Not Another Resolution

New Year’s resolutions seem to be the epitome of goals; statements filled with promises, new beginnings, and a whole lot of motivation that will not – cannot – fail us this time. The new year brings a wave of hope and excitement as we anticipate opportunities we will create for ourselves and feel the certainty that that will be the year, our year. Yet, unlike many New Year’s resolutions, goals need not be feckless, empty promises that only serve to reassure us of our incompetence and lack of commitment. In fact, goals should not be that way at all; they should feel invigorating, encouraging, and most importantly attainable and challenging. If this is not how goals have felt for you, keep reading.

Before dismissing New Year’s resolutions altogether, it may be worth examining the potential of committing to a few new goals every now and then, because the problem with resolutions is not the intention of achieving something new but its content and the way we go about accomplishing it. Think about it, will you actually go to the gym six days a week this year if you have not worked out since college? If you have tried to quit smoking since you started – ten years ago – why will this year be any different? And will you read a book per week if you can’t even finish the long Instagram descriptions your best friend posts? My guess, probably not. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set a goal and strive to achieve it; you just need to do it SMARTly and understand how and why goals can take you a long way.

According to Locke and Latham’s (2002) goal setting theory, difficult and challenging goals lead to improved performance more than goals fixated on doing your best, because specific goals set self-regulation in a way that mobilizes motivational forces such as effort and persistence to achieve said goal. Rather than trying to figure out what exactly constitutes doing your best and either feeling like you are never doing enough or settling for much less than you are capable of, challenging goals produce a discrepancy between what you have and what you want that then activates a feed-forward control, which propels proactive behaviors (Locke & Latham, 2002).

These proactive behaviors differ on their goal orientation. Learning oriented goals are more adaptive, task-focused, mastery-oriented, and especially beneficial in innovative jobs or tasks (Parker & Ohly, 2009). These goals are more appropriate for situations in which individuals must learn or hone the performance and/or have no real knowledge of the task at hand (Parker & Ohly, 2009). Performance-oriented goals assume that individuals possess the skills and knowledge to execute the task and are thus, more instrumental, ego-focused, and defensive as the prize, rather than the process, is the target (Parker & Ohly, 2009). Regardless of their orientation, accomplishing or making progress towards one’s goals increases positive affect while experiencing constant goal conflict increases negative affect (Spieler, Scheibe, Stamov-Roßnagel, & Kappas, 2017). The latter may help explain why trying to sleep more and spend more time with one’s family can feel so frustrating; with only so many hours in the day, this is a case of competing demands among goals.

Beyond competing goals, when one lacks the ability to successfully complete a goal, they will experience negative affect resulting from failure to finish what they set out to (Locke & Latham, 1990). Put it simply, it’s more effective to decrease your cigarette consumption every year until not smoking means giving up on a few cigarettes rather than a pack a day if you – like many – are unable to quit all at once. The goal-gradient hypothesis further supports this idea by showing that if one interrupts goal accomplishment near its completion, they may experience deleterious effects for subsequent acts that require the active self (Freeman & Muraven, 2010). Also, since when individuals experience more positive affect, they tend to spend more time on a given task and increase performance levels, and since making progress towards a goal promotes positive affect, taking smaller yet challenging steps may be the answer to many New Year’s resolutions (Seo & Ilies, 2009; Spieler, Scheibe, Stamov-Roßnagel, & Kappas, 2017).

Therefore, a very logical and organic next step seem to be SMART goals – the tool that will help you define and work through specific, challenging, and useful goals. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely, which means you must possess the ability (Attainable), situational resources (Realistic), and commitment to attain the goal, and that you must have access to objective feedback on your progress (Measurable) (Latham, Seijts, & Slocum, 2016). SMART goals must also clearly state your desired outcome (Specific) and provide you with a deadline to monitor your progress (Timely). Eating right, working harder at work, or spending more time with the kids do not qualify as SMART goals because they lack the ability to give you guidance. Instead, increasing your consumption of vegetables and complex carbs by 30% for six months or picking up the kids from school and taking them to the park twice a week for two hours may help you ace this year’s resolutions.

Goals encompass but are not limited to New Year’s resolutions, in fact the latter are but a token of our society’s pressure to increase productivity and incite us to buy a considerable number of products and apps so we can feel better about last year’s failures. Goals can happen at any time of the year and at any point of your life and they have a wonderful capacity for increasing your self-efficacy, positive affect, and performance if you follow a few guidelines. Don’t wait for the next New Year; start now. What are you dying to accomplish?

References:

Freeman, N., & Muraven, M. (2010). Don’t interrupt me! Task interruption depletes the self’s limited resources. Motivation and emotion, 34(3), 230-241.

Latham, G., Seijts, G., & Slocum, J. (2016). The goal setting and goal orientation labyrinth. Organizational Dynamics, 45(4), 271-277.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American psychologist, 57(9), 705.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (1990). A theory of goal setting and task performance. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Parker, S. K., & Ohly, S. (2009). Designing motivating jobs. In: G. C. R. Kanfer, & R. Pritchard (Ed.), Work motivation: Past, present, and future (pp. 1-60): SIOP Organizational Frontiers Series.

Seo, M. G., & Ilies, R. (2009). The role of self-efficacy, goal, and affect in dynamic motivational self-regulation. Organizational behavior and Human Decision processes, 109(2), 120-133.

Spieler, I., Scheibe, S., Stamov-Roßnagel, C., & Kappas, A. (2017). Help or hindrance? Day-level relationships between flextime use, work-nonwork boundaries, and affective well-being. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102, 67-87.

By: Teresa Aires