New Science Secrets to Creating Lasting Goals

January 2023: Goals & hopes for the possibilities to come. March 2023: Well there is always next year. There are 9 months left in 2023. Use these science backed goal setting tactics to hit your goals

I was sitting in a classroom with about 25 other people. It was our first semester together, so we knew next to nothing. We were all struggling with the assigned task. It seemed pretty easy initially: “write a goal for a patient who had a knee injury.” How do you know how to set the right goals? Especially if you haven’t ever written a goal for that task before.

In the years since that class, I have written several thousand goals for patients and several hundred for myself. I nerd out on writing goals. A part of my brain calms down when I have a goal written despite the mental fatigue of creating them. What I love about goals is that suddenly there is a mark to achieve, a thing to chase down. But sometimes, some goals die the moment after they are written down. They live only on that page and never jump off that page into reality. They check all the boxes for goal writing standards, but my drive to go after them starts to fizzle out like a soda with the lid left off as I look at them.?

I am not the type of girl to let something die if it doesn’t work once. I applied to physical therapy school three times before I got in. It turns out that getting a B+ in trigonometry can haunt you????. Because?my values and mission ultimately power me, I will retackle things I know I want or need to do. I will try coming at something from a different angle. It felt good when I wrote down what I would be tackling. However, when I am confused about breaking the goal down, I feel resistance mounting with no idea how to overcome it.

I have read all the popular goal-setting books, plus a few extras. But I recently learned substantial ‘nerd info’ that has caused shifting in the building blocks of my goal writing system. And it is a shift that makes so much sense. After spending a day reading academic papers and listening to about 5 hours of podcasts, I stared at the ceiling for a while because I needed to make sure all those amazing thoughts didn’t escape my brain and run out my nose??.

Everything I knew before reading that research and listening to the PhDs discuss their findings was not wrong—but it was incomplete. I like being corrected by research, not by my husband, siblings, or kids, because that feels personal.?

Where did all these research papers and podcasts come from? Well, they came from my first love, sports performance. There is big money in sports, so research is funded readily. Through this research, we can find techniques that help athletes and non-athletes achieve their goals. You might want to prep your head to look at the ceiling, so thoughts don’t run out of your nose because things are about to get brainy yet delightfully applicable.?

Making it Happen vs. Letting it Happen

A researcher named?Christopher Swann?wrote a paper about the psychological states underlying excellent performance in professional golfers. This paper inadvertently started the conversation about the types of goals that play into extraordinary performance.?

In the paper, Swann and colleagues interviewed golfers about their experiences where they were performing at their best. Throughout the interviews, the golfers identified two different states when excelling. One was when they were ‘letting it happen.’ Letting it happen was a natural experience where they allowed their body to get into the activity. They had no specific pressure on themselves outside of seeing how well they could do. There was no constraint on what ‘how well they could do’ meant.

The second type of state where the golfers excelled was when they were ‘making it happen.’ In these situations, there was pressure. Specific goals were targeted. It was more effortful mentally to ‘make it happen,’ but they were only in that effort for a short period to hit the goal or achieve a specific score.?

Let it Flow, Let it Flow????

In his research on golfers, Christopher Swann attempted to learn when and how professional golfers experienced the concept of flow. While he ended up with more information than just when they experienced flow, the golfers being in a flow state was still an essential part of his findings. Positive psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura popularized the concept of?flow or being in a flow state.?

If you are new to the idea of a flow state/flow or need a refresher, flow describes the feeling you have when you become fully immersed in whatever you are doing. A flow state is accessible to everyone. According to flow and positive psychology researchers, a good life is characterized by intermittent complete absorption in what one does. This means that getting into flow gives you positive feelings, sunshine in your pocket, etc. Flow IS NOT absorption in your phone, the news, or social media but in something you DO, like physical activity, work, or creative pursuit. And what, you might ask, does this have to do with goals? Ah, well, this is where things get interesting.?

Most of our information on goals and goal setting comes from two great guys named Edwin Locke and Gary Latham. These guys wrote a paper that won them a spot in the nerd hall of fame in 1991*. Locke and Latham have written over 400 articles on goal setting and task performance, so they are pretty legit and not too legit to quit writing papers, it would seem. I can only hope for the sake of their relationships that they did not try to break down the personal struggles of their significant others for improved performance??.?

*note: The nerd hall of fame is not a thing according to Google and ChatGPT…or at least not yet.?

The Marriage with Enjoyment and Goals

Enjoyable, exceptional physical performance occurs when you are in a flow state. During a flow state, you have no specific goal or time frame for how long you will work at a particular level. Your goals during or as you enter a flow state are considered open. They are set in the moment like, how far can I walk? How long can I creatively write about my methodology for choosing the cutest pair of shoes? Open goals have no specific time frame, such as, “I will use my cuteness methodology to research the cutest pair of pink running shoes by 3 March.”?

You might think, “Ah, well, if enjoyable, exceptional physical performance occurs when you are in a flow state (letting it happen), then making it happen is when you are miserable.” Au contraire mon frère which is French for not exactly*. Making it happen is referred to as a clutch state in research which makes sense. You are in a moment where you have to grab onto what you are going after and make it happen. You are expending significant mental focus to make it happen. Clutch or make-it-happen goals are very specific goals that are time-sensitive. Your clutch goals usually are SMART goals.?

*it is French for “on the contrary brother,” but that was too many words to type in the above sentence. Now get back to reading. You are getting distracted.?

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. SMART goals are great and can be very motivating. SMART goals can also be mentally exhausting because they require dedication. Now, if you are an expert or very knowledgeable in a field, you will need less mental energy to focus on improving and achieving your goal. However, if you are going after a goal outside of what you know, it is hard to understand what is reasonable or unreasonable, achievable or not achievable. Your goal could be SMART but have so little wiggle room that you have to be perfect for it to work constantly. Maybe you unknowingly wrote something only achievable if a miracle occurred.?

SMART goals are challenging and problematic when something is complex and you are just starting. Physical activity or exercise is complex and challenging. Eating healthier is complex and difficult. Anything good for your health and wellness is difficult. It is difficult because you have to organize, prioritize and get motivated to fit it into a routine. It is mentally taxing for you to get involved and maintain it. If we go back to the original goal-setting theory by Locke and Latham, they note that when trying for a specific challenging goal, it might hurt performance to have SMART goals.?So how do we goal set when we are starting something new?

And Now for the Application

A couple of lady researchers from England,?Hawkins?and?Jackman, have been looking at how to get sedentary individuals (i.e., couch potatoes) to not only participate in physical activity but ENJOY participating in physical activity. We all know we should exercise, but for most of us, it doesn’t happen. However, it would happen more often if we enjoyed exercise and looked forward to it.?

Hawkins, Jackman, Swann, and several other researchers, have done several studies in the past few years to look specifically at how flow (letting it happen), clutch (making it happen), and goal-setting play together for experts and non-experts alike. Here is the take-home from the past two years of work.

If you are a specialist in a sport, your work, or your creative pursuit, you will benefit from the combination of open goals with no specific target and specific SMART goals within the same session.?If you are a trained painter, painting a new artwork for 2 hours, you will benefit from both open and SMART goals during those two hours. You will probably have benefitted from a SMART goal to paint every Tuesday at 2:00 for two hours using multimedia, including oil paints.

The open goals are essential for the old hand because you need that free creative time to get your juices going, but once you have started to squeeze the juice, you should start to have intermittent clutch SMART goals. That short-term pressure is where the gains are made, and you will enjoy your time in your craft more when you are intermittently pressured to come up with the goods.?There can be creative gains when we put intermittent pressure on ourselves. Pressure like we would have?if we had an outside deadline to meet, like for our job or a school task. This time we have set the deadline for ourselves within this scheduled block.

However, if you are starting or haven’t been doing that activity for a long time, you will kill your goal by making it SMART. Maintaining it is just too mentally taxing because you don’t know what you don’t know. If we look at the example SMART goal for painting, but now you are a beginner, you probably will not know what multimedia painting means. You will probably have no idea what oil paint you should buy. Should you start by watching YouTube videos on oil paints to buy or one that tells you how to make multimedia art? When should you go to the store to get your supplies? How much should you spend?

SMART goals for someone just starting a complex and challenging activity raises too many questions vs. directs you towards success. You will work hard to achieve that goal. You will think it is your fault when you fail or don’t quite make it. You will believe you were not good enough or can’t succeed. You will be hesitant to try for a goal in the future because it hurts to fail. When starting out, you have to start with the vision of your future scene where you have succeeded and use that to power your drive for change.

We need goals. Goals allow us to define and prioritize what we value. Without goals, we will never have the chance to become experts because we won’t go after anything. Our phones, social media, regular life to-do’s, and live streaming will fill our days. Others will define our priorities until we clarify and invest in our goals. When we can?find our scene of success?and invest in it, the best is yet to come.

DIG (Get Deliberate, Get Inspired, Get Going) Deep Action Steps:

Get?Deliberate: If you had a goal from January or January two years ago, dust it off, and let’s rework it. Would you consider yourself good at that task? Try writing a SMART goal for when you will be working on it. Not an expert? Join the crowd! Let’s try making that an open goal. Here is an example: I will see how far my body wants to walk while waiting for the kids to get off the bus. I will see what vegetables I like by ordering one fun salad off of the menu at a restaurant. Your turn.

Get?Inspired: Don’t know what your goals should be??Check out my free course?on finding your scene of success, so you know what to reach for.

Get?Going: Check out this post on Restoring Your Wellness Story if you struggle with patterns and habits that have killed your goals more than once.