Coaching Principles: Goal Setting Theory

How to do impossible things

There's a line of thinking I hear all too often around me. It goes something like this: If it's impossible to do, why should I even try? Now, I know very well that I'm not immune to this line of thinking either. Just the other day. I remarked to my wife that I was feeling better about my effort in doing the chores. It's been an ongoing point of contention within our household that I've been working to improve over the years. She, coming off a weary day, proceeded to educate me on all the chores that weren't getting done and were falling on her shoulders. I was taken aback and feeling discouraged by this bleak outlook, and felt that cynical refrain. What's the point if I can never achieve a satisfactory result?

This is actually a very normal experience dubbed by psychologists as black-and-white thinking, a cognitive distortion. At the neuroscience level, there's a part of our brains¹ responsible for cost-benefit analysis that signals to us whether an action is worth taking. This calculation is a key part of our motivation and helps us make big decisions like: should I go swimming with whale sharks?² Where this computation often works against us is in goal setting.

Goals are a big deal. People set goals when they have identified a need for change. Something is important enough to instigate deviation from the status quo and intentional effort to behave differently. Usually, the goal concerns something big like career progression or weight loss. Problem is, these issues are large and unwieldy, making them poor goals by themselves. In framing such an issue as a goal, we make it far too easy for our brains to dismiss the goal as too difficult, too complicated, or too much to commit to.

So Jason, if these goals are too big, how is it then some people are able to change their lives and accomplish unthinkably large personal transformations? Are they just built different?

Well, they could be. Individual humans are different enough that population-based studies can't possibly account for every story. Your Uncle Ron might just be a different beast. But more likely, they broke their desired change into smaller, achievable goals that lined up to form the momentus change you saw or heard about³. Rather than an all-or-nothing overnight transformation, a far more effective framing is to view the overarching change as a vision for the future and design incremental steps toward that vision.

For your brain, these baby steps make all the difference. Previously, you had to weigh the incalculable cost of a full transformation against your desire for change. This time, you are only tasked with the cost of a single, concrete action plan-say, meal prepping a set of healthy and delicious protein-centered dinners. When you evaluate the action, your brain is much more likely to side withyour intention. Edwin Locke studied the effectiveness of goal setting in 1981 and came away with five characteristics of goals that work better for most people⁴. These are:

Clarity: Is the expected outcome clear?
Challenge: Is it too easy or too hard?
Commitment: Am I committed to this goal?
Feedback: How am I tracking or checking in on progress?
Task Complexity: Are the action steps that comprising the goal manageable?

Let's return to the chores situation (in case my wife needs this). The vision is clear—pull my weight around the house. The goals are a bit less clear, so let's break them down. Chores consist of many tasks (that my wife so generously reminded me of). A particularly challenging task for me has been doing the laundry. To design an approachable goal relating to laundry, I am chiefly concerned with reducing challenge. One thing that could help is to break down the task even further thereby reducing task complexity and increasing clarity. Here's what that might look like:

Doing laundry consists of:
1. Moving the dirty laundry to the washing machine
2. Putting coins in the machine and starting the wash
3. Moving the clothes to the dryer
4. Making sure to pull the pockets out of the pants so they fully dry
5. Putting coins in the dryer and starting it
6. Moving the clean laundry back to the apartment
7. Folding the clothes
8. Putting clothes in the wardrobe

A precondition is stocking coins for the machine, which I can do once a month. For the remaining process, I have time to do laundry weekly on Wednesday. Now I have a goal with a lot of clarity. In terms of task complexity, I still feel a little overwhelmed by the number of steps and the duration of the activity. Maybe I can ask my wife to support on a sub-task like putting clothes in the wardrobe on folding the clothes. For feedback, I can check in with myself after each attempt. Did it feel too challenging? I can also check in with the wife if she feels frustrated by the sub-tasks she’s helping me with or that I’m forgetting to pull the pockets out. With all this goal-setting aiding my efforts, I can make meaningful progress toward the vision of doing a fair share of chores.

Next time you catch yourself shying away from change due to black-and-white thinking, try revisiting your goals instead. Progress just might be quietly be in reach.

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If you need more help with goal setting, health and wellness coaching can really help.

I’ve had great success working with a coach in the past, and I'm currently in training to become a NBC-HWC. My professional training is centered around delivering successful behavior change results and I'd love to be a part of your journey. Schedule a chat with me to see if coaching is a fit for you.

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1. Ciaramelli, E., De Luca, F., Kwan, D., Mok, J., Bianconi, F., Knyagnytska, V., Craver, C., Green, L., Myerson, J., & Rosenbaum, R. S. (2021). The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex in reward valuation and future thinking during intertemporal choice. eLife, 10, e67387. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.67387

2. Yes. Yes you should and it’s awesome.

3. https://opentext.wsu.edu/theoreticalmodelsforteachingandresearch/chapter/goal-setting-theory/

4. See 3 above.