Realistic Goal Setting
The new year and new decade is rapidly approaching. It is now the time for making New Year’s resolutions, setting goals for the coming year and putting all our dreams and ambitions onto paper (if not in concrete). In spite of all our good intentions, most of us, by the end of February feel like failures—it was futile setting goals and making resolutions—we’ve already broken most of them and the rest will soon fall by the wayside to be replaced by feelings of regret and inadequacy, right?
The pragmatic mind would rationalize that it would make sense to set realistic goals and resolutions that one could actually attain. We should set goals that can be achieved in manageable chunks and that afford small, encouraging victories. Small steps forward = progress.
Wrong! Check this out:
As a social scientist, I know one important fact to be true. We human beings, with very few exceptions, are capable of achieving only a fraction of our conscious goals. In political science, this phenomenon is called “the J-curve”.
If you look at a J-curve graph, the “J” is actually upside down and curves to the right. If I had been the person who thought up that concept, I would probably have called it “a candy-cane curve”. Anyway, those of you who are familiar with graphs and charts, I hope you can picture in your mind a line that, from the lower left-hand starting point, heads upward toward its goal in the upper right-hand corner of the chart. Alas, oh no! The graph line begins to peter out somewhere in the upper one third of the chart and, as gravity takes its toll and the line loses momentum, it curves off and ends up short of the actual goal. Get the picture? For those of you non-visual, non-graphy folks, this model means that our progress toward our goals will naturally lose some of their momentum and urgency as time goes by, and we will almost always fall short of reaching 100% accomplishment.
Ok, says you, that is disappointing! Not really. Here is the strategy for setting your resolutions and goals: Since you will surely achieve only a good part of your goal, no matter how small or how lofty, it makes more sense to set great, ambitious, high-flying goals. If the goals that you set for yourself are small, and you achieve only 80% of them, you really haven’t made that much progress; however, if your goals are prodigious, and you achieve 75% of them, you have actually accomplished a great deal. You are way ahead of the game!
Once you have become accustomed to this way of thinking and this method of goal-setting, you no longer view achieving a good percent of your goals as failure, and you begin to recognize your actual progresses as the great victories they really are. The percentage of your goal that you did not achieve pales in comparison to what you have accomplished.
Go ahead—reach for the stars!
