goals that we’re not currently pursuing.

Image credit: Jacob Vance

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