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OPINION: It is that time of year when many of us are setting goals for the coming year. The most common New Year’s resolution, set by 59 percent of us, is to exercise more.
But our research suggests that the way we normally set exercise goals often doesn’t work. So what should we do instead?
Our research interviewing elite athletes suggests that one possibility is setting open goals.
Specific goals can put us off
In general, we are advised to set specific or SMART goals (where SMART means specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound). Trying to walk 10,000 steps a day is a common example.
Fitsum Admasu / Unsplash
The problem is that specific goals are all or nothing: you either achieve the goal or you fail.
This advice is typically based on goal setting theory from the 1990s. However, that theory has now evolved, and research now suggests that specific goals in some cases can really put us off.
One problem is that specific goals are all or nothing: you either achieve the goal or you fail.
That’s why you may feel like you’ve failed after “only” logging 9,000 steps when your goal was 10,000. Actually, 9,000 steps can be an achievement (especially on a busy day), but since you didn’t reach your specific goal, it can be disappointing.
When you stop moving toward your goal, or start to feel like you’re failing, it’s easy to give up, just like many of us do with New Years resolutions.
Used incorrectly, specific goals even cause unethical behavior (such as using devices to artificially increase our step count and benefit from lower insurance premiums).
An alternative is to establish what is known as an open goal.
What are open goals?
Open goals are nonspecific and exploratory, often written with the goal of “seeing how well I can do it.” For example, professional golfers in one study described their best performance when they aimed to “see how many below par I can get.”
When my colleagues and I interviewed elite athletes about exceptional performances, a Mount Everest climber described how: “I was thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll see how it goes and I’ll take it as it comes.’ I climbed higher and higher and the climb had turned increasingly exciting, difficult and all-encompassing really. […] until I discovered that I had climbed about 40 meters without consciously knowing what I was doing. “
Open goals don’t just work for elite athletes, they work well in exercise too. One study found that insufficiently active people performed better (in this study, that meant they walked further) when pursuing open goals than with SMART goals.
The fitness industry is already starting to use open goals. For example, fitness brand Les Mills now recommends open goals (“to see how active you can be”), and the Apple Watch now incorporates open goals as a training option.
Psychological benefits of open goals
Open goals aren’t just good for performance, they’re also much more psychologically beneficial than SMART goals.
In fact, elite athletes who first reported open goals described how they were an important part of experiencing flow – the pleasant, rewarding state where everything seems to fall into place and we perform well without even having to think. On it.
Follow-up studies found that open goals, compared to SMART goals, make walking more enjoyable, make people feel more confident, and feel like they performed better. That increases motivation and suggests that open goals can help people stick with exercise routines for longer.
One participant said that open goals “removed the trauma of failure.”
Why do open goals work differently from SMART goals?
There is another important difference between open goals and SMART goals. When you set a SMART goal, you are identifying something in the future that you want to achieve (“I want to be able to walk 10,000 steps every day”).
So pursuing SMART goals is about bridging the gap between where you are now and where you want to be; You are always falling behind where you want to be. That can make you feel like your progress is slow and slow progress doesn’t feel right.
When you set an open goal, your focus is on your starting point. If your goal is to “see how many steps I can take today,” as you increase the number of steps, it will feel like you are making progress. You may start to think, “Oh, I’m already 2,000 steps … Now it’s 3,000 steps … Let’s see how many I can get to.”
Instead of comparing it to where it should be, you are constantly building on your starting point.
That makes the process so much more positive, and the more positive we feel during exercise, the more we want to do it over and over again.
To set your own open goals, first think about what you want to improve (for example, “be more active”). Then identify what you want to measure, such as your average daily step count.
State your goal in an open and exploratory way: “I want to see how high my daily step average can be by the end of the year.”
And then it starts! With an open goal, you’re more likely to see progress, enjoy the experience, and stick with it until you’re ready to set and achieve more specific goals.
– Christian Swann is Associate Professor of Psychology at Southern Cross University.
This story was first published in The Conversation.
