Goal Setting: When Will Power Runs Short
As the New Year approaches, it becomes a time for reflection as well as looking ahead to the next one. People often evaluate what they did well the previous year and what they want to improve upon in the next one. This is often an annual process and we often end up choosing similar goals for the next year. There is then a period of time where we feel motivated to chase that goal and then by the middle of February, will power has run short and we start to revert back to our old habits.
The primary issue is that most of us rely on will power to attempt to achieve these goals. While will power is incredibly powerful in the short term, it often gets defeated in the long term slog of life where things slowly sap our energy. In an effort to combat this, things like dream boards have become increasingly popular. People will write out where they want to be in 5, 10 or 15 years and put it up on a visual display to try to motivate themselves. This works well for some people because we are highly visual creatures and we trust our eyes implicitly. However, there are a couple things you want to consider.
The first thing to consider with a dream board is that you don’t make it too stimulating. Often people derive enough satisfaction from creating it and looking over it, that it hampers their motivation and drive to go after the things listed. A great example of this is people who want to be writers. They talk about writing a book, talk through ideas of writing the book but never actually sit down and write it. This is because they have received enough positive stimulation from those experiences, that the deep drive to start writing is not there.
The second thing to consider is planning out how you are going to achieve these goals. While dreaming big is always fun, goals must be grounded in reality and the steps to achieving them must be known. If your goal is to own a house, you need to reverse engineer all the steps it takes and then set benchmarks with dates that you need to hit them at. This lays a foundation that is not only achievable but also measurable and on a schedule. Timing schedules help motivate people since they create an internal sense of urgency. Once you have broken your goal down into timely and achievable pieces, you should work through every obstacle that could go wrong. You then should think through how you are going to overcome this obstacle. This can sound demoralizing but it is a vital piece. Because, once you have planned for things that can derail you, you are not surprised or flustered when they do. You simply revert to the strategies you planned out in advance. This helps you make better choices, leading to a better outcome.
The last step is called spot lighting your goal. This works phenomenally well with physical tasks. It consists of narrowing your visual focus to just one small point and focusing on only that. Say you are out for a run and you are focusing on the stop sign at the end of the street. You want to imagine that there is a spotlight on that stop sign and blinders to the rest of the world. If you are running, once you hit that point, you pick a new target. This can be done for mental working tasks as well. You take whatever your goal is, and focus your attention on it, like a spotlight. This mental narrowed window of attention creates an increase in the chemicals that drive focus in the brain. An example would be if you are sitting down to write a blog post, you focus on your screen like there is a spotlight on it and blinders to the rest of the world. As your visual window becomes a tunnel, your mind does too, focusing on what your goal is. This has been called many different things by many different researchers. Cal Newport calls it Deep Work, the title of one of his amazing books. Many others call it the flow state where expert performers can put themselves as they execute at a high level. Many professional boxers will talk about it when they become so focused they forget entire rounds of a fight that they won because they were so mentally engaged in the task.
So, as you aim to make the next year your best year, take your goals, break them down into timely benchmarks, and then spotlight your attention on them. And then, execute your plan.
