Goals: Where You Aim Changes The Game
Goals.
We’ve all heard about them and most of us have probably set one or two. Depending on your experience with goals, you might find them motivating or daunting and discouraging. Regardless of your previous experience with goals, it might be worth putting more effort into your own. A study from the Dominican University in California, found that participants who wrote down their goals, were accountable to someone else, and tracked their progress were much more likely to achieve them.
“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time”
The study found that 3 things make a huge difference in the follow through of our goals.
Written
Writing down your goals on a regular basis makes it 42% more likely that you will achieve them. Another thing that happens when we write down goals is encoding. This is a process in the brain where information travels to our hippocampus where it is either discarded or stored in our long-term memory. Writing improves our encoding process making it more likely we will remember our goals.
Accountability
The study found those who sent weekly progress reports to a friend accomplished significantly more than those who had unwritten goals, wrote their goals, formulated action commitments or sent those action commitments to a friend.
Commitment
Having accountability with ourselves or others can help us increase our sense of responsibility. What’s more, it can also increase the sense of value we have towards our goals and our sense of competence.
So, the next time that you doubt whether setting goals will make a difference for you, consider how you are setting goals. Are they S.M.A.R.T? Did you write them down? Are you accountable? Are you committed?