The Reason You Keep Failing Your Goals🔚
Stay on track toward your goals and get back on track if you’ve fallen off.
We humans are pretty bad at sticking to our goals. Research shows that only 9% of people who make New Year’s resolutions stick to them, and 43% have already quit by the end of January.
Even worse, 23% have given up by the end of the first week.
If you can relate, don’t worry; the good news is that most people fail by making just a few basic mistakes that you can easily avoid if you understand what science can teach us about how to set yourself up for success.
In this story, I will share with you some crucial mindsets and tactics for making sure you stay on track toward your goals and get back on track if you’ve fallen off.
If you don’t know me, I’m Aysha Ayshu💖 writing honest incredible stories on Medium. You can visit my profile to check all of my stories. 🙃
Now, let’s begin.
Hold yourself accountable
What if we told you that research shows there’s a proven way to increase your chances of achieving your goals from 10% to 95%? A 2015 study found that when participants only came up with the idea for a goal they wanted to reach and did nothing else, they stood a 10% chance of achieving it.
However, subjects who told another person about their goals had a 65% chance of succeeding a significant increase. But fascinatingly, participants who told someone else and arranged accountability appointments to check in and talk about their progress had a massive 95% chance of being successful.
Groups that are well known for helping people overcome addiction, like Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization for people struggling with alcohol addiction, know how powerful accountability can be. They hold members to account by making them show up regularly to share their experiences with the same network of like-minded and supportive peers.
So why is accountability so effective? Human beings are deeply social creatures; we really care about what others think of us, especially the people we’re closest to. Sometimes, dealing only with the consequences of relapsing or giving up on a goal and no one else knowing about our slip-up isn’t enough to motivate us.
But often, if we know that others will find out what we’ve done and we’re worried they’ll think less of us, we’re more motivated to push through urges or the negative thoughts holding us back.
Avoid the ‘what the hell’ effect
Researchers at the University of Toronto conducted a study where participants had to eat a slice of pizza and taste and rate some cookies. Some were dieting, and some weren’t.
The pizza slice was the same for all the participants, but the researchers tricked some of the subjects by making the slice look bigger than the others, and they thought they were eating more calories than they were.
The cookie tasting didn’t actually matter; it was just a way to see how dieters would react to thinking they’d eaten more than their daily caloric allowance when everyone, in fact, ate the same. The study found that the dieters who thought they’d blasted through their calorie limit for the day by eating the pizza ate far more cookies than those who didn’t over 50% more.
This is the ‘what the hell’ effect in action.
When we fall prey to the effect, instead of quickly getting back on track after bumping up against a slight setback or falling off the path toward our goals, we tell ourselves that because we failed anyway, what the hell, we might as well quit altogether and continue to indulge in the thing we’re trying to avoid.
If we’re trying to stay away from alcohol but end up having one or two drinks, we think we’ve totally failed and we might as well spend the night getting drunk. Or if we’re trying to avoid social media but accidentally spend half an hour on TikTok, we think there’s no harm in scrolling for a few more hours.
We can avoid the ‘what the hell’ effect first by becoming aware of it so that we can quickly notice it when it rears its head, and second by not thinking about failure and progress in a black and white way; it’s not all or nothing.
Remember, a mistake in one moment doesn’t stop you from working towards your goals in the next.
Now on to the next mindset to get you back on track with your goals
Practice self-compassion
In another study, researchers asked a group of women to quickly eat a donut and then drink a glass of water so that they would feel full after eating the donut. Some women got a self-compassionate message telling them not to be so hard on themselves for indulging, and some got no message.
Then the women were given bowls of candy and told to eat as much or as little as they wanted. Interestingly, the women who received the self-forgiveness message ate only 28g of candy compared to the 70g eaten by the group who didn’t get the message a substantial difference.
You see, for many of us wanting to become better people, telling ourselves off when we relapse or fail comes naturally, but beating yourself up actually leaves you feeling guilty and shameful and lowers your self-esteem.
In fact, addiction experts say that this often triggers a relapse, trapping us in this vicious cycle where we feel low and worthless, which causes a relapse, which makes us feel worse, which makes a relapse more likely, and well, you get the idea.
We avoid this trap by practicing self-compassion. Instead of telling yourself a story about what a failure you are, view your setbacks as simply part of the journey on the way to success, recognizing that you’re only human and mistakes are inevitable.
One of the best ways to nurture this self-compassion is through daily affirmations, a technique that can significantly alter our mindsets for the better.
Don’t set overly ambitious goals
When goal setting, it can feel good to make the goals as ambitious as possible.
We feel that the bolder and more challenging the goal, the more motivated we’ll be to achieve it. But while ambition is good, this usually backfires.
For example, imagine that it’s the start of a new year.
Two people want to lose weight; let’s call them Jack and Jill. Jack is shooting for the stars. He’s doing a 90-day challenge and plans to hit the gym every day for at least 2 hours for the next 3 months.
He’ll also be eating as little as he can and buying all the supplements and diet pills he can get his hands on. Jill’s doing things differently. She’s focused on building the habit of working out, making sure her routine is manageable and sustainable over the long term. She wants to drop just a bit of weight each week.
For her, moving in the correct direction is more important than reaching the destination as quickly as possible. Who do you think will see success by the end of the year? It should be obvious that Jill is a much safer bet.
Jack will start off strongly but quickly burn out, picking up injuries, getting frustrated, and wanting to give up. Research shows that almost everyone who follows crash diets puts the weight back on soon after the diet is over, and often more.
The secret of many extreme dieting shows is that soon enough, the contestants are usually back where they started. Jill will slowly build up the time she spends exercising, from one day to two to three, eventually becoming a regular at the gym.
The few pounds she loses each month won’t make much of a difference at the beginning, but after a year of constant weight loss, she’ll be a new person. As we know, slow and steady wins the race.
Don’t make the mistake of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The best strategy is to work out the minimum you need to do each day to make progress and aim at doing that consistently. Momentum always beats bursts of action followed by long periods of nothing.
If you’re not where you want to be with your goals for this year, don’t sweat it. Give these methods a try, and we promise you’ll start seeing results.
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