• One way to build confidence is the 80% rule. Psychologist Barak Rosenshine, in his review of successful teaching , found that this was approximately the success rate students should experience whi...

• The key is to break down your goals into smaller, daily actions. If you know what needs to be done today, you’re in a much better position to act on it.
• It is even better is if you can create a compelling incentive to stick to the daily plan.
• A powerful tool for overcoming p...

• A common suggestion for goal-setting is to visualize success. But visualizing failure might work even better.

Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer suggests a key ingredient to the success of your goals is what he calls

A significant exception to the power of specific, challenging goals involves creative problem-solving. In tasks that require complex thinking, such as learning, problem-solving or creative work, goal-setting can back...

• Less extreme solutions can also include following a “don’t break the chain” strategy.
• Once you’ve set your daily plan, keep a tally of how many days in a row you’ve followed it. The goal is not to miss a day.
• If you do, reset your tally and start over.
• For goals that...

• Why do we procrastinate? The common perception is that procrastination is caused by perfectionism.
• People who need to do everything perfectly waste time getting started.
• One difficulty with setting goals is that our motivational hardwiring doesn’t cope well with the future.

For over four decades, psychologist Edwin Locke has been central in research on goal-setting. His research has three consistent findings :

1. Setting goals improves performance.
2. Hard goals improve...

• Early research on goal-setting found that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between difficulty and performance.
• This means that easy goals lead to weak efforts, but so do goals that are too hard.
• The key factor here seems to be that goals need to be challenging, ...

• They argue that many of the goals we pursue are only partially our own.
• We chase them because we feel we should, but they are somewhat “alien” to our deeper selves.
• Since these goals mainly just fulfill social expectations, they are harder to motivate ourselves toward consi...

Imagining obstacles in advance and deciding your response can make those responses more effective when the time comes. Since your motivation is usually highest when setting the goal, this planning can keep you from abandoning your goal when things get difficult.

• How do we build motivation to pursue our goals? Psychologist Albert Bandura developed the concept of self-efficacy to explain why some people eagerly face challenges while others shrink. If you don’t feel you’ll be successful, why bot...

In addition to implementation intentions, Gollwitzer also studied the effects of telling people about the goals you want to achieve.

Interestingly, his research found that telling people about your goals can su...

Much of the stress and disillusionment people experience with goals comes from setting ones that aren’t truly their own.

When we work on the goals of other people, goals we feel pressure to achieve but don’t actually want, the result is often misery.

• A stressful deadline to come up with a creative solution can hurt. The goal itself occupies so much space in your working memory that you have little left to try out new possible solutions. In these cases, you’re better off in a relaxed state with minimal distraction.
• One way is to s...