Zillions of articles appear at the beginning of each year about the ambitious resolutions we set for ourselves. Followed by laments and explanations for why they seem doomed to failure. I suppose this is one more. Except that I don’t think resolutions are necessarily doomed, especially if you re-frame them as goals. Goals are achievable.
Four things can help you achieve goals (keep your resolutions):
- Set an intention
- Create a measurable goal, one where you can note steps in accomplishing it
- Use mental contrasting to both envision success and be aware of the challenges that must be overcome
- Recognize that changes often involve creating new habits, so allow time for repetition and practice as you build and restructure neural networks that support the habit.
Set An Intention
Intentions are more powerful than you may realize. In practice, an intention simply means stating what you want to achieve or do. It helps to frame the thought as a descriptive statement rather than a want statement. “I am patient” or “I am physically active” or “I spend time interacting in person rather than on a device” are more effective than “I want to be more patient” or “I want to be more physically active” or “I want to spend less time on devices.”
The idea of setting intentions is an ancient one. The Buddha, for example, observed that you become what you think. Neuroscience indicates that intentions work in part because we prime our mind to be more aware of things that are actively in our brain. Priming is a cognitive process, an aspect of memory, that alerts the brain. When you set an intention, you alert yourself to opportunities to act and incline yourself to pay attention to them. To maintain the priming effect, you have to remain aware of your intention. You can do that by writing it out and posting it where you’ll see it often, like on your computer or bathroom mirror. There are lots of other ways to keep an intention in your awareness: pop-up notifications, singing the intention; repeating the intention each time you hear a recurrent sound, such as a phone ringing or a bird chirping; draw it, paint it or photograph things that remind you of your intention. Do whatever appeals to you as a way to keep the intention in your awareness. You can read more about setting intentions here.
Create A Measurable Goal
In order to achieve a goal, you need to set clear objectives with measurable milestones. This begins by being specific about what you want to achieve. “I want to be physically fit” is vague. So are, “I want to be patient,” and “I want to spend less time on my devices.” In contrast, “I will jog two miles three times a week” or “I will lose 15 pounds” are more specific. Similarly, this is specific: “I will pause before I react to my child’s difficult behavior and I will connect before I try to guide it” (see effective ways to interact for more about this). “I will spend 30 minutes each day being outside or socializing without my phone” is also specific.
The second part of having a measurable goal is to identify in advance how you will measure the successful steps along the path to accomplishing your goal. These need to be specific, things you can literally check off. They also need to be realistic. It is much more likely you will achieve a goal if you set small steps and celebrate, or at least happily acknowledge, each accomplishment along the way. Because each accomplished step IS a success! Small steps are things like, jogging ½ mile twice a week for two weeks; losing 1 pound each week for 15 weeks; pausing and connecting before reacting once on Tuesday and once on Friday this week, then 3 times the following week, and so on; or spending 15 minutes outside or socializing without a phone one day the first week and gradually adding more days and minutes in each successive week.
Remember to enjoy the successes along the way. Keep a check-list; put a check or star on the calendar; spend a few minutes taking it in, thinking about your success; light a candle as each step is achieved; photograph the accomplishment. Note it in whatever way has meaning to you.
Use Mental Contrasting
Lots has been said about the power of being positive. There’s ample evidence that envisioning positive outcomes helps promote success and that negative thinking thwarts it. But positive thinking alone can actually stagnate development and make it difficult to achieve goals! The reason for this is that the mind can become tricked into thinking a goal has already been achieved when we envision it as done, or imagine how it will feel when done. It can create lethargy or apathy. To counteract that, you can use a technique called mental contrasting, in which you alternate between imagining the positive outcome and realistically evaluating the challenges that must be overcome to reach that outcome. To do this, you draw to mind things in present reality that stand in the way of the vision. Things like finding it hard to pause when you are angry, stressed or busy; feeling lazy or not wanting to take time to work out; finding it very easy and addicting to get drawn into mobile devices. In mental contrasting you imagine the positive outcome and hold it in your mind for several minutes then draw the challenges to mind and reflect on them. A second part of reflecting on obstacles is to identify things that can be done to counteract them.
This alternating between envisioning a dream and reflecting meaningfully on challenges stimulates the brain and enhances the likelihood of accomplishing a goal. You’ll find more information about mental contrasting in the Guiding Principle, Set-Up Success. It is discussed in the section, “You can help your child learn how to envision and achieve goals.”
Recognize that Change Involves Creating New Habits
Habits are how we preserve ways we’ve learned to do things. While there is a lot of press about bad habits — eating unnecessary calories for comfort, staying involved in unhealthy relationships, getting hooked on substances — habits are vitally important to us. Tying shoes, driving a car, writing, doing daily activities, adding numbers, combing your hair are all habits. Before these skills become habits, they take attention and practice. Think about the difference between a preschooler carefully focussing on her shoe laces, struggling to figure out how to create loops, and your mindlessly tying your shoes while talking to someone or reading an email. Once learned, habits, become unconscious. They are also rather difficult to teach to others, because we have to work to think about the steps involved and how to describe them. Habits are part of what we call non-declarative memory, a repository of skills that we don’t consciously think about or explain (hence the term not declarative, we can’t easily declare or explain them verbally).
New Year’s Resolutions are usually goals of creating life-style changes. That means establishing new habits. The important thing to recognize is that before a skill becomes a habit, it takes practice, time, and effort. Habits are established over time. On route to creating an effective habit, there are periods of trial and error, often a lot of practice, and considerable conscious effort. The brain builds habits over time. Initially there is a period of alertness and attention accompanied by very little skill. In animal studies, the brain shows bursts of activity in the basal ganglia, an area involved in pain and pleasure, before an action becomes a habit. Actions are at first uncoordinated. A habit begins when a benefit is gained from a particular action, and neural cells become more synchronized and coordinated. This basic pattern is seen for thinking skills as well as for physical actions. Habits strengthen when the brain receives a reinforcing signal, basically that what you have done or thought is beneficial. Once established, a habit becomes unconscious. This frees up brain space for other thinking and activity, which is why habits are so critical. They preserve effective ways of doing things and free up the brain to attend to other matters.
Habit formation involves both time and attention, but the pay-off is that once established, habits are unconscious and freeing. In case you’re wondering, established habits can be become more refined or changed. Consider the “habit” of serving a tennis ball or playing a piece of music or even driving a car. We continually gain experience and skill. These get layered into the habit during sleep. One of the main tasks of non-REM, or non-dreaming sleep, is to allow time for the brain to shift through material that has been added to working memory and create circuitry to retain new information or new skills and to prune out less effective or unneeded circuits.
The important point is that achieving goals involves creating new habits, or sometimes modifying existing ones. Either way, this requires practice, repetition and time.
Help Your Child Keep New Year’s Resolutions (Achieve Goals) Too
You can use these four strategies to coach your child to identify and achieve goals — or keep New Year’s Resolutions.
♥ Teach your child to set intentions, and if you have a tween or teen, explain why they work.
♥ Help your child set specific goals with measurable steps to achieve them. A goal of “I’m going to be a better student” or even “I’m going to ace the science test next week” aren’t very good, because they have no measurable steps to success. A better goal is to set a specific target, such as “I will have a GPA of 3.0 next quarter.” Then have your child identify which class is most in need of a boost and target that one. If math is holding down a GPA, set a goal to study a certain number of minutes each night, to meet with the teacher to tell him/her the goal and ask for advice, to arrange for tutoring or help once or twice a week with a peer who excels in math, a neighbor, an older sibling, or a paid professional tutor. Set specific measures, such as, “within one month I will have a C in math,” or “I will score a grade of C (or C-, what is realistic?) on the next math test and improve that score by 2 points on each weekly test.”
Acing a science test is much more likely if there are measurable steps, such as “I will study each day for the test and will meet with a tutor (or science loving friend) to go over material on Wednesday.”
♥ Teach your child to use mental contrasting. You may want to read the article, Set-Up Success for suggestions on how to do this.
♥ Encourage your child to practice and allow time for change to happen. If your child is young, you may want to simply be aware that it takes time to build skills and try to allow time for your child to work at things rather than jumping in to help or rushing her to finish. If your child is older, you may want to also explain how habits take time to build.
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