Motivation

According to Forbes, in Achieve your Goals Faster, the reason we fail at achieving goals is due to 2 factors: your brain—and your blood pressure. Apparently, high blood pressure can help you keep goals on track!

Emily Balcetis, a social psychologist from NYU, recently explained how properly set goals boosts our systolic blood pressure (SBP), which is the measurement of our body being geared up and ready to act. If the goal is easy to achieve we get a nice spike. If it’s moderately hard but seems like a feasible challenge (harder than easy) we get a larger spike and thus more excitement in the body and sympathetic nervous system. But if the goal is seen as impossible our system writes it off, indicated below by SBP decrease.

So it is vitally important to set our goals to be both achievable and a stretch.

Also important to balance is the distance to our goals – here-and-now or way in the future. So breaking our goals down and bringing them closer to us is key.

According to Emily’s research we need to plan for obstacles (Plan A, B, C …), Create Healthful Habits and bring our goals closer to us – spatially, socially and/or psychologically.

So keeping your eyes on the prize – brings it closer to you, breaking your goals down into achievable stretch goals, activates the neural pathways and releases the chemicals we need to jump start our actions, thus creating the ideal conditions in your mind and your body to take you there – this applies to you as well as with your team of course.

Why and how goals – the science

To be successful it helps to create two types of goals. The first type is about why you want to change. The second is about how you will achieve the change.

How goals activate a different part of the brain than why goals. Why goals are activated in the default system, where we think about others and ourselves. How goals are associated with the part of the brain that thinks about tactics and strategies. Why goals are often the outcome you will achieve. The vision you have. How goals are the steps and milestones to achieve the outcome. If you have not created a plan about the steps you need to take to achieve the change, it is very unlikely to happen.

People can get trapped in a habit of only thinking about one or the other type of goal. Without goals about why, it is harder to keep on track, especially if it is going to take a while to achieve the final outcome. Without how goals, it is hard to make progress on why goals; you won’t have a clear idea about the steps you need to take or see the progress you are making towards the final outcome.

http://www.headheartbrain.com/neuroscience-goals/

Visioning & The Brain

(Taken from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23802125)

Coaching and mentoring to the Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA) emphasizes compassion for the individual’s hopes and dreams and has been shown to enhance a behavioral change. In contrast, coaching to the Negative Emotional Attractor (NEA), by focusing on externally defined criteria for success and the individual’s weaknesses in relation to them, does not show sustained change.