Talking About One’s Goals Hinders Their Achievement

There are people who have a kind of foreboding and surprisingly seem to have found confirmation in evidence to support these feelings: talking about their goals hinders their achievement. In reality, this has nothing to do with fate or anything like that. There is a logical thread that connects these two events.

The entrepreneur and scholar of human behavior, Derek Sivers, brought this issue to the table. According to him, talking about one’s goals hinders the realization of the same. To confirm this thesis, he reported several studies by Kurt Lewin (1926), Wera Mahler (1933) and some works by Peter M. Gollwitzer (1982 and 2009).

At the same time, however, there are several contemporary studies according to which anyone who explicitly manifests their intentions and projects would have a better chance of success. Why does this happen? What does the fact of talking about one’s goals have to do with the fact that they are not achieved?

Talk about your goals

According to the hypothesis of Derek Sivers – which moves in the same direction as neuroscientists – the human brain has some “defects” in its functioning. One of the most important is that he doesn’t always manage to distinguish reality from fiction. This is why, for example, it happens to cry in front of a film, even knowing that what happens in the frames is not real.

Well, precisely because of this distortion, the brain tends to confuse saying with doing. This mainly happens when that “saying” has a lot of emphasis or goes on. A goal is a wish that we have visualized, but not yet achieved. The main point is this: it is a desire. Precisely for this reason it needs motivation to be achieved.

Yet when we talk a lot about a goal, it creates a kind of illusion. It consists in the fact that the brain begins to give shape to the sensation of having achieved that goal (a sort of anticipation of the pleasantness of the reinforcement is produced which would seem to take away the value of the goal itself). In short, how to obtain a “successful simulation”.

The problem is that it has been found that in general people don’t really like talking about their ambitions and goals. They do it because in many cases an opportunity to share a fantasy is an opportunity to live, to project that illusion onto the other – rather than reality.

The cause of the phenomenon

So why does the brain end up creating this illusion of success? According to the studies mentioned, this only happens if you talk to other people about your goals. You can think about it, put them in black and white on a sheet of paper, mull over or do what you want, as long as you don’t share them with others.

This is because talking about one’s goals aloud generally determines a feedback mechanism: if the goal is evaluated positively, the person who expressed it generally receives recognition for the very fact of having set this goal.

Thus, the goal can be approached as a fact rather than a projection of the future. In this way, a series of sensations are generated towards the aforementioned goal, which end up “diminishing”, so to speak, the desire to reach it.

Don’t talk about your goals

It is usually thought that it is better to speak with facts. This is absolutely true. If we talked less and did more, we would probably take better care of our motivation and prevent the brain from falling into its own trap.

In particular, Derek Sivers indicates that if the project, on the one hand, stimulates the admiration of others, on the other hand it will end up gratifying to the point that the least of the problems will be to carry it out. Derek gives the following advice:

• If you want to talk about your goals, do it with generic comments and vague definitions. Don’t mention anything specific until you’ve actually accomplished it.
• If you can’t resist the desire to talk about your goals or a project, express your ideas in a way that you are “in debt” with the other: make it clear that this is an unattained success.

As for the first point, an example might be saying something like, “I’m practicing some habits to feel better”, instead of explaining in detail what they consist of.

As for the second, it could be something like: “I have set myself the goal of reading one book a month. If we see you next month and I haven’t done so yet, scold me ”.

Try it. It seems that using others as a yardstick, based on the criteria discussed, works.