Pushkin. So the problem with unrealistic goals is that we get discouraged. If we perceive that the goal is completely unrealistic, then we give up and we walk much less than if we set a more realistic but motivating goal. So the whisky is that will just say, ah, that's never going to happen, and therefore I should do absolutely nothing about it. Doctor Yellette Fishbach is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago and it's the author of the best selling book Get It Done. Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. She spent decades studying how we can get better at not only setting the right goals for our selves, but also sticking with them. One of her strategies is to think carefully about what we reward ourselves for when we're trying to reach a goal. Often we reward what is easy to measure. Okay, so we might reward ourselves for how many hours we set in front of our computer, but not really on whether we were productive, whether we did work that gets us somewhere. Maybe we were just answering emails and kind of killing time, but we did work for many hours. But really we should care more about the quality. On today's show, we learned about the science of motivation so that we can set smarter goals and actually reach them. I'm Maya Shankar and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. I've known Ielt since I was a post doc studying the science of decision making, and her research has had a big personal impact on me. I was eager to have her on the show because motivation is a key ingredient in successfully changing our lives, and her science based strategies can help us think differently about how we set goals and how we ought to pursue them. So let's start with the basics. How should we define our goals? You talk about traps that we can fall into when it comes to setting our goals, and one of those is when we unintentionally define our goals to feel more like chores than like aspirations. Yes it, chores are the things that we need to do so that we can achieve our goals, and often we define the goal in terms of the shore. So we might, for example, define our goal in terms of applying for a job instead of getting a job stead of having a career. Applying for a job for most people is no fun. Going on a date it gave for many people, that's not really fun. That's a joke, okay. The goal is to find someone. The goal is to start a relationship, and so defining that the goal on the level that is exciting, that identifies what you want to achieve, is important. Don't make it too obstruct A goal that doesn't have any action that is connected to it gave. If someone says my goal is to be happy and they cannot name the actions that will make them happy, then this is not useful either. But there is this like sweet spot between something that is exciting that defines where you want to be, not necessarily what you need to do in order to get there, but it's nevertheless connected to these actions. And whereas that sweet spot exactly, it depends on many factors. But there are two different types of questions you can ask yourself that will pull you in different directions and help you find that balance why questions and how questions. So to get yourself to think more abstractly about your goals, you need to ask many why questions, like I want to sign up for JIM membership. Why Okay, because I want to start running? Why because I want to be healthier? And so on, And every why question makes you a bit more abstruct. Now stop with the why on the level where it's no longer really connected to action. Okay. So when you ask people why and why and why, eventually they give you something very because I exist, Yeah, exactly, exactly, because I must still the time that I have on this earth. Yes, and that's not useful at this point. Okay. And if you feel that you are already up there in the sky and this is not really useful, then you ask the how questions. You know, I want to be happy, like how, okay, well you know I want to have a relationship, Well you know how, Well I'm going to start meeting more people. Well, how I'm going to call my friend who knows many people and so on. A Yelle's research shows that the way we frame our goals can have a big impact on motivation. There are what she calls approach goals or do goals. For example, I want to eat healthier foods or I want to excel at my job, which are all about striving towards a good outcome, And then there are avoidance goals or do not goals like I do not want to get sick or I want to avoid getting fired, which are all about trying to avoid a bad outcome, and I yell. It says that whether reframe things in one way versus the other can some times just depend on the kind of person we are. Is there a question we can ask ourselves to figure out if we are more approach versus avoidance oriented. You can ask what drives you in life? Are you the kind of person that is worried about doing the wrong thing? Okay, that is a concern about trying out something that doesn't work. Are you concern about messing up? I'm going back to dating because I think this is actually illustrates this really well. Like when you think about finding someone in your life, are you thinking about approaching relationship or are you thinking about avoiding being lonely? How what feels right to you in your mind when you think about this goal. By the way, there is really a nice research joint that when people feel that they have power, the same goal will come to their mind more in terms of approaching than avoiding. Can you give me an example of what what you mean by having power, think about the work when you're meeting with your employee versus your boss, Okay, And often that changes in a manner of just you know, a few minutes. In one meeting, you are the person in power. You are the big boss, and I don't know, maya, maybe you're always the big boss, but I'm not, so I'm not either, Okay. So then you go to another meeting and you are, you know, the person that sits there quietly, and everybody else has more power. And in the first situation, when you are the boss, you are more likely to think about your work in terms of opportunities, and in the second setting, you're more likely to think about your job in terms of maybe opportunities to mess up. How do I not say the wrong thing? As opposed to what can I say that might be a useful it might move this forward. So so you've said that we just to summarize, you've said that that there can be these different environments that invoke our do goals and then other environments that invoke our do not goals. And then in addition to that, there are individual differences that can lead us towards one direction or the other. What would you recommend that we go with as as a default option as we're as we're going about our daily lives, and I'm you know, I've just read your book, I've just listened to this podcast, and I'm like, you know, I might have these proclivities, but maybe I should be reframing my goal in a certain way. Approach goals. Do goals are better than do not. The reason is because avoidance goals tend to be chores, and approach goals tend to be fun and exciting and often more intrinsically motivating. And so unless you really you need to protect your life, you need to do something to just making sure that you are safe in the short term. I mean, in which case avoidance framing fits use approach, Yeah, exactly. I think it's also important to note that our emotional responses to failure can be different when we framed our goals in terms of approach versus avoidant. Right, So when we achieve something that we're approaching, we can be filled with feelings of pride and accomplishment and fulfillment when we when we achieve a do not goal, right, um or I don't even know it's if you can call it achieving a do not goal. It kind of sounds a little bit odd. But when we when we um we don't have the thing happened to us, right, we feel feelings of relief and calm and relaxation like oh, you know, the swiping of the forehead, right, like the few thank god that didn't happen. When you are trying to avoid something and you successfully avoiding it, then you are in a way satisfied that you don't have the negative experience that you would have if you could not avoid it. Okay, So it's the absence of negative. Basically, in posuitive avoidance goals, often there is either negative if you fail, or the absence of negative, which is if you are successful with a bit of you know this relief that laculia, I'm not feeling horrible, right, Yeah. And it's also striking me right now that it's really hard to measure the absence of an activity and absence of an action, right. So a lot of times when you frame something in terms of avoidance, are you really keeping track of every time you avoided the chocolate cake, every time you avoided you know, the tempting option. That's just hard to measure, right, And so it can feel less motivating because you just have less signal about how much progress you're making. There's less to hold onto. That's why, for example, I'm such a that I've always I'm always telling everyone in my life you could probably cleanness about me. But I'm a superaction oriented person and so when the action item is to like wait or abstain from things, I really struggle. That's that's my weak point. You're not the only one, okay. When you're trying to avoid something, you're constantly checking whether you're avoiding it and by that bringing it back to mind. Yeah, when it comes to setting our goals, one topic that I loved reading about in your book was about the importance of who is setting the goal. And the reason that's particularly consonant with this show a slight change of plans is that we're often talking about the role of agency right in making choices and projecting things about the future and reflecting back on how our changes have affected us. And you say that when we own our own targets right, we're way better at executing on them and we're more likely to stay motivated. And I just, I mean, I guess I just love the research on agency in general because it just reinforces how much we love being the driver's seat, you know, metaphorically, and then when we own that process, we're more likely to stay the course. Yes, absolutely, and we know that for many years that people really need to have control over their lives and need to feel that they are in control when negative outcomes happen, and we all have negative outcomes. When you feel that it's outside of your control, that the world is cruel and it's nothing to do with how you behave this is much more problematic than when you experience that you do have control and nevertheless had the same and negative outcomes. On top of it, when other people set the goal for you, that brings react and stand. You know, you feel like they are controlling you. You want to argue with them, you resent them for demanding certain things from you, and and owning your goals is not just good for you psychologically, it also helps achieving these goals. You're less likely to have these two minds. Yeah, I will do this maya because you ask me, But I also resent the fact that you ask me, and so I'm not going to do my best. Yeah, and I like that, do you know? Obviously a lot of us don't get to control all of the goals that are set for us. Right, we have jobs, we have responsibilities. As you mentioned your book, we might be working with a coach of some sort, but what you've recommended is that at a minimum, that person might be able to give us a set of options from which to choose. Right. So, if you're working with a personal trainer, let's say they can give you Okay, you can do you know, the StairMaster or the elliptical, or we can lift weights. Right, and it's just the idea of Okay, here's the option set that I know will help you thrive. But you can still choose, choose among those options. Yes, yeah, ask for options, ask for alternative ways to pursue your goals so that you you do get some sense of control. Yeah, it's making me think that I should tell my husband, Jimmy in the future. Okay, Jimmy, here's the option set. Unloading the dishwasher, loading the dishwasher, taking out the trash, your choice, buddy, But one of these is going to be accompanied with more motivation. I love it. See you're helping on motivation. You're helping, you know, marital relationships. This is fantastic. Yeah, you know, we didn't even get to relationship. Ye. Yeah, we haven't gone there yet. Okay, So I want to wrap up this part of the conversation where we're talking about how to better set goals with my favorite recommendation from you, which is to make sure that we're setting our goals when we're in a similar psychological and physiological state as the one will will be in ultimately when we are actually striving for that goal. And I mean, this is just this is such smart advice because of course our aspirational selves can can race away from us and say, oh yeah, I can totally imagine eating salad for every single meal, or you know, in work, adopting a totally new set of habits. But what you said is no, Actually to have a little bit of a temperature check and to ground your goals in reality. Make sure that you're actually at work when you're setting those goals, or if you're thinking about healthier eating, make the goals when you are totally fal and it's easy to say that you're always going to be able to eat the healthier option versus you know, the unhealthy one. Yeah, well you summarize it beautifully, so one reason for this is the empathy gap is our tendency not to be very empathetic to our future selves. And so you know, when we plan our career transition, we think that this future person that we are going to be is going to wake up at six am, start walking at seven am, right, and walk until they get dinner and go to sleep, and so that person is going to accomplish a lot. The problem is that that person is going to be us, and so that person will be baled or tired and everything else, and the empathy gap, it's just very how to overcome. If you set your goals when you're in a similar state, that helps you being more empathy addicted to this person that will have to follow through with the goals and the danger lives and if you don't do this and setting unreasonable goals and then basically jumping ship when you when you find that it's it's not even within the realm of of you know, practical life to be able to do those things right. It's so the problem with unrealistic goals is that we get discouraged. Usually we don't really care about the specific target that we set. We care about setting a goal so that we are motivated right so that we want to walk hard. But if we perceive that the goal is completely unrealistic, then we give up and we walk much less than if we set a more realistic but motivating goals. So the risk is that will just say, ah, that's never going to happen, and therefore I should do absolutely nothing about it. After the break, I will share how we can use science based strategies to sustain our motivation as we make progress towards our goals. We'll be right back with a slight change of plans. So you've taught us a lot about how we can better set our goals, and now I'd love to talk about how we can sustain our motivation to make progress on those goals. And the first step in doing this is just to get your foot in the door period right to begin the activity. And you've talked about how important that first step is because it can lead to almost a disproportionate impact on motivation in the longer term. Do you mind sharing more about that. The difference between CEO and one steps is huge, and that means that people are usually very enthusiastic when they start something, and we can help ourselves maintain this commitment or you know, I help others and stay committed by looking back by notice that we already took the first step. Okay, so taking that first step can give us the boost we need to stay in the game. It signals to our brains that we care about the goal and that we've taken at least one step towards achieving it. But there's an additional challenge that lies ahead. Research shows we often have trouble sustaining this motivation as we pursue our goals. Our motivation often flags as we approach the halfway point, what eyel It calls the middle problem. You have high motivation at the beginning and high motivation at the end, but then there is the middle, and the middle is when your motivation is usually lower, both in terms of doing the thing and also in terms of doing it right. Okay, so we see that people are less likely to engage, but they're also going to relax their performance standards. People are not going to do such a good job. Okay. We did the study in which we gave people a bunch of shapes on the a piece of paper and they had to cut them with just a pair of scissors. And like the first shape they cut, well, the last shape they cut whale in the middle, they were literally cutting corners. I love that. So they were literally relaxing their performance standards. You know, studies on cheating they found that, you know, if people ever cheat, they are not going to do this on the first time. Okay, they're going to do it more towards the middle, and so we walk less hard in the middle. We also don't do such a great job. So what can we do to address this dreaded middle problem? You can actually get rid of middles yet exist. Yeah, no middles. No, Well, we need to have middles, but we can keep them short. Either. An annual goal might be a monthly goal. So instead of saving money this year, I think about saving money this month. An exercising goal could be a weekly exercising goal. And if you if you might have a weekly exercising goal, I'm pretty sure that you will have another weekly exercising goal next week. Right, you're not going to really get to the end of this goal. But by defining it more nearly, by setting sub goals, we can fight these middles. We can also remind ourselves that our identity is Let's take a more identity, remind us thinking that whatever we do reflect on who we are as a person is helping us do a good job. Is there an example a lot of you, you know, shortening the middle or refraining things in your life to try to get around the middle problem. Well, I do try not to think about the full time in which I will see you a goal. So every research project it takes years, but I really try to think about what I'm going to do this quarter. So the middle is really short. And every quarter we start in my lab by just telling each other what are the goals that we are going to pursue for this period of time and what needs to be completed. Okay, So when it comes to when it comes to sustaining our motivation, and obvious natural place for us to dive in is to talk about one driver or motivation, which is incentives. Right. Yes, I think about incentives as mini goals. Okay. What we find is that it's really critical to incentivize the white thing. Okay, so not a proxy, not something that is just easy to measure. But do you mind getting us an example of what it means to reward the quote right thing? Yes, what does it mean to reward the right thing. Often we reward what is easy to measure. Okay, so we might reward ourselves for how many hours we set in front of our computer, but not really on whether we were productive, whether we did work that gets us somewhere. Maybe we were just answering emails and kind of killing time, but we did work for many hours. When we incentivize others, we sometimes incentivize them for doing things very quickly, but really we should care more about the quality. Another piece of advice eile It has when it comes to staying motivated is sometimes turn to ourselves for advice. In a study eile It ran, she identified people who were struggling to achieve a specific goal. They were then asked to share their own advice for how to reach that goal, or they were given advice from an expert, and then researchers measured had these two different sources of advice affected motivation levels, and what they found was really surprising. So we asked unemployed people to give advice on how to get a job. We ask people who said that they are struggling with being angry to give advice on how to control you anger. People were more motivated by their own advice than by the advice that we have given them, which with though was really interesting because it suggested when when you just increase your confidence, So when you just remind yourself of how much you know, okay, like you remind yourself that you're the expert and get confident as a result, then you are motivated to do something about it. Yeah, can we can we take in a little bit more into the mechanism that's at play here. I was in particular interested in people who are struggling. So the people who when I asked them to give advice, they've started by saying, why would you ask me? Like what do I know? Obviously I'm like, I don't know what they said? Why would you ask me about dieting? And you know, I didn't have a conversation with most of them. But the people that I didn't have a conversation with, I was saying, you are you kidding me? Like you know more than other people because you were struggling with this, Okay, like you've learned. You've been doing it now for a while. You try things and maybe they didn't work, and so you learn, Okay, some things did work for you. You learn from those too. And it turned out that when people are willing to go beyond this first reaction of what do I know? Okay, obviously I'm not doing it very well, they realize that they have a lot of knowledge. This memory search brings to mind the things that they do know. Often it brings to mind the lessons that they learn from failures. But there is such an amazing knowledge that comes from trying something and realizing that it doesn't work. However, you need to think hard and identify these lessons. So they find these lessons. And then the last thing that it does is just that build a confidence because hey, I ask you for advice, so I think that you are the expert you know, and when someone tells you that you are the expert, you feel like you know a lot. Yeah. So, so one antagonist for sustaining motivation, UM, as we're trying to pursue our goals is failure. Right are the setbacks that we face? And how can we think differently about about failure or learn from failure so that we can we can stay the course. I'm so glad that you ask, because I think that we both our passion is in learning from a failure. Might try Son told media the day that I'm the expert on failure, and I love that. Hey that's a great that's a good cop, I thought. So it's then when you realize that his mother knows something about failing. So yeah, so it's really hard to learn from failure. It's unintuitive, and it's just how do to learn what to do from what not to do? It's actually, it turns out that it's easier to learn from other people's failures. So in our task where we just have like the really usually just two options, there is a correct answer and there though it's an incorrect answer, And if you look at someone else choosing the incorrect answer, you do learn the correct answer more than if you yourself guess the incorrect answer. Is that because emotion and ego aren't clouding the situation exactly, okay, exactly because if you chose the wrong answer or you're upset, yeah, just busy with managing your emotions. When you look at me choosing the wrong answer, you're not upset, You're just learning. Okay. Of course, the problem is that we don't tend to share our failure with other people, so you might not know about all the ways in which I failed because I'm not telling you about it. Yeah, that's your chance mail it, have the whole platform. I'm just kidding. I'm not gonna make you an unfailure lane. No, but I love that, And it also shows that you know, when we when we are when we structure our lives around trying to achieve goals with others, it does create an open space for us to share failures and successes because you're getting exposure to other people's journeys day in and day out. Right. I mean, if I have a running buddy in the very theoretical world in which I ran aail it um, you know, I might see the days that they don't show up for running because they're having low motivation, or you know, you pull back the curtain and you get the unglamorous look into how other people are working to perceive their goals. I agree, and I would say that people do not share their failures, so it's not easy to get it from them, like we we looked at it in many studies. To give you an example, we asked teachers to tell us one success doe in one fellow story and then anonymously share with another teacher the one of these stories Okay, so the story that you think has a better lesson. Okay, almost everyone share the success story. Yeah, wouldn't it be so great if the last three lines of your CV were all the things that you tried and sucked at or failed at. Right, So it's like, ah, here's the highlights reel. But Baya never became the Bollywood dancer that she wanted to become when she was in high school. She never became the singer songwriter that she wanted to become when she was in college, right, because she had no aptitude for singing. And so it would be really wonderful to hear a slightly more unfiltered story from people about the broad range of things they've tried in their life and then have not succeeded at. Cannot agree more. You know how everybody got accepted to their amazing college. I know, it's remarkable. We're at one hundred percent hit rate. Yeah, despite the fact that all these colleges tell us that they reject most candidates. You know, no one was ever rejected that I know. I've never heard of someone rejected from college. Absolutely, not myself included. Because people are so hesitant to share their failures with one another, and because I let knows there's so much we can learn from doing so, she's been on a mission to help encourage this behavior. As we wrapped up our conversation, she shared that someone reached out to her about an event where failure takes center stage. People are encouraged to shout from the rooftops about all the times they didn't get it right. People are talking about projects that they tried and failed, or just personal failures, just like I'm going on a stage in front of people and talking about what went wrong and trying to understand what the lesson in the person started this try and for which me and I told me that my research was part of the inspiration for these nights, and I felt very good about that. Hey, thanks for listening. On next week's episode, our season finale, we hear the story of a Theronos whistleblower, Erica Chung. Erica knew something was very wrong at the company, and even though she had a lot to lose by speaking out, she saw no other option. Honestly, the idea of knowing what I knew and having not done anything, and knowing that there was something that I could have done about it, and I didn't do anything like that's the real prison. That's the real purgatory. A Slight Change of Plans is created written an executive produce by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change Family includes Tyler Green our senior producer, Emily Rostak, our producer and fact checker, Jan Guera, our senior editor, Ben Tolliday, our sound engineer, and Mia LaBelle our executive producer. Louis Skara wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries. So big thanks to everyone there, including Nicolemrano, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Heather Fame and Carly Nigliori, and of course of very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. How I became the expert of failure. So my son was struggling with his video game like he had like tears in his eyes. He was super frustrated. He felt like the challenge that he will never be able to to do. And then he asked that I will come and sit next to him, and my daughter was saying Wow, but I sit next to you, I actually know something about video games, like mom doesn't know anything. And he said that despite the fact that I am not very useful in terms of the knowledge that I have about video games, I'm the expert on failure and he really prefers to fail next to me because I will make him feel good.

Pushkin. So the problem with unrealistic goals is that we get discouraged. If we perceive that the goal is completely unrealistic, then we give up and we walk much less than if we set a more realistic but motivating goal. So the whisky is that will just say, ah, that's never going to happen, and therefore I should do absolutely nothing about it. Doctor Yellette Fishbach is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago and it's the author of the best selling book Get It Done. Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. She spent decades studying how we can get better at not only setting the right goals for our selves, but also sticking with them. One of her strategies is to think carefully about what we reward ourselves for when we're trying to reach a goal. Often we reward what is easy to measure. Okay, so we might reward ourselves for how many hours we set in front of our computer, but not really on whether we were productive, whether we did work that gets us somewhere. Maybe we were just answering emails and kind of killing time, but we did work for many hours. But really we should care more about the quality. On today's show, we learned about the science of motivation so that we can set smarter goals and actually reach them. I'm Maya Shankar and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. I've known Ielt since I was a post doc studying the science of decision making, and her research has had a big personal impact on me. I was eager to have her on the show because motivation is a key ingredient in successfully changing our lives, and her science based strategies can help us think differently about how we set goals and how we ought to pursue them. So let's start with the basics. How should we define our goals? You talk about traps that we can fall into when it comes to setting our goals, and one of those is when we unintentionally define our goals to feel more like chores than like aspirations. Yes it, chores are the things that we need to do so that we can achieve our goals, and often we define the goal in terms of the shore. So we might, for example, define our goal in terms of applying for a job instead of getting a job stead of having a career. Applying for a job for most people is no fun. Going on a date it gave for many people, that's not really fun. That's a joke, okay. The goal is to find someone. The goal is to start a relationship, and so defining that the goal on the level that is exciting, that identifies what you want to achieve, is important. Don't make it too obstruct A goal that doesn't have any action that is connected to it gave. If someone says my goal is to be happy and they cannot name the actions that will make them happy, then this is not useful either. But there is this like sweet spot between something that is exciting that defines where you want to be, not necessarily what you need to do in order to get there, but it's nevertheless connected to these actions. And whereas that sweet spot exactly, it depends on many factors. But there are two different types of questions you can ask yourself that will pull you in different directions and help you find that balance why questions and how questions. So to get yourself to think more abstractly about your goals, you need to ask many why questions, like I want to sign up for JIM membership. Why Okay, because I want to start running? Why because I want to be healthier? And so on, And every why question makes you a bit more abstruct. Now stop with the why on the level where it's no longer really connected to action. Okay. So when you ask people why and why and why, eventually they give you something very because I exist, Yeah, exactly, exactly, because I must still the time that I have on this earth. Yes, and that's not useful at this point. Okay. And if you feel that you are already up there in the sky and this is not really useful, then you ask the how questions. You know, I want to be happy, like how, okay, well you know I want to have a relationship, Well you know how, Well I'm going to start meeting more people. Well, how I'm going to call my friend who knows many people and so on. A Yelle's research shows that the way we frame our goals can have a big impact on motivation. There are what she calls approach goals or do goals. For example, I want to eat healthier foods or I want to excel at my job, which are all about striving towards a good outcome, And then there are avoidance goals or do not goals like I do not want to get sick or I want to avoid getting fired, which are all about trying to avoid a bad outcome, and I yell. It says that whether reframe things in one way versus the other can some times just depend on the kind of person we are. Is there a question we can ask ourselves to figure out if we are more approach versus avoidance oriented. You can ask what drives you in life? Are you the kind of person that is worried about doing the wrong thing? Okay, that is a concern about trying out something that doesn't work. Are you concern about messing up? I'm going back to dating because I think this is actually illustrates this really well. Like when you think about finding someone in your life, are you thinking about approaching relationship or are you thinking about avoiding being lonely? How what feels right to you in your mind when you think about this goal. By the way, there is really a nice research joint that when people feel that they have power, the same goal will come to their mind more in terms of approaching than avoiding. Can you give me an example of what what you mean by having power, think about the work when you're meeting with your employee versus your boss, Okay, And often that changes in a manner of just you know, a few minutes. In one meeting, you are the person in power. You are the big boss, and I don't know, maya, maybe you're always the big boss, but I'm not, so I'm not either, Okay. So then you go to another meeting and you are, you know, the person that sits there quietly, and everybody else has more power. And in the first situation, when you are the boss, you are more likely to think about your work in terms of opportunities, and in the second setting, you're more likely to think about your job in terms of maybe opportunities to mess up. How do I not say the wrong thing? As opposed to what can I say that might be a useful it might move this forward. So so you've said that we just to summarize, you've said that that there can be these different environments that invoke our do goals and then other environments that invoke our do not goals. And then in addition to that, there are individual differences that can lead us towards one direction or the other. What would you recommend that we go with as as a default option as we're as we're going about our daily lives, and I'm you know, I've just read your book, I've just listened to this podcast, and I'm like, you know, I might have these proclivities, but maybe I should be reframing my goal in a certain way. Approach goals. Do goals are better than do not. The reason is because avoidance goals tend to be chores, and approach goals tend to be fun and exciting and often more intrinsically motivating. And so unless you really you need to protect your life, you need to do something to just making sure that you are safe in the short term. I mean, in which case avoidance framing fits use approach, Yeah, exactly. I think it's also important to note that our emotional responses to failure can be different when we framed our goals in terms of approach versus avoidant. Right, So when we achieve something that we're approaching, we can be filled with feelings of pride and accomplishment and fulfillment when we when we achieve a do not goal, right, um or I don't even know it's if you can call it achieving a do not goal. It kind of sounds a little bit odd. But when we when we um we don't have the thing happened to us, right, we feel feelings of relief and calm and relaxation like oh, you know, the swiping of the forehead, right, like the few thank god that didn't happen. When you are trying to avoid something and you successfully avoiding it, then you are in a way satisfied that you don't have the negative experience that you would have if you could not avoid it. Okay, So it's the absence of negative. Basically, in posuitive avoidance goals, often there is either negative if you fail, or the absence of negative, which is if you are successful with a bit of you know this relief that laculia, I'm not feeling horrible, right, Yeah. And it's also striking me right now that it's really hard to measure the absence of an activity and absence of an action, right. So a lot of times when you frame something in terms of avoidance, are you really keeping track of every time you avoided the chocolate cake, every time you avoided you know, the tempting option. That's just hard to measure, right, And so it can feel less motivating because you just have less signal about how much progress you're making. There's less to hold onto. That's why, for example, I'm such a that I've always I'm always telling everyone in my life you could probably cleanness about me. But I'm a superaction oriented person and so when the action item is to like wait or abstain from things, I really struggle. That's that's my weak point. You're not the only one, okay. When you're trying to avoid something, you're constantly checking whether you're avoiding it and by that bringing it back to mind. Yeah, when it comes to setting our goals, one topic that I loved reading about in your book was about the importance of who is setting the goal. And the reason that's particularly consonant with this show a slight change of plans is that we're often talking about the role of agency right in making choices and projecting things about the future and reflecting back on how our changes have affected us. And you say that when we own our own targets right, we're way better at executing on them and we're more likely to stay motivated. And I just, I mean, I guess I just love the research on agency in general because it just reinforces how much we love being the driver's seat, you know, metaphorically, and then when we own that process, we're more likely to stay the course. Yes, absolutely, and we know that for many years that people really need to have control over their lives and need to feel that they are in control when negative outcomes happen, and we all have negative outcomes. When you feel that it's outside of your control, that the world is cruel and it's nothing to do with how you behave this is much more problematic than when you experience that you do have control and nevertheless had the same and negative outcomes. On top of it, when other people set the goal for you, that brings react and stand. You know, you feel like they are controlling you. You want to argue with them, you resent them for demanding certain things from you, and and owning your goals is not just good for you psychologically, it also helps achieving these goals. You're less likely to have these two minds. Yeah, I will do this maya because you ask me, But I also resent the fact that you ask me, and so I'm not going to do my best. Yeah, and I like that, do you know? Obviously a lot of us don't get to control all of the goals that are set for us. Right, we have jobs, we have responsibilities. As you mentioned your book, we might be working with a coach of some sort, but what you've recommended is that at a minimum, that person might be able to give us a set of options from which to choose. Right. So, if you're working with a personal trainer, let's say they can give you Okay, you can do you know, the StairMaster or the elliptical, or we can lift weights. Right, and it's just the idea of Okay, here's the option set that I know will help you thrive. But you can still choose, choose among those options. Yes, yeah, ask for options, ask for alternative ways to pursue your goals so that you you do get some sense of control. Yeah, it's making me think that I should tell my husband, Jimmy in the future. Okay, Jimmy, here's the option set. Unloading the dishwasher, loading the dishwasher, taking out the trash, your choice, buddy, But one of these is going to be accompanied with more motivation. I love it. See you're helping on motivation. You're helping, you know, marital relationships. This is fantastic. Yeah, you know, we didn't even get to relationship. Ye. Yeah, we haven't gone there yet. Okay, So I want to wrap up this part of the conversation where we're talking about how to better set goals with my favorite recommendation from you, which is to make sure that we're setting our goals when we're in a similar psychological and physiological state as the one will will be in ultimately when we are actually striving for that goal. And I mean, this is just this is such smart advice because of course our aspirational selves can can race away from us and say, oh yeah, I can totally imagine eating salad for every single meal, or you know, in work, adopting a totally new set of habits. But what you said is no, Actually to have a little bit of a temperature check and to ground your goals in reality. Make sure that you're actually at work when you're setting those goals, or if you're thinking about healthier eating, make the goals when you are totally fal and it's easy to say that you're always going to be able to eat the healthier option versus you know, the unhealthy one. Yeah, well you summarize it beautifully, so one reason for this is the empathy gap is our tendency not to be very empathetic to our future selves. And so you know, when we plan our career transition, we think that this future person that we are going to be is going to wake up at six am, start walking at seven am, right, and walk until they get dinner and go to sleep, and so that person is going to accomplish a lot. The problem is that that person is going to be us, and so that person will be baled or tired and everything else, and the empathy gap, it's just very how to overcome. If you set your goals when you're in a similar state, that helps you being more empathy addicted to this person that will have to follow through with the goals and the danger lives and if you don't do this and setting unreasonable goals and then basically jumping ship when you when you find that it's it's not even within the realm of of you know, practical life to be able to do those things right. It's so the problem with unrealistic goals is that we get discouraged. Usually we don't really care about the specific target that we set. We care about setting a goal so that we are motivated right so that we want to walk hard. But if we perceive that the goal is completely unrealistic, then we give up and we walk much less than if we set a more realistic but motivating goals. So the risk is that will just say, ah, that's never going to happen, and therefore I should do absolutely nothing about it. After the break, I will share how we can use science based strategies to sustain our motivation as we make progress towards our goals. We'll be right back with a slight change of plans. So you've taught us a lot about how we can better set our goals, and now I'd love to talk about how we can sustain our motivation to make progress on those goals. And the first step in doing this is just to get your foot in the door period right to begin the activity. And you've talked about how important that first step is because it can lead to almost a disproportionate impact on motivation in the longer term. Do you mind sharing more about that. The difference between CEO and one steps is huge, and that means that people are usually very enthusiastic when they start something, and we can help ourselves maintain this commitment or you know, I help others and stay committed by looking back by notice that we already took the first step. Okay, so taking that first step can give us the boost we need to stay in the game. It signals to our brains that we care about the goal and that we've taken at least one step towards achieving it. But there's an additional challenge that lies ahead. Research shows we often have trouble sustaining this motivation as we pursue our goals. Our motivation often flags as we approach the halfway point, what eyel It calls the middle problem. You have high motivation at the beginning and high motivation at the end, but then there is the middle, and the middle is when your motivation is usually lower, both in terms of doing the thing and also in terms of doing it right. Okay, so we see that people are less likely to engage, but they're also going to relax their performance standards. People are not going to do such a good job. Okay. We did the study in which we gave people a bunch of shapes on the a piece of paper and they had to cut them with just a pair of scissors. And like the first shape they cut, well, the last shape they cut whale in the middle, they were literally cutting corners. I love that. So they were literally relaxing their performance standards. You know, studies on cheating they found that, you know, if people ever cheat, they are not going to do this on the first time. Okay, they're going to do it more towards the middle, and so we walk less hard in the middle. We also don't do such a great job. So what can we do to address this dreaded middle problem? You can actually get rid of middles yet exist. Yeah, no middles. No, Well, we need to have middles, but we can keep them short. Either. An annual goal might be a monthly goal. So instead of saving money this year, I think about saving money this month. An exercising goal could be a weekly exercising goal. And if you if you might have a weekly exercising goal, I'm pretty sure that you will have another weekly exercising goal next week. Right, you're not going to really get to the end of this goal. But by defining it more nearly, by setting sub goals, we can fight these middles. We can also remind ourselves that our identity is Let's take a more identity, remind us thinking that whatever we do reflect on who we are as a person is helping us do a good job. Is there an example a lot of you, you know, shortening the middle or refraining things in your life to try to get around the middle problem. Well, I do try not to think about the full time in which I will see you a goal. So every research project it takes years, but I really try to think about what I'm going to do this quarter. So the middle is really short. And every quarter we start in my lab by just telling each other what are the goals that we are going to pursue for this period of time and what needs to be completed. Okay, So when it comes to when it comes to sustaining our motivation, and obvious natural place for us to dive in is to talk about one driver or motivation, which is incentives. Right. Yes, I think about incentives as mini goals. Okay. What we find is that it's really critical to incentivize the white thing. Okay, so not a proxy, not something that is just easy to measure. But do you mind getting us an example of what it means to reward the quote right thing? Yes, what does it mean to reward the right thing. Often we reward what is easy to measure. Okay, so we might reward ourselves for how many hours we set in front of our computer, but not really on whether we were productive, whether we did work that gets us somewhere. Maybe we were just answering emails and kind of killing time, but we did work for many hours. When we incentivize others, we sometimes incentivize them for doing things very quickly, but really we should care more about the quality. Another piece of advice eile It has when it comes to staying motivated is sometimes turn to ourselves for advice. In a study eile It ran, she identified people who were struggling to achieve a specific goal. They were then asked to share their own advice for how to reach that goal, or they were given advice from an expert, and then researchers measured had these two different sources of advice affected motivation levels, and what they found was really surprising. So we asked unemployed people to give advice on how to get a job. We ask people who said that they are struggling with being angry to give advice on how to control you anger. People were more motivated by their own advice than by the advice that we have given them, which with though was really interesting because it suggested when when you just increase your confidence, So when you just remind yourself of how much you know, okay, like you remind yourself that you're the expert and get confident as a result, then you are motivated to do something about it. Yeah, can we can we take in a little bit more into the mechanism that's at play here. I was in particular interested in people who are struggling. So the people who when I asked them to give advice, they've started by saying, why would you ask me? Like what do I know? Obviously I'm like, I don't know what they said? Why would you ask me about dieting? And you know, I didn't have a conversation with most of them. But the people that I didn't have a conversation with, I was saying, you are you kidding me? Like you know more than other people because you were struggling with this, Okay, like you've learned. You've been doing it now for a while. You try things and maybe they didn't work, and so you learn, Okay, some things did work for you. You learn from those too. And it turned out that when people are willing to go beyond this first reaction of what do I know? Okay, obviously I'm not doing it very well, they realize that they have a lot of knowledge. This memory search brings to mind the things that they do know. Often it brings to mind the lessons that they learn from failures. But there is such an amazing knowledge that comes from trying something and realizing that it doesn't work. However, you need to think hard and identify these lessons. So they find these lessons. And then the last thing that it does is just that build a confidence because hey, I ask you for advice, so I think that you are the expert you know, and when someone tells you that you are the expert, you feel like you know a lot. Yeah. So, so one antagonist for sustaining motivation, UM, as we're trying to pursue our goals is failure. Right are the setbacks that we face? And how can we think differently about about failure or learn from failure so that we can we can stay the course. I'm so glad that you ask, because I think that we both our passion is in learning from a failure. Might try Son told media the day that I'm the expert on failure, and I love that. Hey that's a great that's a good cop, I thought. So it's then when you realize that his mother knows something about failing. So yeah, so it's really hard to learn from failure. It's unintuitive, and it's just how do to learn what to do from what not to do? It's actually, it turns out that it's easier to learn from other people's failures. So in our task where we just have like the really usually just two options, there is a correct answer and there though it's an incorrect answer, And if you look at someone else choosing the incorrect answer, you do learn the correct answer more than if you yourself guess the incorrect answer. Is that because emotion and ego aren't clouding the situation exactly, okay, exactly because if you chose the wrong answer or you're upset, yeah, just busy with managing your emotions. When you look at me choosing the wrong answer, you're not upset, You're just learning. Okay. Of course, the problem is that we don't tend to share our failure with other people, so you might not know about all the ways in which I failed because I'm not telling you about it. Yeah, that's your chance mail it, have the whole platform. I'm just kidding. I'm not gonna make you an unfailure lane. No, but I love that, And it also shows that you know, when we when we are when we structure our lives around trying to achieve goals with others, it does create an open space for us to share failures and successes because you're getting exposure to other people's journeys day in and day out. Right. I mean, if I have a running buddy in the very theoretical world in which I ran aail it um, you know, I might see the days that they don't show up for running because they're having low motivation, or you know, you pull back the curtain and you get the unglamorous look into how other people are working to perceive their goals. I agree, and I would say that people do not share their failures, so it's not easy to get it from them, like we we looked at it in many studies. To give you an example, we asked teachers to tell us one success doe in one fellow story and then anonymously share with another teacher the one of these stories Okay, so the story that you think has a better lesson. Okay, almost everyone share the success story. Yeah, wouldn't it be so great if the last three lines of your CV were all the things that you tried and sucked at or failed at. Right, So it's like, ah, here's the highlights reel. But Baya never became the Bollywood dancer that she wanted to become when she was in high school. She never became the singer songwriter that she wanted to become when she was in college, right, because she had no aptitude for singing. And so it would be really wonderful to hear a slightly more unfiltered story from people about the broad range of things they've tried in their life and then have not succeeded at. Cannot agree more. You know how everybody got accepted to their amazing college. I know, it's remarkable. We're at one hundred percent hit rate. Yeah, despite the fact that all these colleges tell us that they reject most candidates. You know, no one was ever rejected that I know. I've never heard of someone rejected from college. Absolutely, not myself included. Because people are so hesitant to share their failures with one another, and because I let knows there's so much we can learn from doing so, she's been on a mission to help encourage this behavior. As we wrapped up our conversation, she shared that someone reached out to her about an event where failure takes center stage. People are encouraged to shout from the rooftops about all the times they didn't get it right. People are talking about projects that they tried and failed, or just personal failures, just like I'm going on a stage in front of people and talking about what went wrong and trying to understand what the lesson in the person started this try and for which me and I told me that my research was part of the inspiration for these nights, and I felt very good about that. Hey, thanks for listening. On next week's episode, our season finale, we hear the story of a Theronos whistleblower, Erica Chung. Erica knew something was very wrong at the company, and even though she had a lot to lose by speaking out, she saw no other option. Honestly, the idea of knowing what I knew and having not done anything, and knowing that there was something that I could have done about it, and I didn't do anything like that's the real prison. That's the real purgatory. A Slight Change of Plans is created written an executive produce by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change Family includes Tyler Green our senior producer, Emily Rostak, our producer and fact checker, Jan Guera, our senior editor, Ben Tolliday, our sound engineer, and Mia LaBelle our executive producer. Louis Skara wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries. So big thanks to everyone there, including Nicolemrano, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Heather Fame and Carly Nigliori, and of course of very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. How I became the expert of failure. So my son was struggling with his video game like he had like tears in his eyes. He was super frustrated. He felt like the challenge that he will never be able to to do. And then he asked that I will come and sit next to him, and my daughter was saying Wow, but I sit next to you, I actually know something about video games, like mom doesn't know anything. And he said that despite the fact that I am not very useful in terms of the knowledge that I have about video games, I'm the expert on failure and he really prefers to fail next to me because I will make him feel good.