Beliefs and Expectations and their Effect on Goals.

Perhaps one of the most important realizations in goal setting, is that our beliefs drive our expectations.

When we approach goals, we have a belief about our ability and the nature of the challenges that we are likely to encounter as we work toward our goal.

The beliefs might be flawed but they still drive our expectations about the goals we pursue.

In this goal pursuit, we may come to a point where challenges overwhelm us and we realize that our ability falls short. This leads to frustration for two reasons:

? Our expectations have been defied.

? Our beliefs about our ability and the challenge at hand are flawed.

At this point we see a gap between the expected and the actual outcome. There is also a gap between our beliefs and reality. There is need to update both our beliefs and our expectations of outcomes.

Cognitive dissonance, is this discomfort that we feel due to a conflict between what we believed and believed and the reality at hand.

We can deal with this discomfort by updating our beliefs and expectations. This would mean that we admit to there being a need for us to do two things:

? To work on improving our ability to meet the challenge at hand.

? To willingly reduce the goal so that it can match our current ability.

With the first approach, if the task is too hard, we investigate why and we examine what needs to be improved. It calls for working harder and employing better strategies.

With the second approach, we admit to the goal being too big for what we are capable of doing now. If there is no much time to upgrade our skills to meet the goal, we shrink it into something doable.

We are seldom comfortable with these two ideas. As a result, we neither update our beliefs about our ability and the challenge at hand, nor our expectations .

When there is cognitive dissonance, we reduce it by giving explanations about what hampered our success.

We give excuses. The weather, lack of a good support system, a horrible boss and everything else that can be attributed to our failure is quickly apportioned blame.

Facing our failures in the pursuit of our goals and attributing the right reasons to them is how we grow.

Giving excuses to reduce cognitive dissonance only locks us in a closed loop where we neither learn nor improve.