Why You Shouldn’t Tell Anyone About Your Goals

How Talking About Your Goals Make Them Less Likely To Happen

If you truly want to accomplish your deepest dreams and goals, don’t tell a soul.

This might seem counterintuitive. After all, maybe your family and friends have been there for you before. They help you brainstorm and encourage you when you need a boost.

But the very act of telling them can actually sabotage your chances of success!

In a recent paper, “Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?” Peter Gollwitzer found that when we share our goals, we can inadvertently make them less achievable.

The reason has to do with Dopamine, the chemical responsible for motivation and drive.

Dopamine is released when we work towards our goals, however, as anyone who has used TikTok for 5 min knows, Dopamine can be inadvertently triggered when we don’t want it to.

Social media scrolling and cheap pleasures can spike our dopamine, however, so can telling people about your goals!

When you tell your BFFF that you are going to run a marathon next month you receive encouragement and affirmation from your friend.

This triggers your dopamine circuitry in the same way actually achieving your goals would.

To your brain, you’ve already achieved your goal and received your reward.

This leaves less motivation and brain juice (official scientific term) for when it comes time to train or actually put in the work needed to achieve your goal.

Interestingly enough, Gollwitzer found this was compounded the more passionate the individual was about their goal and the more their goal was wrapped up with their identity.

Let’s say you are a track star and training for the Olympics. You tell your family, friends, gym members, that random guy at Subway, and anyone else who will listen all about your plans.

Each time you tell someone dopamine is released and it’s as if you’ve already won that gold medal.

Your brain receives its reward and thinks it’s already achieved its goal. It reinforced your identity as an incredible track star, before you’ve even competed.

So come tomorrow at 5am when the alarm goes off… you have less in the tank.

Now all this is assuming you have a supportive social network.

If you are surrounded by naysayers and people who bring you down, talking about your goals can be even worse!

Once they learn of your goals they might try to sabotage you or hurt your chances in some way.

If you are unsure of your family and friends’ intentions. It is even more important to work in secret.

Let’s save our dopamine for the work that really matters. No need to keep everyone in the loop on our intentions and methods.

If you have to share your plans, share them with someone that will keep you accountable or help you in a practical way.

Already told everyone about your goal? No need to panic, you can recoup some of that sweet sweet Dopamine with these easy methods:

If you’re really feeling a lack of motivation to achieve your goals, you might even need a hard reset of your Dopamine system altogether:

Remember, the next time you’re tempted to tell everyone and their grandma about your big plans, take a breath and… don’t :)

Better to share your success after the facts.

After all, telling everyone just might be the difference between achieving your goals and never getting off the ground.

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