The Definitive Formula To Take Action And Achieve Your Goals
How many times have you abandoned an activity that generated good results but required effort and discipline? In fact, how many times have you thought about starting a positive project that you never carried out in the end? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have enough fingers to count them.
Procrastination and cognitive laziness are inherent to people as they allow us to save a large amount of energy. However, when trying to achieve the goals we want in our lives, they are two great barriers that we must overcome.
Achieving the objectives we set for ourselves: how to achieve it?
Psychology studies motivation as the psychological process that links our behavior towards our goals. However, this process has the great disadvantage of being temporary.
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We would all like the motivation that comes from watching movies like Invictus, Gladiator or the famous TED talks; remain in our daily lives to achieve the objectives we set, although experience tells us that in a matter of hours we return to the baseline of connecting to social networks and lying on the couch.
The implementation of intentions
According to Theory of Planned Behavior from Fishbein and Azjen, the relationship between intentions and behavior is 26%; Now you know the reason for your failed attempts. This low correlation shows that intentions are not enough and that we must find a system that continuously leads us to our objectives.
New York psychologist Peter Gollwitzer realized how often people encounter problems when it comes to transforming our intentions into actions and created the concept of implementation of intentions.
According to this theory, defining a behavioral objective in response to a specific future event significantly increases the time to act. Therefore, the best strategy to carry out all the projects that we want to undertake, even if they cost work, consists of define in advance the situations of our daily life in which we will act in a certain way to achieve our objectives
The formula to maintain motivation
This action formula is known as “if-then” planning and one of its determining phases consists of creating all those “If X, then Y” situations. Let’s look at some examples:
If our goal is to get in shape we will consider:
If our goal is to find a partner:
It is necessary to emphasize that these rules are established as universal laws of conduct so that every time this situation arises, we will necessarily act in the indicated manner.
Why is this theory effective?
The effectiveness of this technique lies in the fact that the formula “If X, then Y” is the code that the brain best understands and, above all, Keep in mind that motivation is temporary so we impose a rational system based on behavior-situations that will be imposed when laziness attacks us.
Likewise, extensive research indicates that “if-then” planning increases team performance by emphasizing group focus and provoking members to carry out key actions at the right time, according to Heidi Grant of the Business School of Columbia.
The fundamental idea is that the variable that mediates between intention and action does not reside in temporal motivation, but in the decision. Therefore, l Decisions about how to act are shown as the mediating variables of the actions that will lead us to our most desired goals
Time to take action
You already know that the most effective way to start training, get the best grade in exams, work more efficiently or whatever your ambitions are; It does not consist of watching motivational videos or self-improvement films, but rather locating the situations that occur to you daily (“If”), planning the most effective actions to achieve your goals (“then”), implementing them and considering them as rules of the game to achieve the goal. best result.
