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Self | Self-improvement | Psychology

You achieved your goal! What is next?

Achieving a goal can lead you to disengage with the goal-attained behavior. How to maintain it using the metaphor method.

Take away

It can be difficult to maintain a goal-attained behavior after a goal is achieved
Focusing on the path rather than the destination can help you in maintaining the goal-attained behavior
Focusing on the path rather than the destination can help you in maintaining the goal-attained behavior

What happens after a specific goal is achieved?

Generally, this allows individuals to disengage from behaviors directed at achieving that specific goal. Think about the last goal you have achieved, what happened the next day? Did you maintain the same behavior?

I have always struggled to maintain my focus on behaviors I “gained” during a goal chasing, once that the goal was achieved. The end of the task gave me a kind of “double prize”. The first part of the prize was the goal itself, I wanted something and I succeeded in reaching it. The second one was the permission of being relaxed, coming back to be the old person with, as an example, 10-pound weightless.

I did not want to just a “goal-achiever”, I wanted to maintain a better version of myself. How?

Disengaging from the “goal-behavior” is functional in focusing on other goals. However, this disengagement can also be detrimental, since the behaviors aligned with the completed goal can be beneficial in and of themselves and can help people achieve more long-term goals in life. Attainment of a goal is a positive experience, but this can lead also to disengagement of the behaviors aligned with the completed goal.

What does it mean? In a sense, this means that “success” can relax us too much. Once you have obtained that weight target then you give up easier than the previous week in front of a piece of chocolate. What can we do so?

One way to help people see a goal-aligned behavior as an end itself is to have them look back and observe how they have grown from the goal-unattained state

One possible solution, according to scholars S. Huang and J. Aaker (here their article), is to continue goal-aligned behaviors after attaining the original goal accentuating the growth (from the previous goal-unattained state into the present goal-attained state) to sustain goal-aligned behaviors. One way to help people see a goal-aligned behavior as an end itself is to have them look back and observe how they have grown from the goal-unattained state (when they did not this behavior) in the beginning into the present goal-attained state (in which they do this behavior regularly).

For example: if you attain a 10-pound weight-loss, after achieving this weight-loss goal, if you continue to focus on the remaining distance to the goal (which has become zero), you will not be motivated to keep on monitoring food intake or exercising. In contrast, by looking back on how you have grown by being a couch-potato into being a fit person, you would be more likely to continue monitoring food intake and exercising.

Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash

This means that rather than focusing just on the fact itself (the 10-pound weight-loss) you should be aware of the 8 weeks of efforts that led you there. How? How is it possible to trick our brain in such a way? Telling it lies, or, more politely, using storytelling! In particular, using metaphors!

Metaphors have always helped people through their lives. It is often used nowadays as a unique metaphoric expression to describe life situations, relationships, and goal strivings: the metaphor of a path. The use of this metaphor enables individuals to see their lives as a continuous thread of progression leading to the ultimate destination. Construing an achieved goal as a path can encourage the continuation of goal-aligned behaviors. A path metaphor could lead to distinct perceptions and behavioral consequences based on the person’s focus when applying this metaphor.

Shifting people’s focus to the journey aspect of this path could help to induce thoughts about where one started, what one went through, and what one has now achieved, highlighting the connection between the beginning of this path and the goal one has attained at the end of this path, propelling one to continue these goal-aligned behaviors.

Authors have tested the metaphor method as a way of continuing behavior aligned with this goal in different contexts; from college students who had just completed an academic goal to people who had to write a food diary, to people who had a walking program. They found that by using the journey metaphor as a cognitive tool, it is possible to increase the likelihood that individuals will continue behaviors that are aligned with their attained original goals. It resulted that people in the journey (vs. destination) conditions were more likely to mention thoughts related to a journey, the beginning of the pursuit, the process/step they took, the instrumentality of their actions they took, and the feeling of growth and change. In contrast, those in the destination, the end goal, and the present success.

These findings suggest that the journey metaphor may have helped people think more about the actions they took during the journey, where they started out, and all the ups and downs along the way, leading to the feeling of growth. These thoughts could also contribute to an increased perception that the actions they took were instrumental and should be continued. Conceptual metaphors hence provide rich cognitive lenses through which people deliberate and reframe an experience.

It is plausible that thinking about a completed goal as a journey increases the connection between the actions one has taken (i.e., past planning) and the achieved goal while inducing positive feelings such as the feeling of growth.

I tried this method by myself. I started to journal my goal-attained behaviors as a list (i.e., “Today 20 minutes run”) and I started to read the track of the previous day when I was writing the achieved behavior of the current day.

It was a sort of sub-goal achieving.

As stated above, I did not want to be just a “goal-achiever”, reaching goals has always been important to me, I have always loved challenging myself. However, I liked to reach the next step: maintaining those behaviors, I struggled for. I reached a switch in my “double-prize” frame, the “goal” part has remained the same, but the second part has changed. I do not have the permission of being relaxed anymore; instead, I achieved a method to maintain my new behaviors. This has helped me to focus more on my efforts and myself rather than on external variables. I realized that the goal is usually achievable, it depends on myself, and, most important, reaching it is not the end of the story. What it counts most is the path. In this way, each goal becomes a stopover (which has to be celebrated as a big conquest) in a continuous, to use a metaphor, self-improvement journey.