Everyone has something he’d like to accomplish or change. In his book “59 Seconds,” author Richard Wiseman gives brief overviews of the best approaches to a multitude of challenges. His conclusions are bite-size chunks of research-based advice anyone can use.
For example, Wiseman describes a study he conducted with 5,000 participants who had set personal goals. One group was followed for six months, the other for a year. Wiseman tracked the participants’ supporting habits and compared those to their success rates.
Although almost all the participants started the study with high confidence that they would achieve their goals, in the end only about 10 percent actually accomplished what they set out to do.
To find out what this 10 percent did differently, Wiseman compiled a list of the 10 techniques all participants most commonly used to achieve their goals. Of these, five turned out to be of little or no value in goal-achievement. These included: motivating yourself by focusing on someone you admire or who inspires you, such as a celebrity or great leader; thinking about the bad things that will happen if you don’t achieve your goal; simply avoiding thinking about bad habits you might want to quit, such as smoking or overeating; relying on willpower alone; and daydreaming about how great your life will be when you achieve your goal.
What worked? Telling other people about your goal; thinking about the good things that will happen if you achieve your goal; rewarding yourself for making progress toward your goal; and recording your progress in some way, for example in a journal or on a chart.
In particular, there was great value not only in making a plan but in making a certain kind of plan. As a result of this study and other research, Wiseman recommends breaking one main goal down into no more than five sub-goals. This “helped remove the fear and hesitation often associated with trying to achieve a major life change,” Wiseman wrote. “These plans were especially powerful when the sub-goals were concrete, measurable and time-based.”
In the study, some goals showed up more often than others. For example, successful job-seekers made plans to rewrite their resume in week one, and then apply for one new job every two weeks for the next six months. People who felt they’d succeeded in enriching and enjoying their lives more were those who broke their goals down into achievable and measurable sub-goals, such as spend two evenings a week with friends and visiting one new country each year.
In addition, successful goal-achievers explained what they were doing to family and friends. In other words, they didn’t keep their goals to themselves. They took a public stance that bound them to the goal and enlisted the support of those who cared about them.
Unlike less successful participants who daydreamed about what life might be like, successful goal-achievers reminded themselves of specific good things that would happen when they achieved their goals. They could list actual benefits they believed they’d receive. In other words, being specific mattered.
Finally, Wiseman found that implementing a reward system made achieving the sub-goals easier and he recommends building that into the plan from the start. Other researchers have reached the same conclusion, and Wiseman is clear on three things. The rewards don’t have to be big; they should not undermine your efforts (like rewarding yourself with an ice cream sundae to celebrate losing two pounds); and they should be something you look forward to that gives you a sense of achievement.
Next time you consider something you’d like to achieve, break it down into no more than five steps, pick a reward for each step and create a timeline. Then tell your family and friends about it, make a list of specific good things that will happen to you when you achieve that goal, and read that list often.
Contact Jennifer Hansen at jhansen@arkansasonline.com.