How Goals Succeed or Fail

by Roy Wiersma

Goals can be a challenging and tricky tool to incorporate into your life.  They can become even more complicated when you are creating goals for a family or group of people.  The purpose of this article is to explain a few mechanisms by which goals help us move forward  and provide a healthy perspective when things don’t go according to plan..

Two reasons goals work

The first reason goals work has to do with vision.  Vision is the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist and think of it as if it does exist.  Vision is associated with aim, direction or orientation.  When you have a vision, you orient yourself toward an idea, like a possible future, and create a direction that you could travel, moreover, you establish a sense of value about that possible future to serve as motivation.     

With a vision you can start to fill in the steps necessary to make the vision actually exist.  You can think proactively and begin building the skills or resources necessary for confronting future challenges.  The question of “How do I do this?” essentially turns into a set of instructions that walks you through the whole process. 

The second reason goals work has to do with relative opportunity.  Once you begin pursuing a goal your circumstances tend to change.  These new circumstances created by your forward momentum provide you with new perspectives on old situations and brand new opportunities.  Had you remained in the old situation goal free you would potentially have stagnated and not been exposed to new people, ideas, or opportunities.

The reasons goals fail and how to avoid them

The first obstacle to goals derives from taking aim at your vision.  When you take aim and fire you run the risk of missing.  This risk of missing can often create the classic fear of failure situation.  The other version of this is the distance from the present state to the vision.  When the gap between your present state and your vision is too vast it seems impossible.  This actually serves to demotivate you because the version of yourself in the vision is far better than the present version of yourself and that can be a painful comparison.

The best solution to these problems is to only set goals you believe are achievable.  You can have dreams that are beyond possible, but real goals should seem nearly 100% achievable.  By setting goals that seem doable you are more likely to find value in pursuing them and more likely to continue if something derails progress.  

Negative feedback loops can be one of the most potent problems when it comes to achieving goals.  There is a psychological theory called the Zeigarnik effect.  It states that people remember things they failed to complete more readily than things they completed.  This can create a negative feedback loop when it comes to goals.  If you fixate on the part of the goal you failed to complete, then it is very easy to miss what you did complete.  This focus on the incomplete can in turn create the sensation that goal setting doesn’t work for you causing further setbacks, then further focus on failure, and the cycle continues all the way down.

To combat this problem, it is paramount that you occasionally take an inventory of where you are compared to where you were.  This allows you to reorganize and collect new information to inform your next decisions and actions.  It might be the case that your understanding of your original goal was incomplete or maybe it isn’t what you thought it was.  Maybe after doing some of the work it simply isn’t for you, or maybe some of the tasks weren’t actually as important as you thought.  Any of these situations can happen, but you still made progress and should capture the positives of this new situation when possible.  

The final major problem is attachment to a certain path to a goal.  When you become attached to a particular path you are no longer able to see the extra opportunities that are being presented to you, tunnel vision.  This problem is especially sneaky because tunnel vision can masquerade as standing by your principles or doing things right.  For example, it is a good thing to do business in an ethical manner, but it is likely that there are several ethical paths to a successful business.    

When considering a major change to a goal, compare the change to your vision.  Is the change altering the core goal, or is it merely changing the path?  Your vision can serve as a powerful motivation to continue working toward your goals even if the path has to change.  When you check your progress be certain to determine whether you have moved closer to your vision.    Oftentimes, you will find that you have made significant progress even though your current path may not have much further utility.

Final Tip: Keeping Momentum

Momentum is potentially your strongest ally when it comes to goals.  Achieving your goals basically amounts to dealing with the major problems from above and maintaining momentum.  Each of these problems are essentially a challenge to your momentum.  The biggest secret to momentum boils down to good habits and measuring progress and are covered in depth in other articles.  In short, implementing habits that focus on the two main reasons goal setting works and creating a measuring system that supports the solutions to the common problems, you can more easily maintain momentum and keep a clear frame on your vision.  These principles can be applied to goals in any area of your life and can help you enact powerful lasting changes.