Having a Tough Time Reaching Your Goals? Keep Them Visible
How’s that? Just looking at your goals every day for 17 seconds or more increases your chances of accomplishing it by 13% (Yue, 2013; Medina, 2016; LONI, 2016). Because, it updates your mental to do list to include the goal as important each day. Our brains are problem solving machines, literally—if I give you a task, your brain sees that as a problem, and immediately, unless interrupted by something it deems more important, begins to figure out the best way to solve that problem and accomplish the task. As the day goes on and more things are added to your mental list, the brain begins to rank order and hierarchicalize the list in order of importance, if you don’t keep your eyes on your goals, the goal could slip literally right off your to do list.
What happens each day is that the brain wakes up to new tasks and new problems, so old problems and/or unfinished problems get pushed down that list further and further until they disappear or are finally acted upon or solved. Older items receive less brain power and energy, so the older the problem the less likely it is to be solved. The older your goal the less likely it is to be achieved.
Unless, you refresh the list. Just looking at your goals periodically throughout your day or week can refresh the list. The more often you refresh your list, the more often you remind yourself of your goals, and the more likely you are to achieve those goals.
But, want to really increase your chances of accomplishment go one step further and use visualization. Athletes that visualized their goals increased their performances by 30% to 50% over athletes that did not. There are two types of visualizations: outcome visualization—see yourself achieving your goal and process visualization--seeing each step necessary in the goal (Niles, 2011). For best results you should use both of them—see yourself achieving the goal and then backup and see each step you will take to get there or vice versa. The best times to visualize is any time, but it might be easiest to do this when you are bored in a meeting or take a moment of two before you get out of bed each morning or before you close your eyes to sleep at night.
Of course, action is always best, but if you cannot do it at the moment, then seeing yourself doing it successfully is the next best thing until you can take action. Right now, you might be saying, who has time to do this, but there are many easy ways to keep your goals visible.
Here’s a list that I hope will help you (Pavolina, 2009).
Use a digital photo frame to display photos of your goals along with your friends and family pictures. Put it on your desk or someplace you look often.
Add goal pictures or goal words to your sidebar widget.
Use Evernote to post on your phone—there’s also an app to help you set them as your alarm, so you hear them at loud every morning.
Use Google or Outlook to look at your goals each day and to set goal start/stop reminders.
List your goals on your desktop background or screensaver.
Use Post-It Notes. Write your goals on paper and put them everywhere. I had a student who put his in the shower to look at each day.
Tell other people about your goals. Telling others is a great way to gain support.
Create a Vision board and hang it where you can see it every day.
References
Medina, John. (2016) Brain Rules. Retrieved from http://www.brainrules.net/attention
LONI: Neuro-Imaging Lab. (2016) How many thoughts does the average person have per day? Retrieved from http://www.loni.usc.edu/
Niles, Frank. (2011 ) How to Use Visualization to Achieve Your Goals. Retrieved fromhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-niles-phd/visualization-goals_b_878424.html
Pavlina, Steve. (2009) Keep Your Goals in Front of You. Retrieved fromhttp://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/05/keep-your-goals-in-front-of-you/
Yue, G. (2013). Kinesthetic imagery training of forceful muscle contractions increases brain signal and muscle strength. Retrieved fromhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3783980/