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Half-Size Your Goals

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At the start of the year, if you’re like most people, you selected a bunch of lofty, impossible goals. Now, halfway through the year, you feel disappointed and let down with yourself. In fact, the longer your goals list, the more overwhelmed and off-track you’ve got.

Simplify Your Goals - Set a Less Difficult Version As part of your mid-year review, reflect on the first six months of the year and adjust your goals for the rest of the year. Revisit your goals, assess your progress, evaluate your approach, and change your timeline. Break big ambitious goals down into more manageable decisions and improve the odds of achieving the type of outcome you desire.

Try half-sized goals. If you’re struggling to attain a goal that seems to be too challenging, set a less difficult version of the goal.

If you’re not getting good results, then you go back and tweak what you’re doing. Don’t feel the need to change everything in your life at once.

How To Set Social And Emotional Goals For Children

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Everyone needs to be pushed from time to time, this applies to adults as well as children. Without being pushed it is too easy to fall into a routine and develop a comfort zone. The problem with this is that you will inadvertently hold yourself back. This can be a real issue when facing new challenges. The inability to step outside your comfort zone can have a detrimental effect on your mental health.

That is why you need to set social and emotional goals for children. Although it can be difficult to decide what goals to set, this guide will help you In addition, it is worth chatting to your child care team to make sure you are all moving in the same direction.

Deciding The Goals

It can be difficult to decide what social and emotional goals to set for your children. The best approach is to look at what social and emotional skills they currently have and consider what they should have. If they are old enough to talk to you about these goals, that will help. Not only can you set the goals together, but this will also help to motivate them to achieve them.

When setting the goals you need to consider the skills that you would expect a child of their age to have. This is dependent on age but most children should be able to:

  • Understand emotions and control their own
  • Listen to others
  • Interact with others and share toys/tools
  • Ask for help when needed
  • Focus on a single task
  • Shown compassion and empathy when the situation demands it
  • Know how to calm themselves

Implementing The Goals

The most difficult part of this is not deciding the goals. Once you start thinking about what your child should be able to do emotionally and socially, it is easy to see where they are lacking. The trick is to tackle one goal at a time and to break the goal into smaller goals. This makes it easier to achieve and helps your child to stay motivated as they feel like they are succeeding.

For example, if your child needs to learn to interact with other children more, or better, you should set them a goal of making one friend. That is one person they can share things with and play nicely with. The secondary goal can be extending this to two and then more.

It can help to give your child an incentive, such as a special day out when they show they have reached a goal.

Regular Review

In order to ensure your child is moving toward a goal you will need to chat with their child care center regularly and your child. Ideally, discuss progress with your child every week. This will help them keep moving forward but it will also aid their listening and communication skills. Both of which are essential parts of emotional and social development.

With a little patience, you can guide your child willing in the right direction and improve their quality of life, today and in the future.

This Hack Will Help You Think Opportunity Costs: Goals and Anti-Goals

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Goals and Anti-Goals---Opportunity Cost Making decisions is all about opportunity costs. For instance, every time you spend money to get something, you should ask yourself what else, perhaps of better value, you could get with that money—now or later.

The problem is, when forced to choose between something immediate and concrete and something else that’s comparatively abstract and distant, the opportunity cost could lack clarity.

Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely proposes the notion of “anti-goals” to help examine the trade-offs you’re forced to make. Ariely encourages pairing goals such that if you satisfy one, you’ll impede the other. For example, when choosing to spend $100 on an evening out today, you can consider a tangible anti-goal—say, saving for the family’s summer vacation—that’ll be held back.

Idea for Impact: Thinking about what you want to avoid—the anti-goal—is a potent tool. It allows you to focus on things that really matter.

What Happens When You Talk About Too Many Goals

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Matthew Pritchett's cartoon: Labour For the Many Brexit Positions Not the Few

To supplement this illustrious sketch by the British cartoonist Matt Pritchett, an excerpt from HuffPost’s article on “How Jeremy Corbyn Lost The Election,”

One big problem was the sheer size of the [Labour Party] manifesto and the number of policies on offer. Candidates complained that they didn’t have a single five-point pledge card like the one Tony Blair made famous. While the Tories had a simple message of ‘Get Brexit Done,’ Labour lacked a similarly easy ‘doorstep offer.’ “We had so much in the manifesto we almost had too much,” one senior source said. “It felt like none of it was cutting through. You needed to boil it down.”

“We tried to give a retail offer and also a grand vision and ended up falling between the two stools. To get across ‘you’ll be better off with Labour,’ we should have made our position clearer much earlier.”

Idea for Impact: Distill your goals into simple messages that others will find relevant and timely. When it comes to persuasion, clarity and conciseness are critical. Weak messages meander. Smart messages immediately express what’s important and help rally your resources towards your mission.

Shrewd Leaders Sometimes Take Liberties with the Truth to Reach Righteous Goals

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Shrewd Leaders Must Sometimes Take Liberties with the Truth to Reach Righteous Goals Duplicity must be decried when used to justify the attainment and exercise of power. However, sometimes, even principled leaders must put on an act to realize noble ends—infuse optimism to surmount hopelessness, win followers’ devotion to audacious new ideas, for example.

In the Zen parable that follows, a warrior motivates his followers in the face of desperate odds. He persuades his outnumbered army by flipping an unfair coin and proclaiming that they are fated to win the battle.

A great Japanese warrior named Nobunaga decided to attack the enemy although he had only one-tenth the number of men the opposition commanded. He knew that he would win, but his soldiers were in doubt.

On the way he stopped at a Shinto shrine and told his men: “After I visit the shrine I will toss a coin. If heads comes, we will win; if tails, we will lose. Destiny holds us in her hand.”

Nobunaga entered the shrine and offered a silent prayer. He came forth and tossed a coin. Heads appeared. His soldiers were so eager to fight that they won their battle easily.

“No one can change the hand of destiny,” his attendant told him after the battle.

“Indeed not,” said Nobunaga, showing a coin which had been doubled, with heads facing either way.

Idea for Impact: Moral Leadership Relates to the Integrity of Leaders and Their Intentions

A wise leader must be open to bringing deception into play to smooth the way to sound decisions and noble results.

As long as leaders use these methods to respectable purposes, and until people wise up to their methods, certain ends can justify certain means.

Postscript: The quoted Zen parable is sourced from the celebrated compilation Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings, Shambhala Edition (1961) by Paul Reps. This book traces its roots to the thirteenth-century Japanese anthology of Buddhist parables Shasekishū (Sand and Pebbles) compiled by the Kamakura-era monk Mujū.

Think in Terms of Habits & Systems Rather Than Goals

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Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize

Most folks fail to understand how goals work: goals don’t stipulate behaviors.

Goals relate only to the outcomes and results of specific behaviors—they are not about the actions and behaviors that can bring about those results.

In other words, goals can only provide direction and can even impel you onward in the short-term, but ultimately, a well-designed system—when put into habitual practice—will always prevail.

'The Power of Habit' by Charles Duhigg (ISBN 081298160X) Developing a system is what matters to discipline and self-control. Committing to the process is what makes the difference. As New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg wrote in his bestselling The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (2012,) only a systematic approach works:

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

An example of a goal: “I want to lose 10 pounds before my sister’s wedding.” A habit/system would be, “What dieting and exercising changes can I make with the aim of looking better at my sister’s wedding?”

Another example of a goal: “How do I amass $1 million before I turn 35?” A habit/system would be, “How do I develop financial disciplines and investment methods to get richer over time and achieve a net worth of $1 million by the time I’m 35?”

Idea for Impact: Only by creating habits and systems to achieve goals can you live more of the life you aspire to. As a creature of habit, when you are doing something that is routine, you don’t need to be deliberately engaged in the task in the same way as if you were doing something that is not habitual.

Our Vision of What Our Parents Achieved Influences Our Life Goals: The Psychic Contract

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Understanding Others’ Motivations is a Key to Building Better Relationships

Psychic Contract Theory: Children are Programmed to Want to Do as Well as or Better Than Their Parents Understanding others’ deep-held motivations involves recognizing what drives them, why and how they want to work, work styles they may adopt in various circumstances, and what levers you have to motivate them.

Take for example Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a motivation hypothesis used widely for several decades now. Represented as a pyramid, this hypothesis proposes that people are motivated to fulfill basic subconscious desires such as food and shelter before trying to fulfill higher-level needs such as affection and prestige. Even though academics have extensively debated its specifics, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has provided a handy framework to value the multifaceted composition of human motivation and to understand how to engage others.

The Relationship between Your Own Vision of Success and Your Parental Influence

'The Anatomy of a Great Executive' by John Wareham (ISBN 0887305059) One less-known framework for understanding the provenance of people’s life goals—their deep-seated aspirations for want to achieve in life—is the “Psychic Contract” hypothesis, a concept that dominates The Anatomy of a Great Executive (1991) by John Wareham, a leadership psychologist from New Zealand.

According to Wareham, a psychic contract is a set of “deals” we subconsciously strike with our parents early in life. Our life-goals are defined primarily by our own vision of what our parents achieved—and what they failed to achieve:

As we grow we absorb the values of our parents, and are conditioned to improve (albeit marginally) upon their achievements. We strike a psychic contract with them whereby “success” in life is defined by the attainment of a similar social positioning, which we later embark upon attaining, sometimes very consciously, but often entirely unconsciously.

Throughout our lives, we unintentionally adhere to our psychic contracts, despite the limitations they place on us. We use our psychic contracts to not only define and approach our life goals but also think about how we measure success.

We consciously measure success in terms of milestones and standards instilled by our parents.

As a rule of thumb, about three quarters or more of people in westernized culture seek first to equal, then marginally to improve upon the lifestyle or status level perceived to exist in the childhood home.

Psychic Contract Theory: Children are Programmed to Want to Do as Well as or Better Than Their Parents

Our Vision of What Our Parents Achieved Influences Our Life Goals: The Psychic Contract In The Anatomy of a Great Executive, Wareham goes into depth explaining how we can know our own psychic contracts and how we can reset our goals to give ourselves permission to succeed. Here are some other prominent learning points:

  • Our psychic contract is based on our birth order, our parents’ birth order, and roles we play relative to our parents in our families.
  • The so-called “prime parental injunction” sits at the heart of our conscious. We go through our lives trying to become the people our parents wanted us to be. Even people who spend their lives trying to become exactly the opposite of what their parents wished are still influenced by this injunction.
  • Every person has a pre-programmed financial comfort level. Most of us strive to reach this level; but once there, we slow down—not because we are lazy, but because we have fulfilled our inner desires and don’t need more. Wareham cites the example of commission-based sales people who, after earning adequate commission to reach their financial comfort level, tend to be less aggressive in selling cars to customers for the rest of the month.

Idea for Impact: “Psychic Contract” is a handy and thought provoking—if unsubstantiated—hypothesis to understand how your and other people’s deep-seated life goals are established. It can give you one more data point in trying to figure people out.

The Power of Sharing Your Goals

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Seek the Positive Effect of Goal-Accountability

This research from the Dominican University of California suggests that writing down your goals, sharing them with friends, and sending your friends regular updates about your progress can improve your chances of accomplishing your goals. The research implies that

  • People who merely thought about their goals and how to reach them accomplished their goals less than 50% of the time.
  • In contrast, people who wrote down their goals, enlisted friends for them, and sent them regular progress reports succeeded in attaining their goals 75% of the time.

Let Your Goals Guide You

  • Put your goals in writing. Writing down goals can be a strong motivator. Use the SMART technique to avoid being vague about your goals. Connect each goal to a larger purpose, be specific, use action verbs, include measurable outcomes, and stipulate target dates for completion.
  • Enlist the help of others. If you can identify a friend or coworker who may share a goal, team up with them. Convince the other person to go to the gym, quit smoking, or share healthy meals with you regularly. A partner can help you stay motivated and committed.
  • Seek a mentor. Look for role models who may have struggled with goals similar to yours or already achieved the goals. Ask them for advice and suggestions.

Idea for Impact: Seek the Positive Effect of Goal-Accountability

Committing to friends, family, or coworkers on goal-directed actions and making yourself accountable can impel you to stay on course and reach your goals.

Write your goals down, share them with others, provide them regular updates, and ask them to keep you on your toes.

Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize

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One of my blog readers asked me to write more about goal-setting and performance against goals. In response, I studied the work of University of Maryland’s Edwin Locke and University of Toronto’s Gary Latham, two renowned researchers on goal-setting. Here is a summary.

Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize

Goals Impact Performance in Several Ways

  • Goals can help direct: A person’s goals should direct his/her attention, effort, and action toward goal-relevant actions at the expense of less-relevant actions.
  • Goals can help motivate: A person’s goals can motivate him/her to pursue specific outcomes. The person can be motivated only when his/her goals are sufficiently challenging and can nudge him/her to put in special efforts.
  • Goals can help persist: A person is likely to persist at his/her efforts when his/her goal is worthy enough to attain.
  • Goals can trigger learning: Goals can either activate a person’s knowledge and skills that are relevant to performance or induce the person to acquire such knowledge or skills.

Best Practices for Goal-Setting and Performance

  • Specific, difficult, but attainable goals lead to better performance than easy, vague, or abstract goals such as the general-purpose exhortation to “do your best.” Hard goals motivate because they require a person to achieve more in order to be content with his/her own performance.
  • 'Goals' by Brian Tracy (ISBN 1605094110) Goal specificity and performance share a positive, linear relationship. When a person’s goals are specific, they direct and energize his/her behavior far more effectively than when they are vague and unspecific.
  • Performance is directly proportional to the difficulty of a goal as long as a person is committed to the goal, has the requisite ability and resources to achieve the goal, and does not have conflicting goals.
  • Taking on excess work without access to the necessary resources to realize the goals (“overload”) can moderate the effects of goals.
  • A team performs best when the goals of the individuals on the team are compatible with the team’s goal. Therefore, when an individual’s goals are incompatible with his team’s, his/her contribution to the team will be subpar.
  • The goal need not be in focal awareness all the time. Once a goal is accepted and understood, it resides in the periphery of the person’s consciousness and serves to guide and give meaning to his/her actions.
  • While long-term goals are relevant and helpful, most people find short-term goals more effective because they channel a person’s immediate and direct efforts and provide quick feedback. This suggests that it’s best to divide long-term goals into concrete short-term objectives.
  • 'Living in Your Top 1%' by Alissa Finerman (ISBN 1453619232) Self-efficacy plays a key role in the achievement of goals. A person is much more likely to buy into and pursue goals if he/she believes himself/herself to be competent enough to reach those goals. The most effective goals must therefore embrace a person’s strengths—such goals help him/her strive towards success by leveraging the best of who he/she is and what he/she can do.
  • One reason a person may lack self-efficacy is his/her past failures with undertaking similar goals. Such a person may believe that he/she may never reach his/her goals and should first undertake a series of small, near-term goals instead of difficult, distant goals. The person’s success with a series of smaller goals can boost his/her confidence and can inspire him/her to undertake larger goals. For example, a chain-smoker will find the goal of smoking cessation daunting. He should therefore focus on smaller goals like gradually cutting down the number of cigarettes he smokes every day. Experiences of goal achievement can build up momentum to tackle the larger goal.
  • Goals are not effective by themselves. Feedback is the most important moderator of goal-setting because it tracks the progress of performance towards goals and creates new sub-goals. If a person finds his/her progress towards a goal unsatisfactory, the feedback he/she receives can drive corrective efforts to develop new skills or pursue the goal in a new way.

“Goals Gone Wild”: The Use and Abuse of Goals

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The Use and Abuse of Goals

An article in The Economist (7-March-2015 Issue) discussed the side effects of goal setting, more specifically the perils of overprescribing goals. This article echoes my earlier commentary on “The Trouble with Targets and Goals.”

The Economist article mentioned a Harvard Business School paper titled “Goals Gone Wild” by Lisa D. Ordonez, et al. This engaging literature review discusses many of the predictable side effects of goal setting on individual and organizational performance:

  • When goals are too specific, they can narrow people’s focus. People tend to fixate on a goal so intensely that they overlook aspects of a task that are unrelated to the goal. Even if unrelated, these overlooked details may be significant enough to warrant attention.
  • When people are assigned too many goals, this can encourage them to concentrate on tasks that are comparatively easier to achieve.
  • When goals aren’t afforded an appropriate time-horizon, they can distort long-and short-term priorities. Short-term goals can steer people toward myopic behavior that harms their organization in the long term. Conversely, long-term goals can be vague about the immediate course of action and obscure what’s required in the short term.
  • When goals are too challenging, they can discourage risk-taking. As a result, people may use deceitful methods to reach their goals or even misrepresent their performance levels—they may exaggerate their feats, conceal underperformance, or claim unmerited credit. The authors acknowledge the complexity of setting goals “at the most challenging level possible to inspire effort, commitment, and performance—but not so challenging that employees see no point in trying.”
  • When goals are complex, specific, and challenging, they can push people to focus narrowly on performance and neglect opportunities for experiential learning.
  • When goals are comparative, i.e., when goals pit employees against their peers, goals can hinder cooperation between people and even create a culture of unhealthy competition within a team.
  • When goals, by definition, try to increase extrinsic motivation, they can subdue people’s intrinsic motivation. Goals can challenge some people far more or far less than necessary if the intrinsic value of the job itself is already deeply motivating.
  • When goals fail to consider individuals’ skills or prior achievements or when they are not tailored enough, they can be too easy for some and too difficult for others. On the other hand, customizing goals can lead to feeling of discrimination or favoritism.

A Warning Label for Setting Goals

The authors propose a clever cautionary graphic sign and conclude,

For decades, scholars have prescribed goal setting as an all-purpose remedy for employee motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.

Idea for Impact: Set objectives that are not only well designed, but also challenging and attainable.