It can feel impossible to achieve a goal when your motivation tank is empty.
Scientist Ayelet Fishbach shares some surprising lessons in her new book Get It Done.
Photo: Cam Adams / Unsplash
Ayelet Fishbach Photo: supplied
When motivation is in short supply, the first step is setting the goal, Fishbach says.
“Changing the situation, or changing the way you think about the situation, is something that every social psychologist and behavioural scientist agree is the way to go.
“What I do in my work is look at four different areas of making these changes. And it starts with setting a goal… Also, it's about doing something - not necessarily about not doing something.”
Sustaining motivation, by looking back on what you've achieved and what you want to further achieve, is the second step.
The third step is integrating your goal into the big picture.
“You always want more than one thing and so now if you add a goal – if you want to eat healthily or start exercising – then you need to think about how that fits with everything else.”
The final step is leaning on social support, cultivating the support of those around you and using role models.
Often motivation fails due to a person's lack of self-knowledge and experience, such as those under 25, Fishbach says.
Although some of us are born with more motivation – and a stronger tendency to think about long-term goals and stay inspired – than others.
“If you have it – great. If you don't have it, then you just have to work harder."
Photo: supplied
The goals people set differ depending on their age and situation, she says. Many older people want to simply maintain what they currently have, while someone younger may want to master self-control.
For young people, setting positive goals and making the process of achieving them fun is particularly helpful.
In general, Fishbach recommends avoiding goals to not do something, which is usually counter-productive as it triggers avoidance.
A goal to avoid something is experienced as negative – and therefore harder to achieve – but a positive reframing will help sustain motivation.
The goal of losing weight is a prime example.
“Set your health goals in terms of being happy with your body, in terms of eating food that's good for you, in terms of movement… If I eat the food that is good for me, if I know that I eat more green vegetables and less sugar, if I exercise a few times a week, then that's probably going to also take care of the weight but the goal was not set as a chore, as an avoidance, and inherently going to be unpleasant to do.”
The repeated failure to achieve your goals can lead to valuable lessons, Fishbach says.
“You have learned something from something that did not work, and there is a lot of work in the behavioural sciences and in psychology on how to help people learn from this experience.
“The reason that there is all this work is that it's not intuitive. When something doesn't work as we were planning, we tend to disengage, we tend not to learn much from that experience.
“But you know what, you did not achieve the goal but you learned something. You at least identify one way in which that doesn't work.”
Being able to summarise and understand an experience – and share lessons learnt with others seeking to attain the same goals – can motivate a person to try again, she says.
“They put into words a lesson that they haven't realised that they have learned, that maybe they never quite sat down to think, ‘Okay, what have I learned?”
To-do lists may work for many people as a means of keeping on track during the day, but Fishbach says she has “an ambivalent relationship” with them.
“I actually did not include anything in my book about to-do lists…
“My problem with to-do lists is that they often obscure the priority of your goals. Another problem with to-do lists is they are a chore – this thing that you have to do. I want people to be more excited about their goals."
