A big problem in learning to achieve your goals is being
selective in what you do. As much as you
might value keeping all of your options open, at some point you have to commit
time and energy into particular goals in order to attain them.
A key part of being selective is figuring out which goals to
pursue and which ones to leave behind.
To make that decision, there are two criteria you can use. One is to determine how important a
particular goal is to you. The second is
to think about how achievable that goal is.
Ultimately, you want to put your effort into things that are important
to you that you also believe you can achieve.
In the past, I have written about the research of Gabriele
Oettingen and her colleagues. Their
research suggests that an important part of the process of selecting particular
goals to achieve involves comparing the present to the future. These comparisons highlight what has to be
done in order to help you achieve your goals.
When people are forced to make these kinds of comparisons (rather than
focusing selectively on the present or the future), they are more likely to
commit to achievable goals and to take steps to reach them.
How common is it for people to make these comparisons?
Timur Sevincer and Gabriele Oettingen explore this question
in an interesting paper in the September, 2013 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
First, they developed a scheme for analyzing what people
write about their goals in order to tease out whether they were contrasting the
present and the future. To do that, they
asked people to write about goals that were important to them. Some people were asked to focus only on the
present and how they were currently achieving the goal. Some people were asked to focus only on the
future. A third group was asked to
contrast the present with the future.
Looking at this writing, they were able to tease out the statements that
referred to the present and the future.
People’s writing did indeed show evidence of these instructions. Those who were asked to compare the present
to the future wrote more about both the present and the future than those asked
to focus selectively. This initial study
demonstrated that the researchers could identify who was contrasting the
present to the future just from the way people write about their goals.
In a second study, over 300 participants in an internet
study were asked to write about a goal that was important to them. They were given no particular instructions on
whether to focus on the present or the future or both. People were later asked to rate whether they
thought the goal was achievable.
Finally, a week later, people were asked a number of questions about how
hard they worked that week to try to achieve the goal they wrote about.
In this study, 9% of people spontaneously contrasted the
present and future. The most common
types of writing focused selectively on the present (36% of people) or the
future (24%). The remaining participants
talked about their goals in a different way.
Interestingly, the people who spontaneously contrasted the
present with the future were most selective in their goal pursuit. They were most likely to take actions to
achieve their goals when they thought the goal was achievable and least likely
to take actions when they thought the goal could not be achieved. The people who wrote only about the present,
only about the future, or used another strategy were less selective. They put in about the same amount of effort
on their goals regardless of how achievable they thought the goal to be.
The researchers obtained a similar result using a laboratory
study in which students first wrote about their goal to get into graduate
school and then wrote sample personal statements for an application. In this laboratory study, a somewhat higher
percentage of people spontaneously contrasted present and future (27%). The most common strategy in this study was to
focus on the present (51%). Only 3% of
participants in this study focused selectively on the future.
What does this mean?
First, following previous work, it is clear that if you want
to focus selectively on the goals that you believe you will be able to achieve,
then you have to start by contrasting the present and the future. Figure out what you are doing in the present. Then, think about what you want the desired
future to be and how you will feel if you achieve your goal. Finally, determine what needs to be done to
bring that desired future into being and elaborate on the obstacles that will
get in the way of reaching your goal.
That strategy is the best path for success.
Second, despite the importance of this mental contrasting,
it is not something that most people do spontaneously. People are much more likely to focus
selectively on what they are currently doing now or what they should be doing
in the future rather than on comparing the present to the future. Next time you are thinking about goal
achievement, make an effort to contrast the present and the future to improve
your chances of success.
