Making Your Dreams Come True With Self-Control
January 7. We are one week in 2021. Exactly the time that most ambitious New Year’s resolutions slowly start to fade already.
Most people did start this year with good hopes again and with many ambitious goals. But how do you make sure you will stick to them? We give you some motivational video and some scientific little trick in our blog below!
This week we are diving into the direction of a ‘’Better World’’ and more specifically into the subject of free will. A video from Motiversify about discipline focuses deeply on taking 100% control of your own life. If you did just watch this video as well it is evident that all of the video is about self-control: it states that self-discipline is equal to self-love and that the road to sustain happiness is to discipline your behaviour.
So the question that remains is: to what amount is it indeed possible to have an influence on your decisions by applying self-control and discipline? Is it really so flexible and ‘makeable’ as the video claims it to be? Or is the world in fact not that easy as portrayed here and are there maybe some other factors involved as well?
To find a solid answer to this complicated question we went on an explorational journey regarding goal setting and self-control and we did find some interesting articles regarding your daily choices. First of all, to improve things in order to create a ‘better world’ or on a more personal level a ‘better life’ it is important to know what your personal goals are. A goal is a cognitive representation or a desired state; our mental idea to how we would like things to turn out (Fishbach & Ferguson, 2007) (Kruglanski, 1996).
Your goals could be abstract goals but preferably goals are clearly defined goals. Thus, keep in mind to set specific goals that are ambitious, but attainable: research of Hull (1932) about behaviourism showed that animals expend more effort once they approached a reward. And… the same mechanism works with humans!
Underlying to all of these goals is your own motivation – the reason why you are striving to reach these goals. This is why it is very important to search for your why’s before you are deciding your goals for yourself. What is the point of setting very ambitious goals in the end when they are not even aligned with what you really want?
Once you decided your specific, reasonable goals that are aligned with your own underlying motivation you will soon notice that there are many distractions on the way to reaching your goals. And this is the point where self-control and discipline comes in. Self-control simply means to override an impulse in order to attain a higher goal.
A lot of times the case with self-control is that there are internal conflicts between short-term and long-term benefits. Hofmann, Strack & Deutsch (2008) did research about this phenomenon and described that human being both use impulses as well as rational decisions.
The solution? A feedback loop! This is a very useful way to check if you are giving in too much to your impulses or if you are actually applying self-control the right way. Measure every day the difference between your actual and your desired state and watch your growth like never before!
We want to wish you a great 2021 and we hope you are able to fulfil many of your goals and dreams!
