Intentions
One person loves good intentions. The other prefers to keep his or her wishes quiet. Either way, many people tend to think about business and personal goals when a new year arrives. If you do have ambitions for 2024, what is the best way to formulate them?
Types of goals
Behavioral researchers distinguish between different types of goals: superordinate and subordinate.
– Superordinate goals are about the outcomes you want to achieve. For example: I want to become fitter and slimmer by 2024. Or: we want to become a more creative and innovative company in 2024.
– Subordinate goals are about the behavior required to achieve this. For example: from now on I will run five kilometers every Monday and Thursday evening. Or: we organize weekly meetings around new products, where all employees participate.
Bettina Höchli, Adrian Brügger and Claude Messner are behavioral researchers at the University of Bern. They do research into the characteristics of and interaction between the two types of goals. Their main advice: combine them.
Combining works better
According to Höchli and colleagues, goals that revolve around a desired outcome are more motivating in the long term. An important reason: they are more related to who we want to be as a person or organization and such an aspiration cannot usually be achieved with a few simple steps. So even if you take action, the tension between the superordinate goal and the actual situation will remain for a while. And that gives you the motivation to persevere.
Goals that revolve around behavior are more motivating in the short term. Anyone who envisions concrete actions experiences a tension between ambition and reality until he or she takes action. But when action is taken, that tension quickly disappears.
According to the researchers, simply setting an outcome or behavioral goal does not have much effect. But whoever combines both types experiences significantly more motivation to work on it for a longer period of time and also achieves more results.
How to formulate?
During workshops I notice that many people find it complex to formulate different types of goals. Therefore, here are a few helpful questions to ask yourself or others.
Asking the why question helps to formulate superordinate goals. For example, write down three reasons why you want to work on your specific goal in the coming months. What also helps is the question: who do I want to be as a person? Or: what kind of team or company do we want to be?
To formulate subordinate goals it helps to ask: what concrete, recurring behavior; what daily or weekly routine will help me achieve the desired outcome?
Good to know: it is according to behavioral researchers, more effective to describe what you do want to achieve and what you do want to do, rather than saying what you want to avoid or what you want to stop doing.
I often write: this is not rocket science, but it is behavioral science. And therefore quite useful if you want to make 2024 a fun year.
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