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The art of goal setting is not lost on Gen Y. Many of us keep this tool close to the hip and keep it sharp. We know how to keep our current job placement in check with our career aspirations. We are aware of the discussion on work/life balance. And more than once we have been inspired to take a step back from our 9-5s and re-imagine the dreams that light our personal and professional fires.
But a new study suggests that we might need to re-think a critical aspect of goal setting. Some conventional wisdom asserts that letting others know of your future plans makes you more likely to achieve them. There’s a logic behind this wisdom: speaking your intentions is an informal contract between you and your network. That contract creates accountability for your actions. The process makes some sense in theory.
Yet the success involved in announcing your goals may not hold up in practice. As Wray Herbert explains, telling others of our goals may create a previously unforeseen barrier: ego inflation. In some situations, as recent psychological studies indicate, once we declare our goals to peers, colleagues, or friends, we think of ourselves in a different light. The informal contracts make us feel as if we’ve begun down the path to our goal, which can prevent us from taking further steps toward actually achieving it.
The studies contrasted law students in two different scenarios–in both scenarios, a control group of students who did not declare their goals to researchers was compared against a subset of students who did make their goals known. In both tests, those students who kept their goals to themselves performed better in research related experiments.
In some sense, this study targets the issue of committment within the process of goal-setting. At what point do we invest ourselves in our own envisioned futures? Is it when we first dream big? Or later, when we transcribe dreams into plans? Or perhaps commitment comes even further down the road, after we’ve communicated those plans to our closest allies.
As I’m sure others would agree, regardless of when we make commitment, once we do make it, we are more likely to both learn from it and follow through on it. I would wager that the participants in the aforementioned studies who declared their goals were less committed, despite being more vocal, than those who remained quiet. The focus should not be on speaking up or remaining silent, but making and keeping the commitment to yourself.
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Comments
05.18.09
Andrew-
I like the post. I wonder, too, if the actual goal itself makes a difference here. If your dream is "I want to be an astronaut" that is to achieve than "I want to eat a sandwich", no matter if you make your intentions known or not.
The study looks very interesting though--thanks for sharing!
05.18.09
Andrew,
Thanks for this post! I am one of those network committers. I always let people know of my plans even before I start acting on them. Maybe I need to reconsider...
05.18.09
Huh, I've never really thought of goals in this light before. I'm always so quick to tell anyone and everyone about my plans, but you're right- that's sometimes gratification enough and I find that I don't do anything further about it.
I'm going to experiment with working on a new goal privately this week and see how it goes!
05.18.09
Interesting Post- I find that once I've made my goals known there's a sense of accountability which motivates me to act on it. After all, if I don't achieve a goal no one but I knew about, there's less (perceived) consequence. Maybe it's time to try internalizing goal-setting.
05.19.09
Wow. Well, there you have it. For years, I've set goals, made plans, told people about them and did little else.
Never tried keeping it to myself.
Note to self.
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