WIN 7 - Clarity of Goal and The Hard Science of Success with Heidi Grant Halvorson

Welcome to win the Women Investing Network, the podcast where you can learn from successful entrepreneurs, business leaders and real estate investors who are winning in business and life. Learning from others is the fastest way to grow your skills, gain knowledge and avoid pitfalls so you can win. Join our hosts, Elizabeth Embry and Jason Hartman. Elizabeth is a seasoned real estate investor, experience corporate executive and skilled mentor. Jason is a self made multimillionaire investor, entrepreneur and highly acclaimed thought leader. Together with their successful guests, you'll get the tools you'll need to win.

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Women Investing Network. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Embrey. This is episode number seven. Super excited to have you here. Today Jason's interviewing a research scientist. Her name is Heidi Grant Halvorson and she's speaking about the science behind motivation and success. I was recently speaking with Jason about the fact that I moved. So if you've listened to some of the episodes that I've been on for the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman, or if you've listened to some of the prior episodes for the Women Investing Network, and if you haven't, I urge you to please go back and subscribe and listen to past episodes. But Chase and I were talking about the fact that I'm moving. I've recently putting my house on the market in Seattle. My husband and I moved to this swanky apartment in the sky. I feel very, I feel like the Jeffersons, I guess. And so everything is in boxes. I don't have any of my studio space set up. I don't have anything set up. I'm literally sitting on the floor in the closet and my laptop's on a box. It's cracking me up because at one point Jason said, oh, I've recorded. I had to record my podcast in, in the closet because I don't know, at a hotel or wherever he was at. And I thought the closet. He goes, yeah, you know, you need to about the sound quality as you're recording the podcast. And some of you may have caught that some of my earlier podcasts, of which I recorded a whole bunch, didn't have the best possible sound quality. And so now I'm learning how to make the sound quality better. But yeah, I'm literally sitting on the floor in my closet. But, you know, we have to figure out how to persevere. And, you know, I definitely want to be able to, to provide this podcast on a weekly basis. There's so much great content that we've got Anyway, so this is the part in which I talk about the tip of the day before we go into the interview. So one of the things that I was speaking with somebody who was a former employee recently, and we were talking about getting the right mentor, getting the right coach involved so that you can achieve those successes that you've mapped out those goals. And we were talking about the fact that the person that was their mentor wasn't really quite the right person. So they actually got a coach. A coach was helping them through the challenges that they were having. And the differences between a coach and a mentor are pretty specific. And we can talk about that in a later episode. How you actually go about selecting the right coach and the right mentor are pretty similar. They both involve having clarity of what you need out of the person, which is super critical. So clarity. The second is you actually have to have the time. And the third thing, which actually, ironically, isn't the most important, but you have to. The person has to be really knowledgeable about the topic at hand. And quite frankly, that's the least important. In my opinion, that's the least important of the three. So clarity of your goal, clarity of what you're trying to get out of the person. Super key. Because you can't achieve those goals unless you know exactly where you're going. And sometimes people will come to me and they say, I need help with my career. Oftentimes the people that I help that are not people that I know directly, not somebody that I've worked with directly, but somebody that's been referred to me, they'll often say, I want to get promoted within my company. And as we start unpacking that, as we start understanding exactly what they're looking for, it turns out that that company may not be the right thing or the promotion may not be the thing that's the most important. It's where they're stretching or whether they're growing. So I actually spend the first three to four sessions really understanding exactly what they're trying to achieve. And that clarity usually becomes like an aha moment for them. So clarity of what you really, really want out of that coach is critical. And. And the second is time. So I was lucky enough to have some coaching sessions gifted to me, and I was super excited to work with this person. I think very highly of them. I thought that she just was kind of a rock star, and she had a lot of great thoughts and a lot of great feedback. So we had our first session, and she was driving exactly what I was looking for. You know, what did I want out of this? These conversations. And she gave Me some great feedback and some great tips. And she ended the conversation by setting up the time for the session, second, for the second meeting. And when the second meeting was coming up, I hadn't done any of my homework. And she was like, okay, you know, I said, hey, can we move this out? Can we push it out a little bit? No, just give me another week. Give me another week, you know, so that I could accomplish those specific things that I need to do it as homework. And she was like, yeah, we'll cancel this one and then we can set up another one at a later date. And then she sent another email at the time that I proposed, you know, a follow up email, and said, okay, did you finish those homework assignments? And I did some of the work, but I didn't do all of the work. You know, I just didn't have really that time to commit to her, to commit to myself, to accomplish those things. So, one, I didn't take the coaching sessions as seriously as I should have because they landed in my lap, they were a gift. And the second is, frankly, I just didn't have the time to work on the things that I thought I wanted to work on so desperately with her because, you know, I was moving, I was preparing for a move. So it just wasn't that important to me. And so that time, having the time to invest in yourself, because keep in mind, you're wasting that coach or mentor's time if you're not doing the assignments that they set up for you. And you're wasting your own time, which is even worse, because if you know that you've got areas that you've got to improve on and you're not even willing to get the time in to take care of it, Boy, how successfully can you either gain that new skill or, you know, make that new breakthrough or achieve that new objective? And the third is, do they actually have the right skills? What I find with most people when I mentor or coach them is I'm actually functioning as a sounding board. I'm reflecting back to them the things that they're saying to me, and then I'm expanding it, I'm tweaking it. It's kind of like pulling taffy in a way, because I'm taking what they're saying and I'm looking at it at different angles. I'm stretching the ideas, the thoughts, and I'm creating a new form out. The things that they give to me, I'm giving it back to them in a different way. Now, obviously, I can apply the knowledge that I have specific books, specific activities, groups, connections. You know, there's lots of things that I can do, but mostly the biggest benefit that I'm providing to that other person is to listen to them really help and shape and form exactly what they're looking for and then give it back. For instance, if somebody were to ask me about real estate investing or you know, project management in software or, you know, how to go from not being able to bike to being able to bike, you know, a 50 mile stretch, you know, things that I know, things that I've done, I can provide a lot of information, but I can also help people in areas where, frankly, I don't know that much about the topic at hand because really it's that connection, that bond. And I find the same thing for people that I've talked to when they talk about what made their successful coaching session or their successful mentoring session with the people that they have as coach or as mentor. And it really comes down to a skill set in some ways, but really being able to build that rapport. So I think that, you know, unless you're going for a specific hard skill and then you need somebody that's an absolute expert in that specific skill. Like if I were to learn how to be a coder, I, well, I'd go back to school and then I'd start watching a lot of YouTube videos I think, and Coursera and you know, any one of the other thousand self learning tools that are out there. But anyway, so now I've completely gone off on a tangent. I feel like I'm, I'm channeling my inner Jason. But as I sit on the, sit on the floor in my closet sharing with you my thoughts. So again, it is the fact that you have to have clarity of goal of what you want out of that mentor. You've got to have the time to do the assignments and really work on the things that they talk about. And the third thing is they've got to have the right fit. But more importantly. Sorry, they've got to have the right skills, but more importantly, they've got to have the right fit to be able to reflect back to you what you already know and where you want to go with those things that you're trying to improve. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jason.

My pleasure to welcome Heidi Grant Halvorson to the show. She is the author of Succeed How We Can Reach Our Goals. And unlike so many people talking about this subject out there, Heidi is a research scientist. So we're going to hear about Some real hard science today and how it applies to motivation and how we can live more successful lives. Heidi, welcome.

Oh, thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.

Well, our pleasure to have you. So where are you located, by the way?

I spend my time sort of between New York City and Easton, Pennsylvania.

Fantastic. Well, so you are a research scientist in the subject, the field of human motivation. What do you do every day? I mean, what. I don't understand what that would. What would. What would be your typical day?

Well, you know, a typical day involves things like, you know, conducting experiments. What is, I think, different about the approach that I take to motivation from, say, you know, a lot of the other kind of advice that you get out there from people is that, you know, much of that advice is personal. Right. So someone who's very successful says, this worked for me. This didn't work for me. So that's my advice to you. The approach we take is really to take a step back and say, okay, sort of objectively, let's look at 100 people trying to lose 10 pounds. Let's look at 100 people trying to get a promotion, and let's look at what they do, and let's look at who succeeds and who fails and try to figure out what the difference is. And the differences usually have to do with things like the strategies they use to try to reach their goals. And so we're able to identify, oh, that's a strategy that works, and that's a strategy that doesn't. So we kind of, by taking a little bit of a step back, you kind of get a better sense of sort of what works for everybody, not just sort of what works for one person, but what seems to be sort of principles that you can really kind of count on. And then you can apply those principles in your own life to be more successful. And one of the things that we find is that our intuitions about success and failure and what makes someone successful or not tend to be really wrong. There are lots of areas in psychology where kind of common sense tells you basically how something works. This is not one of them. You know, we kind of have. We feel like we know what makes someone successful. We feel like we know why we were successful sometimes and at other times not. And many times our answers are just wrong. And we know that by kind of, again, taking a step back, looking at hundreds and hundreds of people and seeing what the success stories have in common and what the failure stories have in common. And often they're not the things that you would intuitively think are the reasons. So it's a different kind of approach. But what I like about it is it's very. It's an edit. And so what I do on most days is design studies that try to kind of isolate these things to try to say, you know, I wonder if this strategy would be a good strategy. And then you try to design a study that really tests that idea by having people use that strategy in the lab or in the classroom or in the workplace and see if it works for them.

So then your academic training. I mean, you were a professor, or are you a professor now?

Well, I've been a professor now. I'm actually at Columbia Business School. I'm the associate director of the Motivation Science center there. So I used to do a lot more teaching. Now I'm mostly focused on doing research and then writing about. A big part of what I do these days has to do with sort of taking what we learn in these experiments, in these various studies and kind of translating them into English so that people can actually use them. So I spend a lot of my time these days writing for different kinds of outlets. I write for the Harvard Business Review a lot and Forbes, trying to kind of get people to learn about this stuff so they can use it to actually improve.

And I should also say you write for Fast Company, you blog for them, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and you're a regular contributor to the BBC's World Service business Daily. So that's fantastic. Now, so is your academic background then in psychology or statistics or. I mean, it would seem like you'd have to know statistics, too.

It's in psychology we learn a fair amount about statistics just to be able to do our jobs. But my PhD is in psychology, and my area of specialization is motivation. So I've always been interested in sort of questions having to do with, why do some people, when you do something that's difficult, that's really challenging, why do some people withdraw and they feel helpless in the face of difficulty, while other people sort of dig deep and experience it as a challenge and then really kind of rise to the occasion? And how are those two kinds of people different from each other? The interesting thing is that what you might think something like, oh, maybe one is smarter than the other. It turns out not to be the case. IQ does not predict anything about how someone handles difficulty. So it tends to be these more sort of psychological variables. Our beliefs about ability, the kinds of goals we set for ourselves, the mindset that you have when you're approaching a goal, the strategies, as I said, that you use when you're trying to reach it that really actually spell out the difference between success and failure.

So before, you know, we're going to drill down into this. HEIDI but let's, I mean, I think before we, we have to define success and of course that means something different to everybody. But the general western idea of success, I think it would be fair to say, is economic success. Mostly it's the most visible, it's the most quantifiable mode of success. But of course, there are many other definitions and areas of success. How do you define success?

Well, in the work that I do and other people do in this area, we tend to define it sort of in the eye of the beholder. It really doesn't in many cases matter what the kind of goal is that you're pursuing. It just matters that you have a goal. And then we kind of figure out what works. Because surprisingly, the things that tend to work, trying to lose, the strategies you would use, trying to lose weight, are often in many cases the same strategies, motivational strategies you would use trying to keep your finances in order or get along better with your spouse, or remember to call your mother, whatever the goal is. Oftentimes the same kinds of strategies are used. Now, having said that, and you know that success is very much, I think, personal, it has everything to do with being successful at the goals you choose. And they are going to be determined, of course, by your experiences and your values. I would say on top of that, there is really quite a bit of research showing that some goals are better than others. And if by better you mean better able to give us sort of a lasting sense of well being and happiness, it turns out accumulating money for the sake of accumulating more of it. Fame, popularity, power, these kinds of goals, which are, by the way, the goals most of us pursue all the time, really actually tend to not predict. I mean, everybody is happy when they reach the goal, but they don't necessarily predict lasting happiness as well as goals that we kind of think of as ones that satisfy our basic human needs. So things like feeling connected to other people, feeling competent, being able to use your skills and to develop new ones, and feeling autonomous, which is kind of basically saying that you get to choose what you do and your choices reflect who you are, your values, your preferences, they feel kind of like authentically you. When people set goals that kind of get to those feelings of connectedness, feelings of confidence and feeling that they're kind of doing things that are chosen because they speak to them personally, those are the goals that when you reach them, seem to lead to a much sort of deeper and longer lasting happiness. That's not to say that the other goals aren't good. And of course, often it's the case that you need to be concerned about making money in order to maybe do some of these other things that you want to do that are kind of more, you know, so it. They're interrelated, you know.

Sure, sure they are. They are interrelated. That's a very good point. So a couple comments on that and let's just talk about kind of the money thing first, if we can. Yeah. You know, for a minute here, because that is so visible and quantifiable. And in the Western world, most people have their basic needs met. They're moving up Maslow's hierarchy and you know, they've got the basics taken care of, fortunately. I mean, thankfully. That, of course is becoming maybe less true nowadays in this time of economic hardship where you've got, you know, you see tent cities around the US and homelessness rates and so forth. But by and large, anybody listening to this show has their basic needs met and they're striving beyond that to move up that rung. And so money does create independence to some extent. And, and that that feeling of being autonomous and being able to make one's own choices in life is a freedom and that that creates a sense of well being and happiness, right?

Absolutely.

Now, some of the studies I've read about money, like whether prosperity, really the old saying is, you know, money can't buy happiness. And what I say to that is it buys more happiness than poverty does.

That is certainly true.

Yeah. It doesn't solve problems, it just creates new sets of problems and it maybe makes the stuff that's less pleasant in life. You know, you can hire other people to do that stuff that you don't want to do. So there is maybe some freedom and independence in that.

I think you're absolutely right in that idea that you mentioned before, that sort of having money frees you to make autonomous choices is, I really think, a big part of it. I mean, so it becomes about what you do with it. You know, the studies that look at the relationship between wealth and happiness, they do show that. But you do have to get to a certain level before you're not miserable, because obviously poverty is very bad. But then sort of like what happens beyond that? What happens beyond when my needs are met.

Which is really the interesting space. Now what the data seems to show is that there isn't a really reliable relationship between what happens after the needs are met. So you're accumulating more wealth and you're not necessarily happier. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people in that, that's on average. And I think that there are people in that that are in fact happier because they have more money, because of what they're doing with it. That they are using that money in ways that allows them to, like I said, sort of satisfy these other needs, satisfy, be able to. The freedom to make choices, the freedom to pursue the things that you find interesting in life and rewarding. The freedom to, to have time to be with people you want to have connections with. And there is of course a feeling of achievement, you know, that is really should. There's something to be said for that too. Someone who is really excellent at what they do that is also very satisfying and leads to greater well being. And so there's a kind of a satisfaction there that's less about the money and more than just like, wow, I'm really good at this and that feels really good, you know. So I do think that it's too, it's too simplistic to say money doesn't buy you happiness. And it really is more about making wise choices about what that money affords you to do. And when people get too wrapped up in just making the money for the sake of making the money and they're not really adding.

That'S when you're going to find people that aren't happy. And that's why you find sort of on average people aren't happier. Because there's a lot of people that kind of aren't doing it right.

Yeah. So the things I've read about that, you know, I remember reading a really interesting study maybe five, six years ago and it talked about the issue and it compared, it talked about different countries and then within the US and there was a lot of stuff about this out at that time. Maybe it was one of your studies, who knows? But, but it basically said that in the United States, and of course this is for a person who's into their 40s and older than that probably, but in the United States, if you could put a number on it in terms of a net worth number, they came to the conclusion that the net worth number that really kind of quote buys, unquote you the, the ideal level of happiness. And it depends where you live, depends what your expenses are. Now if you live in New York City or California, this number's got to be higher. But if you live in the Midwest or the Southeast? This number is gonna be fine, right? Here's the number. I bet everybody's waiting with bated breath and I want to hear what you're gonna say. What is the number? Is it one million? Is it ten million? It was about one and a half million dollar net worth 1.5. That was the number they came up with. And that was, of course, before real estate prices doubled.

Right.

So maybe that number needs to be adjusted. It went up and then now it's back down a little bit. What are your thoughts on that?

I do think it has a lot to do with the point at which people feel that they're not worried anymore. Now, of course, what happens for people, you know, there's like. There's a keeping up with the Joneses thing that happens for a while. You know, if you get. If you're making $50,000 and then suddenly you're making $100,000 a year, you don't necessarily feel twice as wealthy because your expenses generally go up too, right? You move into a nicer neighborhood, you buy a nicer car, and that happens for a while and that keeps progressing. There was an article in the New York Times, it was interesting not too long ago that was very controversial about basically how rough it is for the ultra rich in New York because they have such huge expenses.

And they are staggering because you have to have a house in the Hamptons and you have to have anything if you look at all these costs. But there is that sensibility, right, that it's sort of. My guess is that somewhere around that point is where people are feeling like they can breathe. They really. It's not hard to keep up anymore, and they can maybe relax a little bit. You know, there's also a lot of research showing that money. The ideal way to kind of make people happy is to take money out of the equation. So in other words, you have. But in order to do that, you have to make the amount of money. So Big Dan Pink talks about all this, about with motivating employees, that the idea about taking money out of the equation is basically pay them really, really well, and then money is no longer something they're kind of worried about. And so you open up all this mental space for creativity and innovation and really enjoying their jobs because you've kind of taken that out, which is usually something people tend to kind of fret over. So I think there is probably a wealth point at which people sort of of don't worry quite so much. And that opens up space mentally for all these other Things that really are kind of enriching. And that would be my guess.

I would agree with you. And I would say that one needs to get to the point in the money game where money buys margin, where you have this margin of comfort, the cushion, that you don't have to worry about things and that you have freedom and autonomy from everything. And I say that the things are. It's really a paradoxical time we live in because, you know, I'm an economist, okay. And things are deteriorating in many ways and I think they will get a lot worse for some, but for others they are accumulating more and more. And it's really kind of sad to see the middle class going away in this country because I think it's been such a stabilizing factor. But yeah, no, I think that's a really good way to look at money. And the only other comment I would have and would love to get your thoughts on, on is that I think when, and I've noticed it at times in my life when I've been successful, sometimes all these things you buy really become more of a burden and a ball and chain on you than a pleasure. You know, I used to have a big yacht and it was just a big hassle.

Yeah, it is a burden, it's a responsibility. Then it has to be taken care of.

The things you own start to own you. And what I'd say that people want to have in their lives is they want to have that margin, that autonomy, but they also want to use their money to do some good in the world because that's very gratifying internally and also to buy experiences. Experiences and memories. Those are really important things. So one that comes up would be travel is, I think, a good one for a lot of people. It certainly is for me. And experiences and education, things that enrich the soul in the psyche.

I absolutely agree. And you know, there's actually some very interesting research. You just reminded me of looking at another reason why, explaining, trying to explain why wealthier people aren't necessarily happier. And there's very interesting research showing that the more money you have, the less likely you are to savor and savoring, whether it's a really great steak or a fantastic vacation or a beautiful sunset. That thing we do where we kind of really focus on how wonderful something is and how special something is, that is a very powerful source of well being. And it turns out that the more money you have, the less likely people are to take the time to savor something because things feel a little bit less Special because they're more easily gotten. You know, my mother, who had very little and she grew up in Germany after the war and there was almost nothing, you know, very, very poor. And you know, when she got an orange at Christmas, I mean, it was the most magnificent food experience she had ever had. And she goes, there's no oranges in Germany to be shipped in. And it was very special and it was very expensive. And you know, and she said, you know, I almost missed, you know, I don't think I've ever eaten anything in my entire life. And even now, having much more money to go to fancy restaurants and things, ever eaten anything as good as that orange? Because it was so very special. And so it doesn't mean that when you have a lot of money, you can't engage that experience, but you have to sort of make yourself do it. You have to make yourself aware, ask yourself, am I appreciating? Am I taking a moment to appreciate these amazing, special things I have in my life? Because it just turns out that the more money you have, the less likely you are to do it. And you can fix that by just taking time for savoring. And that turns out to be a really powerful way to really kind of access a source of happiness. And the things you're talking about, when you say spending the money on creating, creating experiences, creating memories, that is that kind of using my money to create things that I'm going to really savor and just really get the most sort of bang for my buck out of, you know, in terms of my well being and my happiness. So I think that is really the absolute best way to think about what the accumulation of wealth in the end should be for. It should be for creating happiness your own and other people's and other people's. You know, that's reciprocal. You create happiness for other people, it creates more happiness for you. So you just have to think about how you, what you do with it is always, you know, what matters.

Yeah, no question about that. And you know, there's a great quote about it, and forgive me, because I'm going to totally butcher this, but it's something to the effect of as you climb the mountain to success, in other words, that's the metaphor for moving toward your goal. Stop and enjoy the view along the way, because there are many great things to see as you're doing that. And that's part of that makes it a much more fulfilling experience. So we've got to just keep in check that the money doesn't become the master. I Think that's really the way to look at it. It is important. No one can deny the importance of it. But it's an instrument.

It's an instrument, not the end in itself. And I think that that's. Then you keep things in perspective and then you can do. It's for your own sake. It's for maximizing your own happiness. It's just the best way to think.

About it, no question. Well, hey, let's not focus totally on that prosperity, money, wealth aspect. Let's talk more about the science of how we get ourselves to achieve our goals, whatever they are, whether they be to be more healthy and fit or to make more money or to. To do whatever.

Well, you know, I think one of the first things you learn when you start studying this and looking over people have been studying motivation and achievement for 50 years. And when you start looking at past studies and doing your own, one of the first things you realize is that the one big mistake we make, that people make in general, but nobody makes this mistake more than Americans do, is thinking about ability as really fundamentally the cause of success and failure. And by ability, we usually mean something like innate ability. So we see someone who's just amazingly successful, and we think prodigy. We think, oh, genius. This person is a genius. And by that we usually mean something like they sort of won the DNA lottery, right? And so they were born to win. And that turns out to be wrong in two ways that are both very important. First is that ability doesn't work that way. So really, nobody wins the DNA lottery. It is true that your genes play a role in shaping your temperament. They shape what kinds of things you find interesting, that tendency. Not everybody thinks math is fascinating, but in fact, everybody can do math. This is one of the ones that drives me the most crazy. You constantly hear people say, I'm not a math person, or I am a math person. There's no such thing as a math person. What there is is people who like math. And so they do a lot of it and they get good at it. And people who don't like math or are frightened of math or have convinced themselves that they're not a math person, so they don't put in the time, and then they're not good at it. So ability is profoundly malleable. Whether you're talking about intelligence, creativity, athletic ability. I mean, we just find no matter what ability we study, that it turns out to be just profoundly, profoundly malleable. It's really just so influenced by your effort and your experience. So that's one way in which that kind of. Of thinking is wrong, and the other way in which it's sort of even more wrong is that actually sort of ability in general has very little to do with who succeeds and who fails. What we find is that the difference between, say, someone who succeeds at losing ten pounds and someone who doesn't, or someone who succeeds in getting a promotion and someone who doesn't, whatever the goal is, is not usually that one has ability and the other doesn't. It isn't even that one person knows what to do and the other one does. They both know what to do, but only one of them can actually get themselves to do it. And that's really where a lot of the strategies that I talk about in the book kind of come into play, because with what Bob Sutton has called and other psychologists have called the knowing doing gap, right, that we know what we should do, and we just don't seem to be able. And we feel like we want to do it, by the way. We feel like we really are. We're committed, and we just can't get ourselves.

You know, there's a great saying for that, and for 20 years I have loved this quote. It's a. It's a Zen quote. And here it goes. To know and not to do is to not yet know.

Exactly. Right. Because there is a knowledge that's missing, and it's that knowledge of how do I get myself to do the thing that I want to do, you know, and we approach it, I think partly, you know, part of the problem is we think, okay, well, I just need to really get more committed. Well, commitment is very important. You really do need to really want a goal, especially if it's a tough one. But commitment predicts less about success than we think it. It's sort of necessary, but not sufficient. Right. In the philosopher's terms, it's something you have to have, but it's not enough. We find on average that about 50 to 80% of the time, depending on the kind of goal it is, people have plenty of commitment and they fail anyway. So it's not that you're not committed. It's not that you lack ability. There's nothing wrong with you. It's not that you lack willpower. Willpower doesn't work that way either. Nobody is born with lots of willpower, and other people don't. It really turns out to be sort of, okay, I need to get myself to do this thing. And you have to recognize what the actual obstacles are. They tend to be very simple things that we don't do. One of them is we don't get nearly specific enough when we think about our goals. So we tend to think. Human beings in general, just sort of like to think in abstract, abstract terms. We like to think, I want to be successful. Well, what does that mean? And we tend to sort of live at this sort of higher level of thinking. And really, to be very successful in terms of reaching goals, you need to break things down. It's not enough to say, I want to lose some weight. How much weight do you want to lose? It's not enough to say, I want to be richer, I want to have more money. Well, how much money exactly, and by when. How much more money do I want to have and by when? Because that those differences. Part of the reason. There's a lot of reasons why this is important. One of them is that it's very difficult to know what action to take if you haven't gotten specific about what the goal is. So you don't know what the next step is if you're not sure about exactly what the end state is that you're going for. The other reason it's really important has to kind of do with the way our brains are wired. We feel like most of when we think about reaching goals and setting goals for ourselves, we feel like it's a really conscious, deliberate process. Process. Right. I'm setting a goal for myself and I'm thinking it through. And it turns out that the vast majority of our kind of the actions we take in order to reach goals happen unconsciously in the sense that we're just not aware of them. You know, you. All throughout your day, you're doing a million things to reach all the different goals you have. And you're not necessarily aware at every moment that you're doing something in order to kind of get closer to your goal. If you stopped and thought about it, you'd be aware of it, but we don't because we're busy. Right. So your unconscious mind, which is. Is most of your mind, is handling these things for you. And it's a great system. You know, it's how you can get in your car to go home at the end of the day and be preoccupied thinking about something. And then next thing you know, you're in your driveway and you think, I don't even remember driving home. Well, you know, your unconscious mind handled that for you because it knew where you were going and so it took you there. Right. So our brains are kind of amazing. The thing is, you really want to take advantage of all of that processing power. And to do that, you need to kind of talk to your brain in its own language, Right? And it needs to know what the specific goal is. If it knows you have a specific goal, like losing 15 pounds, getting a promotion, driving home, then it knows what to do. Whether you're thinking about it or not, it can actually take the steps that need to be taken in order to get you closer to your goal.

Okay, so then what you're saying, if I'm hearing you correctly, is that that we need to focus on talking to our brain in the language it understands.

That's right.

And does that mean we need to program our subconscious mind?

I mean, certainly it's very simple. No, it's not even anything that elaborate by simply just taking the time to say to yourself, okay, I know I want to get ahead at work. What do I mean by that? What would success look like? How will I know? The question I tell people to ask themselves is, how will I know when I've succeeded? If you say you want to be richer and I say, well, how will you know when you've succeeded? People kind of look at you like, oh, well, I'm not really sure. Well, if you can't answer that question, you haven't gotten specific enough. Right. Because you need that end state in mind. Once you've kind of narrowed in on the end state that you're looking for, then your brain does the rest. That's all it needed. It needed to know. It's like trying to program a GPS without putting in a destination. It doesn't know where to go. And your brain is exactly the same thing. So until you kind of get that destination clear in your own mind, you are missing out on a lot of brain power that could be working for you. So getting specific is one big thing, and then the other big thing. You know, among the strategies I talk about in the book, one of the most powerful ones is something I call if then planning. But the basic idea is that not only do we need to get specific about the goal, we need to get specific about the actions we're going to take in order to reach the goal and when and where we're going to take them. It's sort of like not enough to make a to do list. Everybody likes to do lists. They're great. But the problem is that most people's to do lists don't actually include when and where they're going to actually take each of the steps to complete the action item on the to do list. So nothing ever comes off the to do list, right? Because you just go, oh yeah, I forgot I wanted to do that. And it doesn't actually happen. So we miss opportunities to act on our goals all the time. So it's really about again taking a little time and thinking, okay, if I really want to get a promotion, these are the concrete steps I'm going to need to take in order to make that happen. When and where am I going to take those steps? Planning it out, when am I going to, I'm going to need to meet with my boss more regularly. Okay, when are you going to do this? When are those meetings going to happen? Break it down. And then it's amazing. We find that when people do this, when they take, they break their goals down into steps and add that when and where information like, and this is when I'm going to do it and this situation is when I'm going to do it. They're on average about three times more likely to reach the goal.

Sure, sure. So chunking the goal, having a roadmap, you know, I talk to my real estate investor clients about having a five year plan. What are the steps along that way? You know the, the old saying, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Most people, they look at these goals as some big thing out there, like in the distance and someday my ship is going to come in, rather than just the daily doingness of it.

The nitty gritty.

It's not sexy. All that nitty gritty is not sexy.

It's not sexy. It's not how we like to think, but it's how successful people do think and they make themselves because they see the results. They know that often. Just sort of intuitively they know, hey, when I do this, when I really break things down for myself and I say, okay, these are the steps and this is when I'm going to do them. And I plan all that out. They're much more successful. And we find, I mean, just to give you a fun example, there was a study that we did where we took a bunch of people who were all not regular exercises but they wanted to do and we said, okay. We took half of them and they were all joining a gym and we took half of them and we said, okay, when are you going to exercise each week? Because they all said, I want to exercise at least three times a week. And half of them we just said okay, when, when are you going to do it? And they could say whatever they wanted to. They sent me to Monday, Wednesday and Friday before work or whatever they liked. And then we came back a month later and thought to look at who was still exercising regularly. About 32% of the people who didn't make a plan were still exercising. 91% of the people who made a plan were still exercising. So, I mean, that's huge, right? Just from taking a moment to stop and think about, when am I actually going to do this? I want to exercise regularly. I want to meet with my boss more. I want to put away more money in investments each month. Okay, when is that going to happen? How much money are you going to put away? When are you going to do it? What's the system you're going to use? And be very firm about it, and you get typically like a 300% increase in success. I mean, it's just. They're amazing and they're so simple. Part of why I've gotten into doing all this blogging and writing is really like, when I read about these things and I started doing these studies, I thought, people have to know about this. This isn't hard. This is not a difficult strategy to use. And it's so effective. And it really gets right at what the. The real problems of goal pursuit tend to be. It's not that you lack ability. It's not that there's something wrong with you. It's that, you know, you're having trouble getting over that gap between what you want to do and actually doing it, which, by the way, we all have. And you just need the right information in order to help you kind of bridge that gap. And it really works.

Do you want to talk anything about self sabotage and why that occurs? Because, you know, I think that comes into play. It's kind of like what you said before. A lot of people know what to do, but they just don't do it. And, and you outlined some of the reasons for that. But yeah, you know, they also kind of shoot themselves on the foot along the way. Is that because maybe one feels that they don't deserve the outcome, that they don't deserve the goal?

That can happen. I think it can. That can happen. I think the bigger sort of the. When you look at the research on self sabotaging and self. Sometimes we call it self handicapping, right? When people kind of of set themselves up to fail, you know, why does that happen? One of the biggest predictors of that actually has to do with insecurity about ability. So you find in the classroom, for example, that students who are concerned that, you know, who believe that ability is sort of a fixed thing, right? You're kind of born with it or you're not. And they're concerned that they might not have enough will intentionally not study. And the reason they'll do that is because that way they know they're going to fail the test. But when they fail the test, they can blame it on not having studied, which psychologically is less painful than having to run the risk of actually studying really hard and then still failing and having to say it's just that I'm not smart enough. So we find that in general people self sabotage in these situations where they feel that if they really tried they would be able to judge something about themselves that can't be changed. Now again, that's wrong headed thinking because there's really almost nothing about ourselves that can't be changed. I mean, people have pretty stable personalities and things like that. But you know, in terms of abilities, there's nothing you can't improve on. So I think that's sort of part of the problem is that you kind of people who go into situations thinking you're either creative or you're not, you're either good with money or you're not, you're either a risk taker or you're not. And then they think if I try really hard in this situation, I'm going to find out what you know, I'm going to find out what I am and maybe the answer is not going to be good, so I'll just avoid that. And it's like, you know, it's trading one pain for another. But they find that the pain of failing is easier to swallow than the pain of really kind of revealing something about themselves that they would find deeply humiliating. And it's a shame.

That's really sad.

It is because you're always. We find that it's really one of the most, the biggest predictors of who handles difficulty well and who doesn't. Turns up to be this mental mindset that people have when they're performing any activity or kind of pursuing a goal. Whether they think it's about validating their ability or it's about sort of developing ability. So when people go into some situation, you know, a new job and they think of it as well, you know, I know I'm not going to be great at this at first because there's a learning curve, but I'm going to get better at it over time. And so when things are difficult, they handle that difficulty much more easily. It's not that upsetting to them because they kind of expected things to be difficult. But they see themselves as growing over time. Other people get into that new job and immediately think, everybody's judging me, everybody's judging me and I'm judging me. Can I do this? Do I have what it takes? And everybody else is looking at me and saying, do I have what it takes? And so now the whole thing becomes about do I have the ability or don't I? Rather than this is an opportunity for me to develop my ability in a new area, which is really exciting. And that mental shift turns out to be really, really powerful. And it's the people who feel they're being judged, who do the self handicapping and again, being judged by others or even by yourself, they want to avoid the judgment so they do something to themselves like not bother trying. And I think it is, it's a shame because you're always, every time you take that road, you're selling yourself short. And so one of the things we work with in schools a lot now, we've developed a lot of interventions trying to teach kids to think about intelligence and other kinds of abilities as malleable things. We're trying to kind of combat this sort of cultural story that's out there that we kind of think about people as high ability or low ability and sort of saying that's actually not what the evidence suggests, that's not how ability works. And we find that when we can get into situations and teach these kids, no, actually ability doesn't work that way, it can grow. You see amazing differences in their math scores, in their English scores. I mean, you just see them having a totally different attitude towards school. So hopefully over time, eventually we'll kind of get people embracing this idea that we have to put aside our old ideas about what abilities are like and then we'll hopefully see a lot of this self sabotaging behavior start to disappear.

Good points, good points. Well, how would you wrap this all up for people, Heidi? I mean, is there any actionable steps that you want to recap or things you didn't mention that can just help people get what they want, achieve their goals, be more successful and fulfilled?

As I said, I think that the very first thing is to sort of put aside this idea that the reason that you've been, you've had difficulty with something in the past has to do with something you lack, you know, some, some critical quality that you don't have. We just simply find that that is not ever the case. It really is about what you do and you don't do. And there's a lot of strategies I talk about in the book, they're kind of good for different kinds of things. There's willpower strategies you can use for resisting temptation, all kinds of different strategies for tackling different problems. But the most powerful things I can say right off the bat are really get specific about what you want to achieve. Really be able to answer that question. I'll know when I have succeeded when and have that a clear visual in your mind because that's going to again, and just engage all of that processing power of your brain that may have not been engaged before to help you address this problem. And then really when you break it down into the steps you need to take, really take that extra step and think about when and where you're going to take each step. And that's called if, then planning. So if I'm in this situation, this is what I'm going to do. If you actually take the time to do that, you're going to increase your chances of success about threefold. So it's the best five minutes you could possibly spend to increase your chances of reaching your goal.

Good stuff. Well, Heidi, where can people get the book and learn more?

Oh, as they say, anywhere books are sold, it's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. And I also have another short ebook that I just put out with Harvard Business Press a couple of months ago called nine Things Successful People Do Differently that also talks about sort of nine of these key strategies that people can use. And you can find that on Amazon as well.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Heidi. And did you have a direct website that you want to give out? Yeah, I do.

It's just my name. I have my website called the Science of Success. The address is www.Heidi Grant halvorson.com. and that's where I sort of I put all my blogging and videos and interviews and things. And so you can find lots of things that I've written about motivation across a whole bunch of different topics that, you know, definitely check it out.

Well, Heidi, thank you so much for joining us today. And I hope everybody has learned some good things that will help them be more successful and fulfilled and just happier in life in general. So thanks again for sharing this scientific research with us. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

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