Imagine you want to increase your sales by 70 percent this quarter. Big leap, sure, but you think you can make it. If so, end the quarter up 67%.
How do you feel? According to research published recently in Psychological Science, you definitely feel disappointed.
Worse still, you’re much less likely to work to match, much less increase, these results in the next quarter.
Although a 67 percent increase was a huge increase in sales and revenue.
The reason? We tend to think of progress that does not meet our expectations, no matter how significant the progress may have been, as a total failure. Psychologists call this the “negative clustering” effect, in which the result is rejected when it falls short of a categorical reform, despite distinctions in improvement.
Let’s say you can never save money and you have a big goal this month: You want to save $ 1,000. Oddly, if you end up saving $ 900, $ 600, or “just” $ 300, everything looks the same: as if you failed. While $ 300 is good, $ 600 better and $ 900 pretty great, especially considering you’ve never been able to put money aside before. The difference between where you started and what you accomplished is huge.
But it doesn’t look huge, because you haven’t hit your $ 1,000 goal.
And that means you’re less likely to save money next month: As the researchers write, “When attempts to eradicate a problem fail, people may be ignoring smaller but critical steps that were and can still be done.”
That’s why people who decide to lose 10 kg in 30 days (which can be done) and yet “only” lose eight feel like a failure and are far less likely to continue eating healthier and exercising more. .
The same is true on a more global scale. Ask someone whose mission is to ensure that everyone in the world can read and write if they are happy with the progress made and will likely say no.
Although in 1820 only one in ten people could read, and today nearly nine out of ten are able to read. (And among today’s young population the chances are much higher as many of today’s illiterate people are relatively old.)
However, when your goal is 100 percent literacy … you certainly don’t feel like it.
A Tale of Two Charts
So how can you combat the negative grouping effect? How can you keep failing to achieve a goal, especially a huge goal, from feeling like a total failure?
The key is to look back and forth. Measuring yourself a goal is obviously valuable. Read also : health-department-celebrates-2022-pride. Strive to reach a goal, evaluate your progress towards that goal to change your approach, your strategies, your daily activities … goals are valuable as they inform the process you create to achieve it.
You can’t decide how to get there if you don’t know where you are going.
So definitely measure yourself against your goal.
But also be sure to look back and see how far you’ve come.
If your goal was to increase sales by 70 percent and “only” reach 67 percent, anyway: you have grown your business by a staggering amount. If you were hoping to lose ten pounds but “only” lost eight, anyway: you have lost a significant amount of weight. If your goal is total literacy and you’ve “only” increased the rate by 1 percent, anyway: that’s a noticeable increase in literacy.
Looking ahead, your “failure” is relative.
Looking back, your success is absolute: you have grown your business significantly. You are much thinner. You have helped 79 million people learn to read and write.
Use your goals to inform your processes. Use your goals to track your progress and make smart course corrections. Measure yourself against your goals.
But don’t forget to look back and measure yourself against the progress you’ve made, especially if your efforts aren’t up to par with your goals. Failing to hit a target simply means not being able to hit an arbitrary, and perhaps always unreachable, target.
Progress is real. Progress is tangible. Progress, no matter how small, is an achievement to be proud of – and use it as a motivation to keep making progress.
Because milestones are fun, but where you get to is all that really matters.
