10 Ways to Make Your Goals Fail, and What to Do Instead: #8
This post is part of our series answering the question, “Why do my goals keep failing? How do you make effective goals?” For best results, first check out the Introduction, instructions, and table of contents.
TL;DR
Your goal or plan cannot succeed if you simply forget about it.
Action Potentials:
Try the tips below to help you remember your intentions. Experiment until you find what works for you.
How to Remember Your Goals & Plans
salient /ˈsālyənt/ adj.
1. attracting notice or attention
Neuroscientifically, something is “salient” if your brain perceives it, draws your attention to it, and motivates you to act in response.
A crashed car is incredibly salient – it’s hard to look away! Whereas you barely notice any not-crashed car you pass on your way; they’re barely salient at all. Can you feel the difference?
In the context of goals, the more you pay attention to and remember a goal, the more likely you are to act on it. How many times have you made a goal or plan and then failed to do it, simply because you forgot about it until that night, the next day, or some other far-too-late time?
You can’t change a behavior if, in the moment, you forget about your intention to change the behavior – no matter how strong your motivation, willpower, planning, tracking, rewarding, enjoying, or after-the-fact accountability.
So, how can you remember?
1. First, write down your goal and your plan to execute it.
Until it’s written down (ideally by hand), a goal is just a dream. Experiments show that simply writing a goal down improves its implementation [1].
It’s much easier to remember a goal/plan that you spent 30 minutes conceptualizing and writing than one you thought about for a mere 30 seconds. Plus, the action of writing it down involves more senses and brain systems than simply thinking about it, which makes it more memorable – especially if you physically write it down [2-3].
2. Add pictures.
Our brains are wired to remember and respond to images much more than words (which are a recent invention in the span of human evolution.)
So make your goal more salient by creating pictures for it, both physically and mentally.
Physically, in addition to writing your goal down, adding a picture of it that you find or draw will help the idea of it stick in your brain and help you remember to do it.
You can also add mental pictures. Visualization is a powerful technique that involves imagining yourself successfully accomplishing a goal, with as many accompanying details, senses, and emotions as possible. Repeatedly imagining your success makes you more likely to achieve it, especially if you visualize the process of achieving the positive outcome rather than the outcome itself [4].
You might visualize the moment you work on your goal (ex: working out). Visualize yourself doing the action in the environment where you’ll do it. Imagine yourself in that moment. See it. Hear it. Taste it. Feel how good it feels. This helps prime your brain to remember to do the action when you’re actually in that situation. It also reduces your resistance to doing something less familiar, because you’ve essentially already experienced it.
Also imagine what obstacles might arise, and picture how you will overcome them, which similarly primes your brain to respond well to challenges in the moment.
Though not as effective, you might also visualize the moment you finish your goal (ex: the scale shows your target weight). In this case, your mind believing it’s real helps to change your perceived identity. If you believe you’re in shape, your mind wants to relieve cognitive dissonance, so it will adjust your behavior and your physiology to make your belief true [5].
Your brain doesn’t really distinguish between reality and imagined reality [6-7]. (As examples, consider dreams, phantom limb syndrome, false memories, and the placebo effect.) So, if you picture something vividly and often, your subconscious mind starts to believe it’s real.
For this reason, athletes frequently visualize themselves performing perfectly, which boosts their real performance.
Last, besides altering the brain’s perceived reality, visualizing your progress and/or success also helps you hit goals because it causes extra dopamine release, which feels good and motivates you to action.
And therein lies a bonus from all this visualizing! Unlike actually achieving it, which only happens once, you can visualize your success and enjoy those positive feelings again and again 😊.
3. Create reminders of your goal that you’ll notice at the right time and place.
Some people say to put as many reminders in as many places as possible. In my experience, and consistent with research on attention, such oversaturation leads to desensitization: you’re reminded of the desired goal/behavior in so many irrelevant contexts that your brain starts to filter out and ignore the reminders, including in the moments you actually need to act on them.
What moments are those? For example, if your goal is to use newly-learned memory techniques to recall people’s names, and you remind yourself every morning and night, you still can’t achieve your goal if you forget to use the techniques in the moment that you meet a new acquaintance. Or if you plan to meditate right after breakfast, it doesn’t help much if you only remember at lunch when you’re rushed and in the middle of a noisy cafeteria.
So try to make salient reminders in the right contexts to act on them.
Further, in your reminders, try to include what you want to do, rather than what you don’t want to do. To help motivate you, you might include your WHY, your reasons for wanting to change your behaviors, especially how good it feels to do it in the moment, not just for a reward at the end.
Ideally, make your reminders interfere with your routines so you can’t possibly do your normal behaviors without noticing them! The goal is to increase the friction of doing your normal behavior and decrease the friction of doing your new, better behavior.
Examples:
- Hang your morning workout clothes on your closet handles so when you’re choosing what to wear that day, you can’t NOT be reminded to go for a jog first.
- Put items that you need to take with you not just by your door, but in front of your door, so you can’t possibly open the door and leave without taking them.
- Cover the front of your phone with a sticky note that says “Focus! No social media until lunch,” or “A walk will make you feel better than a YouTube video,” or some other statement of your goal and your reason for it.
- Create an automation that makes motivational music (or a simple alarm) start to play when it’s time to start a work session.
- Draw a special symbol wherever you stop in a textbook (on a bookmark, if you don’t own the book!) so that when you pick it back up, the symbol will remind you to use learning skills that you wish to practice. Also put the reminder on something that makes it so you can’t even open the book without moving it, like a block on top of your book.
- Tell your partner, coworker, or accountability partner to ask you about your goal every time they see you, or better yet, remind you at the exact moment. (We’ll cover more about using other people to help you remember and succeed in another post.)
Bonus: if you have rewards planned for when you hit your goals, make them more salient, too! Remember, though, it’s more effective to focus on enjoying the moment of progress rather than the far-off reward.
Notice how all of these examples remind you of your goal not just generally, but in the very moment that you choose to act on it, or not. That said, if you can’t cue yourself exactly at the most relevant moment, at least try to schedule regular reminders at times that tend to be more relevant. Failing that, at least pick totally random times instead of regular times, so that the unpredictability will make your intention stand out more to your brain and prevent desensitization.
Additionally, check out these two tactics I use to make my intentions salient. They’ve completely transformed my time management, effectiveness, and personal development:
1. Show me the money: I’m self-employed and most of my work does not directly generate income, so I stick fake money on my calendar, aligned with each planned 90-minute chunk of work, but easily moved around if I’m not on schedule. Though the bills are fake, I save them up and spend that amount of real money on vacations. (That’s why it’s less than $5 / hr. – most of my real income goes towards normal expenses, but that $5 gets reserved for me! And I double the day’s earnings if I hit my work goal.) So besides building up to a later reward, I get immediate rewards by “paying” myself. It’s extremely salient: there’s money literally staring me in the face just waiting for me to earn it, and if I don’t do the work, it gets left sad and abandoned, unearned. I adjust it every day rather than putting all the bills on at once so that each day stands out and feels like it matters.
2. My Mission, should I choose to accept it: I make a daily Mission for myself, which I write by hand on a sticky note and place in a special corner of my whiteboard. The Mission is the way I’m going to be a little better than I was yesterday. Things like “50 pushups in the morning” or “Smile more” or “Push yourself to finish the project today!” Or intentions of going to bed earlier, using screens less, keeping better posture, or working a little longer or faster. Or multiple at once. Usually, each Mission is a tiny bit more challenging than the previous day’s so I improve my habits and abilities a little more every day. Because each day’s Mission is different, and I swap out the color of the sticky note every day, it is never static and my brain won’t easily become desensitized to it.
Remember: your brain becomes desensitized to familiar things. So try to vary up your reminders over time so your brain won’t stop paying attention.
Finally, to help you remember your new behavior at the right time, you might also try habit stacking or other proven habit-forming techniques (I highly recommend applying the “Habit Loop” that Charles Duhigg first shared in his book The Power of Habit, which can be applied to start good habits and break harmful ones).
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Need help applying these strategies to your specific situation? Click here.
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In summary, to avoid a goal or plan slipping away simply because you forgot about it,
- Write it down.
- Visualize it.
- Create attention-grabbing reminders that you’ll notice at the right time and place.
Don’t forget! (Get it?) Keep your goals salient so you remember to execute them.
FATAL ERROR #9 coming soon
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References
- https://www.dominican.edu/sites/default/files/2020-02/gailmatthews-harvard-goals-researchsummary.pdf
- Keita Umejima, Takuya Ibaraki, Takahiro Yamazaki, Kuniyoshi L. Sakai. (2021). Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 15. DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2021.634158
- Murray CA, Shams L. (2023). Crossmodal interactions in human learning and memory. Front Hum Neurosci., 17;17:1181760. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2023.1181760. PMID: 37266327; PMCID: PMC10229776.
- Pham, L. B., & Taylor, S. E. (1999). From thought to action: Effects of process- versus outcome-based mental simulations on performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(2), 250–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167299025002010
- Berkman E. T. (2018). The Neuroscience of Goals and Behavior Change. Consulting Psychology Journal, 70(1), 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000094
- Kosslyn, S., Ganis, G. & Thompson, W. Neural foundations of imagery. Nat Rev Neurosci 2, 635–642 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35090055
- Jeannerod M. (2001). Neural simulation of action: a unifying mechanism for motor cognition. NeuroImage, 14(1 Pt 2), S103–S109. https://doi.org/10.1006/nimg.2001.0832
