Process goals help more than motivation

If you are trying to reach a new objective at work or in your personal life, setting process goals can be helpful. This can be the difference between success and failure, if done right.

A process goal is a specific action that you identify to help you achieve something. It is different from most of the goals that people set.

Most people set outcome goals. They think about the rewards for accomplishing something and then set the goal there. They say they want to be a millionaire. They say they want a six pack. They say they want to win a race. They say they want to have more freedom, or compassion, or serenity. Whatever it is that they want, they use that as the goal.

Setting a goal based on the expected outcome makes sense. The idea is that knowing what you want will motivate you to work towards that goal. By having a clear goal, you will become filled with the inspiration necessary to do the work to propel you to your goal.

The problem is that the research doesn’t point to motivation as the main reason someone achieves a goal. Motivation is much less helpful when striving to improve. Motivation disappears when we need it the most and appears when we are far away from our goal.

This Hot-Cold Empathy Gap provides explanation. Hot states occur when we are face to face with a difficult decision. Cold states are when we are far away from having to make that decision.

We feel different when we come face-to-face with a difficult decision (being in a hot state). This hot state means that we are less likely to be able to do what we hoped to do. Yet it sounded easy when we first thought it about (because we were in a cold state).

If we think about the last time we wanted to avoid something we enjoy to improve our health we can see this in action. If we want to lose weight, it is easy to think about how we will avoid certain foods. But then when we are hungry and passing our favorite fast food place we cave because the hot state is so much more powerful than the cold state.

It is easy to assume we can overcome challenges with motivation. But if we are in a cold state, we aren’t seeing how challenging it will be in the heat of the moment. It will be more challenging causing us to fail.

But there is a better way to set goals and work towards our idea of success. It starts by changing our attitude around motivation. We don’t expect motivation to always kick in right when we need it to help us make the right decisions.

Instead we work to be consistent in our approach, so we start to build new behavior patterns. These new behavior patterns become habit. Once habit, we do them automatically, not from sheer motivation.

To get started we can set process goals. We set a goal based on what we are going to do to reach our objective. By focusing on what we are going to do, we can continuously adjust to make sure we keep taking the steps necessary.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear points to a study that seems to align with this concept. He says, “In 2001, Researchers in Great Britain began working with 248 people to build better exercise habits over the course of two weeks. The subjects were divided into three groups.”

He goes on to explain, “The first group was the control group. They were simply asked to track how often they exercised. The second group was the ‘motivation’ group. They were asked not only to track their workouts but also read some material on the benefits of exercise.”

Third group received the motivational presentation but also set a process goal. The researchers called this process goal an implementation intention. This implementation intention was a sentence that listed exactly when and where they would exercise.

The results seemed to validate the idea that motivation doesn’t help. It also showed that the implementation intention (aka process goal) did make a significant impact on the results.

Clear says, “In the first and second groups, 35 to 38 percent of people exercised at least once per week. (Interestingly, the motivational presentation given to the second group seemed to have no meaningful impact on behavior). But 91 percent of the third group exercised at least once per week – more than double the normal rate.”

If there is something you want to achieve, focus on how you are going to achieve it. Don’t put all your effort thinking about the benefits or rewards when you hit the goal.

By focusing on how you are going to reach the goal you can set process goals that specify exactly what you intend to do to succeed. This will help you to avoid relying on motivation to rise up and help you.

If you are like the subjects in the Great Britain study that James Clear references, you will more than double the likelihood that you start doing the work. This will help you improve and reach your goal more than any motivation or outcome goal.