2022 is coming to an end. How do you feel about it? Content and happy or disappointed and regretful? As much as I try to convince myself that the end and the beginning of the year are just random milestones we set for ourselves and that we can always have fresh starts, there’s something comforting about knowing it’s a start and an end for most people worldwide. This makes it the perfect time to assess your life and set new goals. Goal setting and pursuit are not for everyone. Some people are content and happy with the way they live their life and should not change it because it’s trending. But if you are unsatisfied with where your life is and have dreams and ambitions you want to achieve, you cannot escape the goal-setting and pursuit process. In the next lines, I tried to detail the ultimate goals guide that is also summed up in a downloadable notion template.
I encourage you to get deep and understand some of the biological aspects behind goal setting and the implemented tools but if you wish to download the template directly, you can get it from HERE.
Why some people hate setting goals
As December approaches, almost everyone gets excited to set New Year’s resolutions. But only 20% and 40% can achieve them by the end of the year. However, even if you don’t explicitly define your goals, you are living by them. If you are working, you certainly have deadlines and if anything is bugging you in your life, you’re thinking of fixing it …. And these are goals.
The reason why people are reluctant to sit with themselves and set clear objectives can be:
Fear of failure and disappointment:
You may have woken up one day and decided to set ambitious goals for yourself. But that motivation soon wore off and the goals remained a piece of paper. You got disappointed and gave up altogether on the goal-setting practice.
Each time you think about it again, you brush it off thinking you’ll fail again. The counterargument is that most successful people have a goal-setting/execution process and it is how they have achieved their success and have grown beyond it.
Not living the spontaneous joy of life:
Drawing goals for every aspect of life can make it look like a corporate enterprise that you manage. It sounds so cold, boring and not how we’re meant to live life. If taken to the extreme, it is exactly how it looks like. But you don’t have to set rigid plans for everything. You can only set a career goal and fitness goal for example and let all the rest flow naturally without attempting to control it. This leaves place for both spontaneity and deliberate planning. You just need to decide what aspects you’re willing to box into a structure.
Some goals are beyond our control:
Revenue targets, weight loss, promotions … are all outcome goals that are not necessarily within our control. What you can control is how much work you put into the business or how disciplined you are with your workout plan. And sometimes by sticking to these controllable steps, problems happen that rails you off from your goals. So, what’s the point in setting these goals and putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves? I’ve tried in the past to stick to only controllable goals to remove the anxiety of trying to factor for things outside my control. But when you do that, you lose the why behind the goal. Why do I want to work harder on the business, or wake up early each morning to workout? I’ve also missed out on the learnings you get when you fail. Failure allows you to identify what went wrong and what you can improve. You can set uncontrollable goals, and when they fail and you’ve done your fair share of controllable actions, you don’t feel bad because you’ve given it your best.
All this being said, there are a lot of people living happily who do not set goals. There’s no right or wrong way to live live. If you’re content with where you’re at there’s no reason to change it. But if you authentically have dreams and ambitions, setting and working towards goals is important if you want to make them true. The problem isn’t in the concept of goals but in the process of defining them and pursuing them.
Important concepts in goal pursuit:
Finite and infinite goals
One of the critiques we can have for the concept of goals is that they are never-ending. We go from one goal to another endlessly without any meaning behind it. I may want to run 5k this year, a half marathon the next year, or an ultra marathon and the sky is the limit … To some, this brings them a lot of joy but to others it may sound pointless especially if not tied to a bigger purpose. This is why it is important to distinguish between finite and infinite goals. Finite goals are the typical SMART (specific – measurable – actionable – realistic – time-bound) goals. They have a clearly defined finish line. Infinite goals are the never-ending goals that bring your purpose in life. It can be that you want to be the fittest version of yourself to be able to play with your grandchildren or that you want to expand your knowledge, or you want to be with your family more often … These goals do not have a limit and can be the compass by which you define you define the finite goal. It’s important to define the infinite goals that mean the most to you, to make the goal-setting process worth it.
Self-awareness:
If you’re copy-pasting other people’s goals based on what’s trendy and appears good in society you’re setting yourself up for failure. If you want to set goals, you must choose them according to your core beliefs, values and dreams. And to do that you have to be brutally honest with yourself. From each goal you define, ask yourself: do I really want this? Why do I want it? What does it make me feel? This is the only way to make sure the goals are authentically yours.
Have material goals but look beneath them:
Some people demonize material goals and some worship them. We know that money doesn’t bring happiness. But we also know that you need to sustain a basic level of financial stability to live a good life. If your material goals go beyond the basic needs, It is important to examine the motive behind the goal. If you want the latest Bugatti, is it because you’re passionate about sports cars? Or is it because you want the respect and admiration people give you when drive it? Why do you want a huge house? Is it so that people can be amazed at how big your house is or because you love hosting massive family and friends gatherings? Why do you want such a large bank account? What does it procure you besides the material belongings?
Asking these questions is very important to get over the hedonic adaptation and the disappointment that comes with attaining material goals. If you’ve gotten the recent iPhone or a gorgeous car, you’ve certainly noticed how the initial excitement dwindles quickly into zero and life becomes normal again. This phenomenon is known as hedonic adaptation. Sometimes, the material goal at the surface level isn’t what you realy want, find the deeper goal and work towards it. But if it is, then go and get it.
Goals are nothing without effective systems.
Or as James Clear beautifully puts it “You rise to the level of your goals and fall to the levels of your system”. When you set yourself finite goals, it is important to define the action steps necessary to reach those goals and turn them into habits or other systems whenever possible. Building the habit practice related to your goal, makes it less mentaly taxing and more sustainable. I have an in depth article on how to build habit the neuroscience way that I highly recommend you check out. If you have financial goals, it may be helpful to design a system that helps you track your income and expenses. Or if you have health and fitness goals, create a system that will help you track your progress, your workouts and your health markers.
If you don’t these systems in place that are designed to suit you, there’s a high probability your goals will fail.
Now, let’s get nerdy and discover how our body reacts during the goal pursuit.
The biological process of goal pursuit:
The physiological process of goal setting and pursuit involves specific brains areas that work together to make it happen. You do not have to memorize all the names. What’s more important is understanding the logic behind how it all comes together so we can leverage certain tools to make the process more effective.
The amygdala:
is the region of the brain that’s associated with fear, anxiety and avoidance. It is used as a protective mechanism for our survival. How does it relate to goal seeking ? Whe you seek a goal of achieving “X”, you are also avoiding not achieving “Y”. The anxiety and disappointment that come with not achieving a goal are built into this area of the brain.
The ventral striatum/Basal ganglia
The ventral srtriatum is located in the basal ganglia which is our go/no go decision maker. It is responsible for initiating action or preventing action. One circuit of this area is involved in getting us to do things. For instance, if I am going to get up tomorrow and workout first thing in the morning or want to avoid bringing my phone to bed with me, the decision is made through this area.
The cortex:
The cortex is the outer shell of the brain. There are two sub regions of the cortex, that are involved in goal-directed behavior. One is the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in the executive function like planning, thinking about things in immediate and long term. And the orbitofrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex which is involved in meshing our emotional state felt during our pursuit of the goal and comparing that emotionality to where it might be, when we are closer to a goal.
There are four areas:
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- one involved in anxiety
- one involved in emotion
- one involved in go/no-go action and
- one involved in thinking through different time scales.
Whether you want to build the next Apple, or planning to have a date night, these same neural circuits are involved. This whole process of defining valuable goals and pursuing them is governed by the neuromodulator “dopamine”.
Now that we understood the physiological elements that go into it, let’s see what tools can we leverage them to make the process more efficient.
Scientific tips to help you achieve your goals:
Visual focus
The NYU laboratory of the psychology department led by Dr. Emily Balcetis has done really nice work on the impact of visual focus on achieving goals. In one of experiments they’ve had two groups of people exercise wearing 15 pound ankle weight. One where people have to go through the same physical effort or mental effort, but they don’t focus their attention just on one location. I’ll give you an example of one particularly nice study from the Balcetis Lab.
In his podcast, Andrew mentioned an interesting study conducted by the Balcetis Lab on the impact of visual focus on reaching your goals. This particular study involves, physical exercise. They had a group of people exercise wearing 15-pound ankle weights and had to run a distance to reach the goal line. One group was visually focused on the goal line and the other group was not told to visually focus on the goal line. And what they found, was that the group that focused on the goal line, was able to reach that goal with 17% less effort. They measured effort and they got there 23% quicker. This is a remarkable difference. This study involves physical activity but they’ve done similar studies looking at cognitive type work that have shown similar results.
So just by changing where you look, you can change your perceived effort and your ability to do something, more effectively and more quickly.
How did it happen ? Well, it turns out, there is an underlying physiological reason and that has to do with changes in our autonomic nervous system. It is the system that prepare us for readiness and action or for resting and relaxing
When we focus on a particular location, systolic blood pressure which is the measured pressure in the vascular system when your heart contracts, rises. Which leads to a moderate rise in adrenaline levels which further readies your body for action. Adrenaline is the activation energy that fuels our goals pursuit.
Practically, If you’re trying to pursue a cognitive or a physical goal, you’re going to focus your visual attention on one point beyond your peripersonal space. It could be on your computer, the wall, the ground …. You will try to hold your visual attention for 30 to 60 seconds. Your may find your mind drifting and that’s okay. Just try to bring your visual attention to that common point again. This will trigger all the physiological elements we’ve explained above and get you in a state of readiness.
Visualization: What you want and what you don’t want
Visualisation to initiate goal pursuit:
A lot of people find it hard to stick to long term goals. Which is very natural because of phenomenon called “Delay discounting”. The farther away the goal is, the less rewarding it becomes. The Balcetis Lab has also done interesting experiments, looking at people’s ability to set and stick to long-term goals. One of the long-term goal that they looked at, was one related to saving money for later in life. They created two group.
One group were asked to imagine what it would be like to be 30 or 40 years older and then invest a certain amount of money, according to whatever it is they thought that they would need.
The other group, actually viewed pictures of themselves that were digitally aged, so that they could see themselves 30 or 40 years into the future.
It turns out that people in that second group, simply by perceiving their future image saved more money. The visualisation technique helped bridge the gap between their immediate experience of life and the life they may experience in 30 or 40 years.
Our visual perception of the future and our visual perception of the present is very powerful. It allows us to anchor our goal-directed systems and our motivation to take on things that in the immediate term might not seem that useful. Other good scientific studies have been done where people were asked to script out their goals in vivid details. And they observed a significant increase in the systolic blood that’s associated with the state of readiness.
Positive visualisation is very important to help us bridge the gap between our current and future selves and get us ready for our goals. But unfortunately isn’t enough to sustain it.
There’s a better way for keeping this activation state that also involves visualization. But this time it’s visualizing failure instead of success.
Visualisation to sustain goal pursuit:
In the scientific literature, what the Balcetis Lab and other labs have shown, is that there’s a near doubling of the probability of reaching one’s goal, if you focus routinely on foreshadowing failure. If your goal is to be able to run 10k in under 1 hour by the end of the next month, think about how disappointed and angry you will feel if you don’t reach that goal. Or if you have a running coach how you will let him down if you don’t do it. Physiologically, if we think back to the neural circuit associated with assessing value in our goal pursuits, this makes perfect sense. The amygdala, the brain centre that is involved in anxiety and fear, is one of the four core components of our goal-setting and goal-pursuit circuitry and there is no bypassing that when thinking about goals. As humans, we are better at moving away from what we fear than moving towards what we want.
We all love to only think positively about our lives and not involve failure but it turns out it’s not the most effective way to reach our goals. We should be thinking mainly about how bad it is going to become if we don’t do it. The disappointment you’re going to feel and how it will negatively impact you in the immediate term and in the long-term.
Make Goals Moderately Lofty
In pop psychology, we’ve heard that we need to set goals that are aspirational and significant enough to get us excited. But they should not be too high that they are impossible to achieve.
Many studies have addressed whether or not the probability of achieving a goal, goes up or down, depending on their difficulty level. In one done by Balcetis Lab, they measured systolic blood pressure, which as we’ve seen is an indicator of our drive and activation state. They found that when goals were too easy for people to attain, they didn’t get a noticeable increase in the blood pressure and recruitment of the other neural and vascular system and they quickly gave up. If the goal was too lofty, and too far from their current abilities, it didn’t recruit enough systolic blood pressure either. Even if people could get very excited about it mentally, physically it didn’t place their body into a state of readiness because it wasn’t tangible that they could achieve it. It turns out that when goals were just outside of one’s immediate abilities and range between the “may be I can do it, my be I can’t”, they neatly doubled the systolic blood pressure.
Goal Assesment and Dopamine Reward Prediction Error
Dopamine is released in moderate amounts the anticipation of the reward. And when the reward comes, the amount increases. When the reward is unexpected, or when something positive and novel happens, the dopamine levels are even higher. But the opposite is also true. When we’re expecting something positive to happen we get an increase in dopamine. And when it doesn’t happen, we get a drop in dopamine levels which causes that feeling of disappointment. If you’re expecting a promotion by the end of the month, you’ll feel a level of excitement before you get it. When it comes, you’ll feel an increased level of excitement. But when out of the blue, the company decides to promote you, the excitement levels will be even higher. And if you expected the promotion and it didn’t happen, you’ll feel disappointed. But if you did not expect it and it didn’t come, you’ll feel somewhat neutral. This process is referred to as the dopamine reward prediction error.
So, by understanding this mechanism, we can leverage it in our goal pursuit by having goal assessment milestones. When you set a pre-defined rate in which you’ll know you’ll be telling yourself whether you are or you are not on the right, you trigger your dopaminergic system. With the reward being the positive assessment of you telling yourself you’re doing great. The ambiguity of wether the result is positive or negative makes the positive result more rewarding. This rise in dopamine itself provides a state of motivation and readiness to continue in the regular pursuit of our goals.
TO RECAP:
- Set goals that are challenging but possible.
- Set a concrete plan
- Foreshadow failure when executing the plan
- Focus on particular visual points as a way to harness your attention and get in a state of activation.
- Focus on particular visual points as a way to harness your attention and get in a state of activation.
- Set regulat assessment interval to leverage the dopamine prediction reward error system.
Let’s put it all together: the goal setting guide
Step 1: review 2022
Before settig any goals, it’s important to review what has already been done. Failures, wins, proud moments, down moments, … This will allow you to replicate what worked for you previously and let go of what didn’t.
In the template, I’ve made a list of questions you can reflect on to guide you through the process.
Step 2: Set goals
1- Visualisation
It’s important to start with the end in mind. What kind of life do you want to have next year ? In 5 years, 10 years ? What do you want people to say about you when you’re dead ? Buy putting yourself in the shoes of the future you, allows you to get clear on your core values which are the basis of the goal setting exercise.
In the template, I’ve included 3 main prompts: describe a typical day in your life next year – a typical day in 5 years – and what you want people top say when after you die. And in the end you’ll chose your 3 core values.
2- Set infinite goals:
Now that you’re hopefully clear on your core values and the life you want to lead. Decide what infinite goals better translate it. For each one, try to write down why do you feel it’s a meaningful goal for you. The answer should naturally relate to one of your core values.
Example:
3- Set finite goals:
Now, we’ll turn each infinite goal to a single or multiple concrete measurable goals.
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- For each goal, try to make a SMART version of it (S: specific, M: measurable, A: Actionable, R: Realistic, T: Time bound).
- Recheck if the goal is realistic and has a clear action.
- Define how you will measure your progress (ie: minutes/km in a run, number of books read, number of weights lifted, …). Then reframe it SMARTly
- Set a deadline for it a the column “Milestone”.
- Define the actions you need to take this year to reach that goal
- Try to think of the obstacles you may face and what possible solutions you may implement to overcome them
Example:
Step 3: Set systems
1- Define your systems:
For each goal, if the actions require regular practices, we’ll try to integrate it in a system to make those practices easily sustainable. These systems can be: a habit tracker – a budget tracker – health tracker ….
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- In column “system” define the the system you see fits. First question to ask is “are the actions necessary practices I need to make habitual ? If yes, the system is a “Habit”. If not, think of a another system you can put in place. Some actions are a one time action and do not require a systematic approach.
- For each Habit, try to name it in the column “Habit name”
- Decide in what Quarter of the year you’ll to introduce the habit. You can only build up few habits simultaneously. And to not burn yourself out and give up on your goals completely, it’s important to introduce them slowly. I recommend introducing a maximum of 4 habits per Quarter. If one of these habits is already solid in your life, do not factor it it.
- To optimise your habit practice and make them easily sustainable, you can stack them whenever possible. It’s specially helpful when you stack a new habit with an already established habit. The latter acts a cue that will remind you of the new habit. If I want to do the pushups and pull-ups, I’ll try to do them while my tea or coffee is brewing While running, I’ll listen to the audiobook While brushing my teeth, I’ll do a couple of stretches
- Define the frequency you’ll use to assess your progress. Is it daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly …. ?
2- Design your systems:
For habits, try using the habit trackers. To read more, try to have a virtual library where you keep track of the books you’ve read and the ones you want to read. And set reminders in your calendar for your periodic goal assessment.
This process may sound daunting at first but is necessary to fully embrace the goals and make sure you keeping track of them. If you’ve finished the processed and got your systems in place, you’re just getting started. The most important and most part is putting them to work.
Link for the Notion template: HERE
I am open to improving the template, if you see ways we can make it better don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected].
Happy new year !
