This Year Turn Your Goals into Verbs: Psychological Tools for Goal Achievement
Imagine.
It’s the first week of January - our friend Jeff goes out and buys a brand new gym membership. He orders 3 books on Amazon. And he tells his wife they’re going to take an amazing trip this coming fall with his extra money.
This is the year.
Jeff set his New Year’s resolutions:
Get in shape.
Read more.
Grow his business unit.
Fast forward – it’s now mid January. The books aren’t getting quite as much use. And his trips to Dunkin’ Donuts are more frequent than his trips to the gym.
And by early February he steps on the scale to see he hasn’t lost a pound. His stack of books have accumulated a nice layer of dust on his nightstand. And he’s doing the same things he was doing before at work.
Odds are you’ve probably been in Jeff’s shoes – I certainly have.
That’s because goal setting is overrated. That’s right, even SMART goals are, in my opinion, not very effective for goal pursuit and achievement.
In this resource I’ll explain why that is and share with you some psychological tools you can use to get results this year: personally and/or professionally.
Let’s start with why goals or resolutions are overrated. Well Jeff (and the millions of other people who fail to keep their resolutions each year) often have the same goals as the people who actually do lose weight, read more books, and earn more money. “Successful” and “unsuccessful” people often have the same goals. So there must be something other than the goals themselves that matter…
Well you might say – okay it has to be a SMART goal. Let’s run with that with Jeff . Remember this means – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound
So Jeff says “I want to lose 10 pounds, read 5 books, and earn $10,000 more from my business by July 1st, 2024”.
The problem of traditional goal setting and SMART goal setting remains – at no point did Jeff actually articulate the behaviors or systems that would lead to the achievement of his goals. He defined the outputs but ignored the inputs. Or as Yale psychologist Laurie Santos would say, he fell for the “GI Joe Fallacy”.
In the old cartoon GI Joe, the protagonist used to say “knowing is half the battle” – in Santos’ course on wellbeing she points out that knowing is absolutely NOT half the battle. Pretty much all of us know we should eat healthier, sleep more, exercise more, smartphone less, and focus more on high priority projects. To do it is the challenge!
So I advocate an approach to goals which is grounded in the psychology of behavior change literature – one that focuses on inputs that lead to the outputs rather than the outputs themselves.
What you’ll get next are what I’ve found to be the 5 most important psychological tools to go from knowing to doing. These are based on research from my happier habits course at the University of Alabama and my work in leadership development with the US Army and enterprise level business leaders.
Make it count.
Make a plan (focused on behavior).
Make it so easy you never miss.
Change your environment.
Create accountability: tracking, rewards, and social support.
Make it count.
This means connecting with the goal on a personal, emotional level. You should think of the goal as it relates to your identity and how you see yourself. Imagine two people trying to stop smoking.
Person 1 says: I think I want to quit smoking this year.
Person 2 says: I am not a smoker. I do not want to set this type of example for my children and I want to be there to play with my grandkids without a ventilator. This stuff is not aligned with who I am.
Now maybe it sounds a little extreme, but who do you think is more likely to quit smoking?
Someone who wants to lose a couple pounds will tolerate missing a workout. An athlete will not.
Someone who wants to get a little better with work-life balance can tolerate staying late at the office just one more time. Someone who sees themselves as a Father or Mother or Partner who is committed to being there consistently for the people who matter most whilst being an efficient, effective leader will not tolerate it. They will implement systems or behaviors to reduce their hours.
There are various models of behavior psychology and motivation that explore this point. Simply stated, you should relate your goal to emotionally compelling reasons why and statements of identity: I am the type of person that [does x consistently] because of [emotionally compelling reasons].
Make a plan.
Now you have emotionally compelling reasons why you will work towards this goal. This step is how you do it. It gets at what I shared early on in this resource.
Goals and resolutions are outputs – what are the inputs?
Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has an excellent resource on this where he talks about “verb-based goals”. What are the day-to-day or week-to-week actions in the physical world which will lead to your goal? Answer that question and make those behaviors your goal instead…
Then create an implementation intention. This means you clearly articulate when, where, and for how long you will do the behavior. This draws on literature from Peter M. Gollwitzer and Gabriele Oettingen in the Department of Psychology at New York University.
Take one study where researchers asked participants to perform an important self-examination to check for potential cancers. One group was told simply to do the 10 minute procedure. Another group was told to do it and state when and where they would do it. The second group was 2 or 3 times more likely to follow through simply because they said when and where.
Think of it as making an appointment with yourself.
Examples:
Lose 10 lbs this year becomes do 20 minutes of cardio at home M, W, F and 30 minutes of weight training at the gym T and R.
Read more becomes read for 15 minutes at my desk after lunch M-F.
Improve the performance of my team becomes Monday and Thursday afternoon I will spend an hour developing a member of my team on a key skillset.
Make it easy.
One of the common issues I’ve observed in coaching leaders and teams is the following allegory: I want to run a marathon this year so I’m going to run 5 miles every day.
By the third day their legs are breaking down. By a week they are ready to go to the hospital.
I follow the model that you must have a habit or behavior in place before you can scale it. There is a certain amount of activation energy required to do a new behavior. Change is hard. So start with something easy.
This is an important point for habit formation as well. Think of the reading example. If you sit down to read for a couple hours on Sunday afternoon that is 120 minutes of reading. If you do 24 minutes, 5 days per week that is also 120 minutes of total reading. But these two examples are not equal.
In the first case you have completed one iteration of the habit. In the second case you reinforced your habit of reading five times. Now we need not take this to an extreme – there are practical limits (you don’t need to read for 5 minutes 5 times per day).
But generally speaking – think of scaling what you did in step 2 down to the smallest possible version of your new behavior or habit and start with that.
What would this look like if it were easy? What is the simple first step (eg putting on my running shoes and stepping outside as opposed to running x miles)?
Change your environment.
I once went 3 months with no alcohol, no nicotine, no meat, no social media, and meditated 4 hours per day.
And want to know the weirdest part?
It was pretty easy… That’s because I was living as a Zen monk at a monastery in the mountains of California. If I wanted booze, nicotine, or meat I would have had to hike over a mountain!
Discipline, like goal setting, is also overrated. Most disciplined people aren’t “more disciplined” – they just have a more disciplined environment.
Despite my ability to do all those things for three months, I promise that if you sit me next to a big plate of my aunt’s Christmas sugar cookies, they are going to get eaten!
What can you do to make your desired behavior easier? How can you change your environment to support you?
Examples
Weight loss: do not keep junk food in the house, keep fresh fruit and high protein snacks on hand, eat a lite healthy snack before going to restaurants so you aren’t tempted, get a gym membership close by, buy new workout gear that you really like wearing, leave a sticky note reminding you to get up and go for a walk, etc…
Read more: leave a book on top of your pillow, turn on DND during reading time, go to a quiet private space, set reminders on your phone, etc.
Improve business: work in a focused environment, remove distractions, join a peer group of people working on the same projects, reduce meetings or other time wasters by setting parameters on your calendar, etc…
Create accountability: tracking and rewards.
Finally, take steps to ensure accountability.
It is amazing the things we do and don’t track. Most people can look at their smart watch and say how many steps they took. They can maybe say how many hours they worked and about how much they made last month.
But if I ask – how much time have you invested in your physical health, mental health, or relationships with loved ones? How are you trending when it comes to your relationship with your spouse or children? What critical few outcomes is your performance measured on in your role and how have you moved the needle?
I usually get back crickets (or worse!).
The idea of tracking is taking what we did in step 2 of making a behavior-based implementation intention and having some way of assessing your progress. This could be as simple as a checklist you cross off at the end of each day. It could be a jar of marbles where each marble is a completion. It could be a digital tracker.
The point is you need to assess if you are actually following through on the inputs that will lead to your outputs rather than flying blind for months then stepping on the scale only to realize the number has gone in the wrong direction.
This will help you check and adjust.
As you reach certain milestones, throw in positive reinforcement in the form of rewards. This is important because most goals and resolutions require some up front sacrifice for a later reward – they are a form of delayed gratification. Exercise now to look better later. Make time to read now to be smarter later. Prioritize and strategize now to earn more later.
The problem is our cognitive systems are designed for immediate rewards. Go kill the deer or find the berries and eat everything you can.
Using intermittent rewards helps to bring those future benefits closer to the present so you maintain motivation.
For example – maybe after you have consistently read a few days a week for a month you aren’t at your goal of 5 books yet but you celebrate with a nice bottle of wine. Maybe you have really dialed in on your one or two business objectives and consistently made time for them but still haven’t seen all the results yet - so you give yourself a little pat on the back.
There are many applications but the important part is the recognition of your own progress. Noticing, savoring, and appreciating your follow through will help to positively reinforce the behavior and increase self-efficacy (which is your capacity to follow through on commitments).
Putting it all together…
I have a resource I use in my consulting and coaching practice that you can follow along with — download it here.
The summary is this: goals are overrated. Most people have similar goals but very different results. In 2024 turn your resolutions into behaviors (aka verbs). And design a plan to stick to it using these principles of behavior psychology.
I’ll leave you with a practical business example from my life...
This year I set a goal for my consulting practice to expand our military leadership development work: Our mission is to help 10,000 service men and women be happier at work. Now we currently have one contract with the US Army National Guard. And honestly for a few months I didn’t make much progress. So I asked myself – what are one or two behaviors (inputs) that would lead to this output?
I thought – well our first engagement came about after a General heard us speak at a military conference. This led to conversations with key decision makers and some discovery into how their organization worked so we could customize our training. So the behaviors I need to get to are speaking at more military conferences and having more conversations with command teams.
But that’s still not quite there yet – because those are behaviors that I cannot directly control nor do consistently.
So I thought okay – I can have my assistant make a list of the top 100 or so military and law enforcement conferences and find the contact information for every state’s National Guard Association. Once per week I will sit down and send 5 emails to conference planners. And I will set a reminder in my calendar a few months ahead of every state National Guard conference to give their director a call.
So I took a pretty big goal that was out of my control (in some sense) – and created a behavior-based goal and implementation plan that I can control.
Every Thursday email 5 military and law enforcement conference planners.
When I see a reminder in my calendar, call the director of the xyz National Guard.
I’ve been running these goals for a few months and we have a couple visits set up with new organizations and have a couple speaking proposals out.
Of course whether you are a business owner or working as a leader in an organization, the details will be different for your context. But I hope in this example you can see these powerful psychological principles at work.
Here are that may help you…
If you want to start with meditation this year check out How to Stick to Meditation.
If you want to go in depth on this then let’s connect about habits-based coaching.
If you want a video on this see below…
Wishing you happiness and success…
Your happiness nerd,
Jackson Kerchis