The Science of Setting Goals

The Science of Setting Goals

What happens in our heads when we set goals?

Apparently a lot more than you’d think. Goal setting isn’t quite so simple as deciding on the things you’d like to accomplish and working towards them.

According to the research of psychologists, neurologists, and other scientists, setting a goal invests ourselves into the target as if we’d already accomplished it. That is, by setting something as a goal, however small or large, however near or far in the future, a part of our brain believes that desired outcome is an essential part of who we are – setting up the conditions that drive us to work towards the goals to fulfill the brain’s self-image.

Apparently the brain cannot distinguish between things we want and things we have. Neurologically, then, our brains treat the failure to achieve our goal the same way as it treats the loss of a valued possession. And up until the moment the goal is achieved, we have failed to achieve it, setting up a constant tension that the brain seeks to resolve.

Ideally, this tension is resolved by driving us towards accomplishment. In many cases, though, the brain simply responds to the loss, causing us to feel fear, anxiety, even anguish, depending on the value of the as-yet-unattained goal.

Love, Loss, Dopamine, and Our Dreams

The brains functions are carried out by a stew of chemicals called neurotransmitters. You’ve probably heard of serotonin, which plays a key role in our emotional life – most of the effective anti-depressant medications on the market are serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning they regulate serotonin levels in the brain leading to more stable moods.

Somewhat less well-known is another neurotransmitter, dopamine. Among other things, dopamine acts as a motivator, creating a sensation of pleasure when the brain is stimulated by achievement. Dopamine is also involved in maintaining attention – some forms of ADHD are linked to irregular responses to dopamine.

So dopamine plays a key role in keeping us focused on our goals and motivating us to attain them, rewarding our attention and achievement by elevating our mood. That is, we feel good when we work towards our goals.

Dopamine is related to wanting – to desire. The attainment of the object of our desire releases dopamine into our brains and we feel good. Conversely, the frustration of our desires starves us of dopamine, causing anxiety and fear.

One of the greatest of desires is romantic love – the long-lasting, “till death do us part” kind. It’s no surprise, then, that romantic love is sustained, at least in part, through the constant flow of dopamine released in the presence – real or imagined – of our true love. Loss of romantic love cuts off that supply of dopamine, which is why it feels like you’re dying – your brain responds by triggering all sorts of anxiety-related responses.

Herein lies obsession, as we go to ever-increasing lengths in search of that dopamine reward. Stalking specialists warn against any kind of contact with a stalker, positive or negative, because any response at all triggers that reward mechanism. If you let the phone ring 50 times and finally pick up on the 51st ring to tell your stalker off, your stalker gets his or her reward, and learns that all s/he has to do is wait for the phone to ring 51 times.

Romantic love isn’t the only kind of desire that can create this kind of dopamine addiction, though – as Captain Ahab knew well, any suitably important goal can become an obsession once the mind has established ownership.

 

The Neurology of Ownership

Ownership turns out to be about a lot more than just legal rights. When we own something, we invest a part of ourselves into it – it becomes an extension of ourselves.

In a famous experiment at Cornell University, researchers gave students school logo coffee mugs, and then offered to trade them chocolate bars for the mugs. Very few were willing to make the trade, no matter how much they professed to like chocolate. Big deal, right? Maybe they just really liked those mugs!

But when they reversed the experiment, handing out chocolate and then offering to trade mugs for the candy, they found that now, few students were all that interested in the mugs. Apparently the key thing about the mugs or the chocolate wasn’t whether students valued whatever they had in their possession, but simply that they had it in their possession.

This phenomenon is called the “endowment effect”. In a nutshell, the endowment effect occurs when we take ownership of an object (or idea, or person); in becoming “ours” it becomes integrated with our sense of identity, making us reluctant to part with it (losing it is seen as a loss, which triggers that dopamine shut-off I discussed above).

Interestingly, researchers have found that the endowment effect doesn’t require actual ownership or even possession to come into play. In fact, it’s enough to have a reasonable expectation of future possession for us to start thinking of something as a part of us – as jilted lovers, gambling losers, and 7-year olds denied a toy at the store have all experienced.

The Upshot for Goal-Setters

So what does all this mean for would-be achievers?

On one hand, it’s a warning against setting unreasonable goals. The bigger the potential for positive growth a goal has, the more anxiety and stress your brain is going to create around it’s non-achievement.

It also suggests that the common wisdom to limit your goals to a small number of reasonable, attainable objectives is good advice. The more goals you have, the more ends your brain thinks it “owns” and therefore the more grief and fear the absence of those ends is going to cause you.

On a more positive note, the fact that the brain rewards our attentiveness by releasing dopamine means that our brain is working with us to direct us to achievement. Paying attention to your goals feels good, encouraging us to spend more time doing it. This may be why outcome visualization — a favorite technique of self-help gurus involving imagining yourself having completed your objectives — has such a poor track record in clinical studies. It effectively tricks our brain into rewarding us for achieving our goals even though we haven’t done it yet!

But ultimately our brain wants us to achieve our goals, so that it’s sense of who we are can be fulfilled. And that’s pretty good news!

Design Your Life by Beginning With the End in Mind

Reflect on the last 10 years of your life. Are you satisfied? Do you get thrilled when you look back? Unless you design your life plan for the next 10 years of your life, life will just happen and you will find the next decade will look pretty much the same as the last decade.

Incredible success does not simply happen. You design it.

The Sydney opera house did not simply happen. An architect designed it whilst first having a complete picture of the opera house in his mind. Once designed he build it according to a project plan. Why do we think our lives will just happen?

Every single top achiever in the world shares two common strengths: A commitment to learning and staying a lifelong student. Setting goals and objectives that are crystal clear, documented and visible and they have a strategic plan with all the steps how they will achieve their goals.

Mark McCormick discussed a ten-year Harvard study that was conducted between 1979 and 1989 in his book “What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School”. The 3% of the 1979 MBA graduate class, who had documented goals when they graduated, earned on average ten times more 10 years later than the 97% of their class who had no written goals when they graduated. The difference between the graduates was the clarity of their goals they had for themselves.

I am amazed that most people spend more time planning a one week holiday, than what they spend to plan a life for the next ten or twenty years. This is so foolish! Jim Rohn said “We all have two choices: We can get by making a living or we can design a fantastic life.”

What is your “why”?

Part of planning your life is to get clarity on your why. Your why is your vision. To have clarity about what you want and why you want it.

A very good way to clarify your why is to evaluate the past decade. What worked for you and what did not? What were your failures, what were your achievements? Which were great decisions in the last 10 years and which were bad ones?

Think beyond some of the financial goals. Think about your life.

Goal setting tools can help you get clear on where you want to be and what you want to achieve with your life. An excellent exercise is to write your own obituary. Imagine you stand at your own funeral. What do you want people to say about you then? What success did you achieve? Whose lives did you improve? What contributions did you make? Whose lives did you change positively? What would your family have to say about your life?

Why is your “why” important?

When you plan your life, you draw up a strategic plan to achieve your life goals. As you live your life following your plan, you will have troubles. You will experience pressure. Adversity will arrive at your door. If you have a clear why, nothing will be able to push you off course and make you want to quit. You will find a way around, over, under and through any adversity because you will remember why you want to succeed.

The opposite is also true. With no clarity on your why, you will become despondent easily. You will want to quit when the going gets tough.

How do you plan a life?

Begin with the end in mind. You look 10 years into the future and decide where you want to be. What do you want to achieve? Envision all the areas of your life. Decide where you want to be financially in 10 years from now. What do you want to achieve in your business? Where do you want to be in your important relationships? What charities do you want to be involved in? Where do you want to be in your spiritual life? Do you want to be in-shape and healthy?

Write down the goals for all the different parts of your life. Write measurable goals. Then make a a plan of how you will achieve the individual goals. Divide each goal into smaller goals. Simply documenting the goals without having a blueprint to start working on, is like writing New Years resolutions down. A year later, no one remembers New Years resolutions.

Begin from a departure point of gratitude. If you want to create a life of abundance, then appreciate and acknowledge abundance. You cannot plan a life from a mindset of desperation and frustration. Write down all that you are thankful for in all the different areas of your life.

Sit down and start to plan your life…