Is keeping Your Goals Secret is Good?
Many of the people keep their goals secret why?
Motivation
Illusion of progress
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Many of the people keep their goals secret why?
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.
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.
Image source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1076632
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