Keep your goals to yourself

Day 45 / 365

Take a moment right now to think about a goal you have been wanting to achieve for a long time. Picture yourself taking the decision to work hard towards the goal. Imagine telling your friends or your parents about this decision, and how they would be happy and would congratulate you for taking the right step.

How does that feel? It must feel good right. Just speaking about your goals to others makes you feel you are one step closer to achieving it. Well, this might not be a good thing.

Manifesting a Social Reality

If you set a personal goal and didn't share it with others the only way for you to feel accomplished would be to actually make some progress towards the goal.

If you tell your friends about it and they acknowledge it or even congratulate you for setting the goal, you’ll have some sense of accomplishment without actually doing any work. Psychologists use the term “Social Reality” to define this phenomenon when you receive satisfaction from just talking (or in some cases boasting) about your goals with others. Once you have had this satisfaction you are less motivated to put in the work

Our brain has a lot of limitations, one of which is that it has a tendency to confuse the talking with the doing. So the next time you are tempted to talk about your goals, make sure you have done some work to show for it first.

This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — The Great Emu War