7 Reasons You Should Keep Your Goals Private
Understanding the Psychology and Potential Pitfalls of Sharing Your Aspirations
In a world driven by achievement and progress, setting goals is a fundamental part of personal and professional growth. It provides a roadmap to desired outcomes, a measure of success, and a source of motivation. Goals give direction and purpose, helping us stay focused amidst life’s distractions and uncertainties. Common wisdom often encourages us to share these goals with others, citing benefits such as increased accountability, motivation from external validation, and the advantage of receiving support and advice.
The Risks of Sharing Your Goals
However, like any strategy, publicly sharing your goals is not without its potential pitfalls. While telling others about your ambitions can sometimes motivate you to work harder towards them, it can also have unintended consequences that may undermine your progress. Some psychological research suggests that announcing goals can inadvertently diminish your drive to accomplish them. It can also expose you to undue pressure, fear of public failure, misunderstandings, or even negative feedback. It’s important to weigh these potential risks against the possible benefits before deciding to publicize your personal objectives.
Here are seven of the potential downsides of sharing your goals:
Premature Satisfaction
Premature satisfaction is a phenomenon where you experience the feeling of accomplishing a goal before it has been fully realized. This can often occur when you share your goals with others. The positive feedback and praise you receive can trick your mind into feeling as though the goal has already been achieved. This satisfaction can then paradoxically lead to a decrease in motivation to work towards the actual goal. For example, imagine you set a goal to lose weight and you share this with a friend. If they commend your decision and express their support, this affirmation may cause your brain to experience a sense of achievement prematurely. Consequently, your drive to stick to your diet and exercise plan could diminish.
Unwanted Pressure
When you share your goals with others, it can create an external layer of pressure to succeed. This added expectation and scrutiny can contribute to performance anxiety, especially if the goal you’ve set is particularly challenging or ambitious. You might find yourself constantly worrying about the need to deliver results, shifting your focus from the journey of achieving the goal to simply avoiding disappointment. For instance, consider a goal to write a novel within a year. If you were to announce this goal publicly, you might experience anxiety from the constant inquiries about your progress, which could interfere with your creative process and hinder your progress.
Fear of Failure
The fear of failure is a significant factor to consider when deciding whether to share your goals. When you publicly announce your ambitions, there’s an inherent risk of not meeting these expectations, leading to a sense of public failure or embarrassment. This fear can be daunting and potentially discourage you from setting ambitious goals or trying again after a setback. For example, if you’ve shared with your colleagues a goal to secure a major client for your company, but ultimately are unable to do so, you might feel a heightened sense of failure due to the public nature of your goal. This could impact your confidence in setting future goals. Hence, keeping your goals private can help mitigate this fear of public failure, providing a safer space to take risks, learn from mistakes, and grow at your own pace.
Vulnerability to Negativity
When you share your goals, it opens the door to potential negativity. Not everyone you tell your goals to will react positively or supportively. Some people might express skepticism, doubt, or even outright criticism. These negative reactions can be demoralizing and lead to self-doubt, which can seriously hamper your motivation and progress towards your goals. For instance, if you announce an ambition to start your own business, a dismissive or discouraging response from someone could dampen your enthusiasm or make you question your abilities. This vulnerability to negativity is a crucial factor to consider when deciding whether to disclose your goals. Keeping your aspirations private can help shield you from this potential negativity and ensure that your motivation remains driven by your own self-belief and determination.
Misunderstanding or Misinterpretation
Another potential drawback of sharing your goals is the risk of misunderstanding or misinterpretation. When you communicate your goals to others, there’s a chance they may not fully understand your aspirations or intentions. They could inadvertently project their own fears, biases, or perspectives onto your goals, leading to unsolicited advice or judgments that aren’t aligned with your actual intent. For instance, if your goal is to travel the world for a year, someone might misinterpret this as an attempt to escape responsibilities, rather than seeing it as a desire for personal growth and exploration. This kind of misunderstanding can lead to confusion and can be a source of distraction, pulling your focus away from your original intent and potentially affecting your motivation and progress. Keeping your goals private can help avoid these complications and keep your focus and actions aligned with your true objectives.
Conclusion
Choosing whether to share your goals with others is a personal decision that requires careful consideration of various factors. While sharing can provide motivation, support, and accountability, it also has potential downsides. The risk of premature satisfaction, unwanted pressure, fear of public failure, misunderstandings, and exposure to negativity should not be overlooked. It’s important to remember that each individual’s reaction to these potential pitfalls can vary greatly, and what works best for one person might not work as well for another. Therefore, in your pursuit of personal or professional goals, choose the approach that best fits your personality, your comfort level, and your understanding of your environment. The journey towards achieving your goals should be driven by what inspires and motivates you the most, whether that includes sharing your aspirations with others or keeping them private. Ultimately, the most important thing is not whether we share our goals, but that we continue striving to reach them, learning and growing along the way.
These insights into the potential downsides of sharing your goals draw heavily from the research of Professor Peter Gollwitzer from New York University, particularly his work on “Implementation Intentions” and the effects of public goal declaration. For a comprehensive understanding of this subject, I recommend reading Professor Gollwitzer’s 1999 article titled “Implementation Intentions,” which is freely accessible online.
