January 27, 2012

Quick Way to Achieve your Goals

As we move toward the end of January, there’s lots of attention on making resolutions happen (financial, personal, etc). Recently, a free webcast offered by the Harvard Business Review website featured Heidi Grant Halvorson, a psychologist who has done widespread research in the areas of motivation and achievement. In that interview, she discussed some of the traps that stand in the way of achieving your goals … and also outlined a proven strategy to make your key objectives happen.

The power of positive thinking

In Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and the well known saying by Napoleon Hill: “What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Halvorson’s research revealed you need to add a second element to that – To maximize your chances of success, you need to also anticipate the difficulties and challenges of achieving your goal.

Quite simply, people who believe their goals will be difficult expect to have to work hard and as a result put in more effort, plan more and take more action. The result should be no surprise – if you anticipate that a goal will be challenging and work harder as a result, your chances of success increase significantly.

A five-minute exercise in mental contrasting

From this research, Halvorson identified the optimal strategy to achieving goals:

First, think positively about what life would be like when you achieve your goal.

Then, think realistically about what it will take to get there.

To achieve this, she recommends a strategy called mental contrasting, designed to bring into focus the rewards of achieving a goal as well what you need to do to achieve it.

Here’s how mental contrasting works:

1. On a clean piece of paper, write down a goal and describe what life would look like and the benefits if you achieved that goal.

2. Then, write down the obstacles and barriers to achieving that goal.

3. Then write down another benefit.

4. And another obstacle.

Continue this process until you’re out of benefits and obstacles. Then look at what you’ve written down – and ask yourself whether you’re prepared to truly commit to this goal. One of the advantages of this exercise is that it helps you identify objectives that are unlikely to happen and to abandon unrealistic fantasies.

The evidence is clear cut – a five-minute investment in mental contrasting leads to better planning, energy and effort – and greater success as a result. Before finalizing your key goals for 2012, run them through this test – and then reassess whether these goals are right for you.

As a side note, Halvorson’s research also confirms that the best goals are also difficult and challenging – difficult goals engage the subconscious in ways the easy ones don’t. So you may need to set more ambitious objectives for 2012