There are at least five different types of what are called achievement goals by social scientists. Some goals increase your chance of failing and some increase your chances of succeeding according to the research.
I’m only going to discuss the two most important of these five types of goals. The one that can help you the most and the one that can hurt you the most (you can find a scientific paper describing all five here).
The type of goal to avoid is the ability goal – whose purpose is to prove you have the ability to do something. For example, if you need to give a presentation and you have the goal of proving how well you can speak, you have an ability goal.
The type of goal that is most helpful is a learning goal. In this type of goal you would approach a public speaking situation with specific ideas in mind for what you can learn from the experience. For example, you might decide you’d like to improve your ability to connect with the audience, your cadence or your use of pauses.
Learning goals are linked to many positive outcomes. Students with learning goals for example use deeper processing strategies in their courses such as “elaborating” and “networking.” People with learning goals also tend to increase their efforts after failure.
Although individuals with ability goals can experience high levels of motivation when they are succeeding, they tend to use more superficial learning strategies and when they experience failure they experience more negative feelings and reduced effort.
In one study pre-med college students taking a general chemistry course were tested to see whether or not they endorsed ability goals or learning goals or one of the other types of goal.
After the course their grades were tabulated.
It was discovered that overall the students with learning goals outperformed all other students. In fact many of those with low performance at the start of the course got better grades on the final exam than they had on any previous exam. Students with ability goals that performed poorly at the start of the course performed worst of all on the final.
So what does this mean for you?
To achieve the most out of life you should set learning goals whenever possible.
If you want to build a successful business focus on the outcome but also focus on what you need to learn to achieve that outcome.
If you want to be more organized, discover what skills you need to gain to achieve more organization and then set about learning those skills.
Focus on what you need to learn and avoid all focus on proving how smart or competent you are.
This can be challenging though as we actually set many goals without being consciously aware of them. And the types of goals you focus on are determined by your mindset.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the kind of mindset that allows you to naturally focus on learning goals. It’s a mindset that’s also been proven in over 20 years of research to increase your achievement.
Until then, please tell me what you think of the idea of learning goals in the comments area below.
Reference to study discussed above:
9 replies to "How To Avoid The Type Of Goal Proven To INCREASE Your Chances Of Failure… And The Kind Of Goal You Should Set Instead"
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I am so happy I cam across your blog as a member of the 30 day challenge. I will try to be more aware of my goal setting and pay more attention to learning the task elements then relying on my ability.
Looking forward to tomorrow’s post.
Thanks so much,
Kevin
Kevin,
Thank you so much for your positive comment. It means a lot to me that you found what I shared today valuable to you.
Rodney
Cheers pal. I do appreciate the wirntig.
When I was in high school ironically I didn’t adopt learning goals but years after I became learn-hungry. I wish I could go back with that the thirst I have for learning now, it would have made a huge difference.
I think ideas like in the book ‘Stop Setting Goals – if you would rather solve problems’ by Biehl work well because while problem solving we have a learning mindset.
Great write up, it’s great to learn from scientific findings reported in a easy to read, ready to apply fashion.
Peter,
Thanks for your comment. I just looked up the book “Stop Setting Goals” that you suggested. The concept seems interesting and I may get the book.
However, Biehl’s suggestion to solve problems instead of setting goals shows that he must be defining goals in a way that’s different than done in the research.
A goal is any end state that a person aims for whether consciously or not. So if I aim to solve a problem, I am still pursuing a goal. But by framing his ideas as different from–and perhaps better than–goals he has a higher chance of capturing the attention of readers.
Still, his approach may be useful so I’ll check it out.
[…] Consciously set learning goals along with any outcome goals you create for yourself. Goals can become habitual if set often. […]
This article is very interesting. However, it seems that all this research is based on students in an academic setting. In that situation, it’s not really surprising that successful goals involve learning. Has there been any research on how this translates to goals outside of school?
In some situations it seems like it would be a stretch. For example, many business goals are about coming up with new ideas rather than simply learning facts (although of course there is usually research involved). Achieving an exercise goal might be more about creating a habit than acquiring knowledge. In fact I could, theoretically, LEARN everything about how to exercise and not ever DO it. So I’m wondering if there’s any research on how learning goals work in the “real world,” or if there are other types of goals that are more important there.
Mike,
You make a good point about the research I cited being mostly about students. However, there’s lot more research showing that learning goals are beneficial in business and other domains as well. You can learn more about the research in Heidi Grant Halvorson’s book “Succeed: How we can reach our goals” which is available on Amazon.com. She describes not only the research on learning goals and ability goals but other types of goals as well.
http://www.amazon.com/Succeed-How-Can-Reach-Goals/dp/0452297710/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352618569&sr=8-1&keywords=succeed+how+we+can+reach+our+goals
And of course if a person doesn’t act on their goals they won’t achieve them. If a person wanted to get in shape they might set a learning goal to learn how to get in shape. However, notice that this person has a learning goal AND a performance goal. There’s no reason to think of them as exclusive.
The only goal you want to avoid is the ability goal because it has a negative effect on performance especially when you don’t have confidence in what you are doing. Learning goals are effective whether we have confidence in our ability or not and can even be more powerful when our confidence is low.