Talking About Your Goals Makes Them Unfulfilled, According To A Study

There are people who have it simply as an omen and, surprisingly, they seem to have found evidence to support it: talking about your goals causes them not to be met. Actually, it has nothing to do with luck or fate or anything like it. There is a logical thread connecting these two events.

Who brought up the subject was the entrepreneur and student of human behavior, Derek Sivers. He has pointed out that talking about your goals causes them not to be met. It draws on this claim in various studies by Kurt Lewin (1926), Wera Mahler (1933), and certain works by Peter M. Gollwitzer (1982 and 2009).

Likewise, there are several current studies according to which those who make their purposes and projects public increase the probability of bringing them to fruition. Why is this happening? What does talking about your goals have to do with them not being met?

Talk about your goals

According to Derek Sivers – a direction towards which neurosciences also point – the human brain has some “flaws” in its functioning. One of the most important is that it does not always succeed in differentiating fact from fiction. So, for example, we can cry watching a movie knowing that what happens in it is not real.

Well, because of this bias , the brain often confuses saying with doing. This occurs mainly when that saying is very emphatic or prolonged. A goal is a wish visualized, but not yet achieved. The key is that: that it is a wish. For the same reason, it implies that there is motivation to achieve it.

However, talking a lot about that goal creates a kind of illusion. This consists in that your brain begins to generate the sensation of having generated that goal (there is a kind of anticipation of the enjoyment of the reinforcement that would lower its value). It’s like getting a “mock achievement.”

What is “problematic” is that it has also been detected that, in general, people really like to talk about our goals and purposes. We do it because, in many cases, an opportunity to share an illusion is an opportunity to live, to put that illusion on the other – instead of on reality.

The cause of the phenomenon

Why, finally, does the brain end up creating this illusion of achievement? According to the studies cited, this only happens if you talk about your goals with others. You can think about them, write them down, turn them over or do whatever you want, as long as you don’t share them with others.

This is because talking about your goals out loud usually produces feedback – if the goal is valued as positive, the person usually receives recognition for the fact of proposing it.

Thus, the goal can be treated as a fact rather than as a projection of the future. In this way, a whole range of sensations are generated in front of this goal, which end up “wearing out”, as it were, the desire to achieve it.

Don’t talk about your goals

It is popularly said that it is better to speak with facts. This is totally true. If we talk less and do more, we are probably going to take better care of our motivation. We will prevent the brain from falling into its own trap.

In particular, Derek Sivers points out that if the project produces admiration in others, it ends up generating such gratification that the least thing will be to make it happen. What he recommends is the following:

• If you are going to talk about your goals, do so with general comments and vague definitions. Do not mention anything in particular until you have actually achieved it.
• If you can’t resist the urge to talk about a goal or a project, express your ideas in a way that is indebted to the other. Let the fact that this is something not achieved become evident.

Regarding the first recommendation, an example of this would be to say something like: “I am carrying out some routines to improve my health”, instead of detailing what it is about. As for the second, it would be something like: “I have proposed to read a book a month. If in a month we see each other and I haven’t done it, scold me ”. Try it. It seems that the fact of using the others as control elements under the indicated parameters works.