Keep your goals to yourself [TED Talks]

Coming up with goals to better ourselves is exciting. It gives us direction and a reason to do more. And what do you do after you’ve sworn commitment to a goal? Do you share it with your friends or the world to ensure that you don’t falter from your path to satisfaction? 

Derek Sivers explains in his TED Talk that psychologists have found that telling someone your goal(s) creates a “social reality” that tricks your mind into feeling you’ve already satisfied your goals, thus making you less motivated to actually do them.

Telling someone your goals makes them less likely to happen.

Sivers goes on to quickly examine a decade of psychological interest to this topic, and in particular a study done in 2009 by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer.

In that study, 163 people across four separate tests wrote down their goals. Half of them announced their goal and the other half did not. Everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would lead them towards their goal, but they were told they could stop at any time. Those who kept their mouth shut worked the full 45 minutes (on average) and said they felt they had a long ways to go. Those who expressed their commitment toward their goals quit at 33 minutes (on average) and said they felt much closer to achieving their goal.

So what do you do when you really want to talk about it? “State it in a way that gives you no satisfaction,” says Sivers.

via TED.com