The Neuroscience of Goal Setting: How It Can Make or Break Your Year

Updated: Nov 28

Neuroscience For Entrepreneurs Series

Introduction to goal setting science

Can cognitive neuroscience and psychology make this the year you achieve your dreams? And can we apply lessons from scientific literature to create goals that push our limits and make us more productive? More effective goal setting will transform your year from average to exceptional.

Whatever new venture you are taking on over the next 12 months, there will undoubtedly be an end goal you are trying to reach - a target (or many) to aim for. That goal could be anything from starting your own business, securing the funding needed to reach a global customer base, to losing weight and keeping it off. No goal is too small or too big.

Why we, as humans, even need to set goals for ourselves reveals an interesting question. While part of us can be content with a peaceful and simple existence, another part needs to stride forwards into the unknown. In general, the pursuit of goals is driven by a necessity to do one or a combination of things, such as seeking out joy, altruism, necessity, or self-esteem [1], but there doesn’t have to be a strong reason why you want to achieve something more this year. The fact that you are here reading this article says a lot about you and your desire to push yourself further.

Goal setting is a vital part of our lives, and for entrepreneurs, it can be the difference between success and failure. Goals not only help us to understand and prioritise tasks we need to work through, but they help us focus our efforts and to promote a sustained behavioural change to our routine, thereby increasing our productivity and overall performance [2]. If you are anything like me, the start of the year brought a new set of goals, potential opportunities, and aspirations to be the best version of yourself. I am confident that more refined goal setting can make a difference for you this year.

Goal setting theory

Much of our understanding of the structure and relevance of creating goals comes from Goal Setting Theory by Locke and Latham [3]. Originally published in 1968, the theory states that if our goals are to be successful, then care needs to be taken to create goals which have three things: specificity, complexity, and difficulty. Specificity of goals aims to limit variability in performance by reducing ambiguity about what needs to be done to achieve them [3]. In fact, a study with nearly 3,000 people examined the difference in performance and goal achievement when many of the attributes of goal-setting were tested [5]. The researchers found a significant benefit when groups set highly specific goals compared with those who had general goals, such as ‘do better’ [5].

Complexity within each of our goals requires us to engage with them on multiple levels to learn and grow as we work towards them and develop new strategies to achieve them [3]. The more dedication you need for the goal, the more likely it is that you will push yourself towards an extraordinary performance and better overall achievement [6].

The goal difficulty is an important feature but one that may feel a little strange at first. The idea that challenging goals actually make them more achievable, not less, might require a little trust in the data at first [6]. Goals should be set at a difficulty level that feels just out of reach of what you are currently capable of and what you think you could reasonably achieve. This is because goal difficulty is impacted by something called the Yerkes-Doson Law. Proposed in 1908 by two psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, it describes the relationship between stress and task performance. Essentially, most of us work at our optimal level when we are under some form of stress and time pressure, especially when we find the tasks exciting and engaging. Too little stress, such as an easy goal we set for ourselves, and we are prone to boredom and distraction. Too much stress and we can feel overwhelmed, rushed, and anxious about how we can manage everything. Interestingly, the very act of goal setting itself improves performance under potentially stressful situations, particularly under time pressure [7]. If you have a deadline, then breaking down your to-do list into manageable targets, and setting yourself smaller deadlines for each, will provide short-term goal setting on a day-to-day basis.

The difficulty of our goals will be personal to everyone, and it is a balancing act between achieving goals and success and not reaching them because they were too challenging. In this instance, even missing specific goals may elevate you to a level greater than if you achieved all of them. Personal experiences, individual differences in motivation, determination, and general outlook will all factor into how you create your own goals.

Creating meaningful goals can lead to impressive benefits, as shown in a 2017 study of 16,500 people demonstrating improved performance and productivity by using goal setting [4]; however, there is something else that has to be considered - timing.

Different timeframes for different goals

Think about what you want to accomplish this year. It may be something outstanding and brilliant, but it will take time to achieve. If that is the case, then it has to be broken down into several smaller goals, which all contribute to the ultimate success. To ensure goals are complex, specific, and difficult, they should be categorised into short, medium, and long-term goals. Each category will fulfill the above criteria in a slightly different way. Short term goals will be very specific but not necessarily complex or difficult. They should help you to feel productive and create a sense of forward momentum that will impact the overall success of your other goals. They would fall into your typical to-do list for the day or week. They probably won’t be difficult or complex, but they might have to be sometimes.

Medium-term goals, on the other hand, will likely incorporate all of the features of goal setting theory. They can be structured to occur at the end of each month or even every 3-6 months. Interestingly, you don’t need to hit every goal you set for yourself. Of course, nobody wants to feel like they failed to achieve something they set out to do, but missing the mark just a little, creates goals difficult enough to be just out of reach of what we are capable of. With this in mind, aim for an 80-90% success rate. If you achieve everything you wanted in that 3-6 months, you should set your goals even higher than you currently rate.

Finally, the long-term goals. They should be challenging and complex enough that the goal can be broken down into more manageable chunks (which would then create the short and medium goals), with long-term goals set every 6-12 months. They don’t need to be the final goal you have created for yourself (which may or may not take multiple years), but they should be designed to make sizeable progress toward that ultimate goal and future you have planned. Long-term goals should be challenging enough that you achieve at least 70% of them. When you don’t complete all of them, feedback sessions will be vital for reviewing and amending future goals. Why? Because goal setting is a process of regularly updating and evaluating, it must be flexible and fluid.

a man atop a mountain having achieved his goals

Why do we need to create multiple timeframes for our goals?

It is essential to break goals into more manageable ones, especially when they are long-term and ambitious. Let us say that your ultimate goal is to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company (let’s dream big, why not?). That initial goal is relatively easy to imagine; it takes only a few seconds, but what steps and milestones are needed to get you there? How many can you think of right now? A few, perhaps? In all likelihood, hundreds, if not thousands, of steps are needed before you reach that point. Each of those steps is a goal. Naturally, some are short-term easy goals that can be achieved in a day or probably in the next 30 minutes. Maybe there are ten things you need to complete within the week to get you one step closer towards the top spot. Those ten tasks will allow you to reach a short-term goal at the end of the week. Now, let us say that ten of those short-term goals (so, ten weeks from the initial starting point) will let you reach a milestone. You will have moved the needle enough that those around you can see a small step in progress. This would be a medium-term goal. Ten more medium-term goals, and you have made a lunge forward. This is your long-term goal. That fictional long-term goal takes around two years. How many of those goals are needed before you reach the CEO of your fortune 500 company?

Sure, these numbers are pretty arbitrary and might don’t stack up to much critiquing, but they do demonstrate a point. We need to break down goals, then break them down further, and then once again. Rather than look at the long journey ahead towards your ultimate target, we can achieve other types of goals in the meantime. This is essential for two significant reasons:

1: It is unlikely that we will know every step we need to take, even if our long-term goal feels simple. This is never more true than when you are attempting to break new ground where there isn’t a blueprint from someone who has done the same or similar before you. By achieving smaller goals, they can inform us of the larger ones we need to aim for. We only get there by working on these important smaller goals, which build our progress like bricks in a wall. You might see a castle as tall as a mountain, but I guarantee you that it was built one brick at a time. A research study looking at nearly 6,000 people using goal-setting to improve their commitment and performance in a task found significant benefits [8] and demonstrated that combining short-term and long-term goals were most effective for increasing performance and overall benefit.

2: Our motivation remains high because we are constantly pressing forwards and achieving something every day. This motivation is vital because, and I feel strongly about this, goals only become achievable from small, consistent moments of hard work, which requires a motivated and determined effort. Short term goals can also improve performance, which feeds back to motivation. A recent study looked at basketball players of all skill levels and their ability to make free throws. In different scenarios, they were timed for 30 seconds, untimed, or were told their previous record and were tasked with beating it [7]. The study demonstrated how short-term goals (in this instance, very short-term) significantly improved their performance.

Variability

In addition to the target length of each goal, it is essential to incorporate variety into the tasks that comprise each goal. For example, if you want to learn a new language, having goals that improve vocabulary and nothing else (such as grammar, reading, and listening skills) will slow progress and create a more boring routine. It doesn’t matter how invested we are in a project, many of the tasks we need to do in order to progress can often be mundane. If we can keep variety in our schedule and maintain interest and motivation, then it can impact overall goal success.

Rewards

When we can learn to associate achieving set goals not just with professional recognition from friends and peers but also with enjoyment for the achievement, then we can utilise our brain’s natural reward pathway. It can train our brain to find additional joy from completing tasks thanks to dopamine and our reward pathway, and it also allows us to take a break and look back on how well we are progressing rather than focus on how much further we need to go. Recognising the achievements of reaching short-term or medium-term goals is also a powerful method to increase overall long-term achievement and self-belief. We can also utilise this reward pathway by taking a moment for ourselves when we achieve (or even miss) a goal. All work and no play isn’t going to be as productive as you think. Take the time to treat yourself to a night out with friends, a restaurant meal, or simply a relaxing evening with a movie. Knowing that rewards are coming at the end of the week or month can incentivise us to work harder to feel that we have earned them.

A woman standing with arms crossed after achieving her goals and proud of it

Feedback

I touched on this topic earlier in the article, but I want to add more detail in this final part. Goal setting is an ongoing process of trial and error, and we need to have moments with the year where we stop and understand the reasons we achieved the goals and why we missed some of them (again, aim high with your goals so that some of them will be very difficult to achieve with a 100% success rate).

Holding regular feedback sessions with yourself that are geared towards tailoring future goals also allows us to attribute success and failure to specific reasons [3]. We can then decide if we want to keep the things that are working for us and change the things that are not. A meta-analysis examining multiple studies incorporating feedback sessions into peoples goal setting format revealed a substantial benefit to overall performance amongst different goals and goal difficulty, compared to groups that didn’t have any feedback [9]. In general, this stems from a framework by Dr. Bernard Weiner, who described his Attribution Theory [10]. Attribution theory indicates a person’s natural tendency to attribute success and failure to specific factors and how they subsequently impact future behaviour and motivation. Success tends to be credited to personal qualities and effort, whereas failure tends to be attributed to situations that are out of our control [11]. Be aware of framing missed goals in this way because neuroscience also tells us that learning from both outcomes can influence motivation and performance, subsequently driving our expectations in future goals [6,10,12]. If we attribute failures to factors outside our control, they can be difficult to learn lessons from and improve in the future. While there are always factors outside of our control, I would suggest that feedback sessions are used to look at factors that we can control, especially regarding our habits and behaviours, both for goals that were achieved and goals that we missed. We can always use this feedback for extra motivation for the next set of goals we create for ourselves. We don’t need to be perfect, and that is ok.

Finally, my last point does not come from the scientific literature but from the heart. Whatever challenge you have set for yourself, whatever goal you want to achieve, and whatever dream you are reading for, enjoy the process. Enjoy achieving them, and try to focus on the things that bring you joy. No matter your goals, there will always be difficult times ahead, but achieving your goals, big or small, is an accomplishment that shows the world how incredible you are.