As the end of the year approaches, many of us might think about making New Year’s resolutions. We often use time marks as a prompt to think about the changes we want to make in ourselves and our lives. The turn of the year is one of the most common markers of change.
But, while many people feel motivated and positive when they make resolutions at the start of January, this motivation often fades quickly. Instead of encouraging us to move forward, New Year’s resolutions often pull us backwards, leading to feelings of failure, low self-esteem, and demotivation.
New Year’s resolutions often seem to set us up for failure, reminding us of previous years when things haven’t gone well.
However, setting goals at New Year’s doesn’t have to be a negative experience. By changing the way we set goals and the type of goals we set, New Year’s goal-setting can help us get to where we want to be in our relationships, social skills, and activities.
Making Specific Goal Lists
The key to effective goal setting is to make goals specific and measurable. Rather than making broad and vague resolutions, we should make a clear list of the types of behaviours we want to decrease and those we want to increase.
Some examples of specific and measurable goals include:
- Expressing our emotions in interpersonal relationships, whether we are feeling happy, frustrated, or down
- Using self-soothing strategies, such as breathing exercises, if we experience intense emotions
- Reaching out to people we trust when we’re not feeling good
- Regularly attending a dance class, even when feeling demotivated or down
Some examples of behaviours we might want to decrease include:
- Turning to self-destructive behaviours when we feel distressed
- Scrutinising small mistakes that we make
- Blaming ourselves for experiences that are out of our control
Setting measurable and specific goals helps us to stay motivated and to take constructive steps forward. As we observe ourselves taking these steps, we also grow in confidence and self-belief. This, in turn, enhances our motivation and our ability to move towards our goals.
Setting Our Objectives
When we’re creating goal lists, it’s helpful to be guided by certain objectives. Unlike our specific goals, our objectives may be more abstract and long-term. For example, our objectives might be to develop social skills or to expand our social networks.
But goal setting shouldn’t be about ‘taking’ these objectives. Instead, we should focus on making steps towards them.
Approach-Oriented and Avoidance-Oriented Goals
It’s also important to think about whether goals are ‘approach-oriented’ or ‘avoidance-oriented’. Approach-oriented goals focus on working on or moving towards something that we want. This might be increasing social circles, improving communication in a relationship, or learning a new skill.
On the other hand, avoidance-oriented goals are about avoiding something we don’t want. This might mean trying to avoid temper outbursts or hostile conflicts.
It’s normal for people to naturally hold a mixture of approach- and avoidance-oriented goals. And when it comes to specifically setting goals, it’s important to include approach-oriented thinking.
Avoidance-oriented thinking alone can quickly lead to feelings of failure and inadequacy: if you do the thing you try to avoid, you can feel like you failed in your goal. These experiences can cause low self-esteem and disappointment, and may make it more likely that you abandon the goal altogether.
On the other hand, approach-oriented goals are about taking steps towards something you do want. You’re less likely to feel a sense of failure about what you haven’t achieved, instead feeling positive about the steps that you did take. Approach-oriented goals tend to leave more room for self-compassion and self-worth.
A large-scale study on resolutions found that people who set approach-oriented goals were more likely to feel like they had been successful than those who set avoidance goals.
Superordinate and Subordinate Goals
Goal-setting theory describes two different types of goals: superordinate goals and subordinate goals. Superordinate goals are more abstract ideas that have a broad focus and require long-term change. Subordinate goals are specific, concrete goals that lead towards, or are one aspect of, a superordinate goal.
Subordinate goals tend to be more motivating than superordinate goals. They help you to believe in yourself and your ability to pursue the things that matter to you. But sometimes they lead to disengagement from long-term goals as soon as the first step is successful.
Superordinate goals can help guide and move through subordinate goals. These intrinsic values can help us to set a new subordinate goal if we have met one already, or decide how to act when different subordinate goals conflict. We might also be more motivated to pursue subordinate goals when we understand that they are part of a wider belief system.
Research has found that using both superordinate and subordinate goals helps people to continue following their goals, while feeling positive about their achievements and progress.
Applying this idea to New Year’s resolutions, we can use our superordinate goals to create a list of subordinate, specific goals. This framework fits in with the techniques of goal lists and objective setting that we already discussed.
So if we want to improve our relationships, we can think about the concrete steps that lead in this direction. This might mean working on expressing our emotions or starting an open conversation if we feel hurt by something another person has done.
By setting these specific goals, we can make the positive changes that we believe in.
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