The Emotions Contained in Goal Achievement
Dr Stephanie Burns conducted a PhD at the university of South Australia on the role emotions play in goal achievement. I become an accredited facilitator of a program that resulted from the PhD findings and I would like to share some of these findings with you here.
These very valuable lessons are extremely important for us to understand if we are going to achieve our lifelong goals and aspirations and go on to be the person we have always wanted to be.
Twenty adults participated in the study over a 12 -week period and each participant could choose their own goal.
When choosing the goal, the participants were asked to ensure that their goal was able to be achieved in a 12 week time-frame, it had at-least 2 actions each week and it required the person participating to have the support of family to achieve the goal as well as the money. Dr Burns was trying to eliminate all possible reasons as to why the goal could not be achieved in that 12- week timeframe.
The participants were asked to journal their thoughts and feelings whilst they were engaged in the goal pursuit and there were noted shifts from positive to negative emotions that were activated by immediate situations involving challenge, hardship or difficulty. My head hurts, my fingers are sore, my muscles ache were all common terms from the participants.
This experience was closely connected to the fact that fifteen of the twenty adults failed to achieve their goals in that 12- week timeframe.
The five individuals that did succeed activated strategies that served to control the effects of negative emotions.
The Findings?
Successful people do something distinctly different in their mind to those who don’t succeed.
There are four phases to any goal pursuit and we would be well served to learn the goal achievement process before learning how to set goals.
We walk around with a set of emotional scales constantly weighing things up and we will do whatever makes us feel better, including getting out of taking the action.
We will create an excuse, a justification and a rationale to get us out of the action and to make ourselves feel better about our choice.
How can you use this information to achieve more of your goals?