You Made New Year Goals, Here’s How to Achieve Them

Goal setting is never easy. Accomplishing the goals that we set for ourselves is even harder.  More often than not, setting a plan for how we’ll achieve our goals can go a long way. With a new year ahead, Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach and the Wharton School’s Katy Milkman offered a few tips on how to effectively find motivation and focus on achieving your goals.

SET A NEW CHAPTER TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF

Simply telling yourself that you’re going to make a change can have a large impact. Milkman calls it the “fresh start” effect.

“I’ve done a lot of research on the idea that there are some moments in our lives that stand out from others that feel like new beginnings,” Milkman says. “Those moments give us a sense that we have closed one chapter and can open another.”

The idea, Milkman says, is to use any specific moment in time and tell yourself, “OK, that was the old me that was overwhelmed and couldn’t achieve these goals, and the new me maybe could do it in this new era.”

BE FIRM ON YOUR COMMITMENTS

Another tactic that can be helpful in making progress with your goals is to utilize a “commitment device.”

“A commitment device is a tool where you basically treat yourself the way you would normally think of a government or a manager treating you,” Milkman says. “You give yourself deadlines, maybe with penalties associated with them for failing to achieve a goal. The firmer your commitment, the harder it is to back down and procrastinate.”

BE YOUR OWN MENTOR

Not everyone is lucky enough to find a great mentor who offers advice and support in achieving goals. But, Fishbach and Milkman say the best mentor is actually yourself. In other words, giving advice rather than receiving it, can play a key role in motivation.

In a study published in the Sloan Review, Fishbach and Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, a postdoc at the Wharton School, asked unemployed people to give job search advice to other unemployed individuals. After giving and receiving advice, 68% of unemployed individuals reported that giving advice made them feel more motivated to search for jobs than receiving advice.

“There are clear, practical implications for management when it comes to motivation and advice,” Fishbach and Eskreis-Winkler write. “Employees struggling to maintain motivation at work ought to give advice as much or more than they receive it. For example, if an employee is experiencing a problem at work with time management, our research shows that this employee would benefit from being asked to counsel a colleague on how to help prioritize their tasks and manage their workload.”

Sources: Stacy Blackman Consulting, Chicago Booth Review, MIT Sloan Management Review

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