Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
Question your doubts about achieving your goals new yearGiving up optimistic goals may be a better strategy for achieving them, psychologists say in a new study.
So far, research shows that when you are unsure whether to pursue long-term goals, you will doubt your own decisions, e.g. new year resolutionswhich reduces commitment and may lead to failure.
However, new research counterintuitively suggests that worrying about your own doubts about pursuing these goals is actually key to success.
“This study finds that raising doubt within doubt can provide a formula for confidence,” said Patrick Carroll, author of the study published in the journal. Self and identity.
Dr. Carroll, a professor of psychology at Ohio University, assessed what happens when people worry about achieving an identity goal—a long-term goal centered on who the person wants to be.
In particular, he assesses what happens when someone pursuing this goal experiences a moment of crisis doubt or intense uncertainty about whether they want to continue pursuing it.
In one of the experiments, 267 people revealed their level of crisis doubt about their most important personal goals.
They responded from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” to statements such as “I wonder whether I should continue working toward my goal or give up on it.”
In a second, unrelated experiment, half of the participants were asked to write down a time when they felt confident about their ideas, while the other half were asked to write about a time when they experienced doubt.
All participants were then asked to rate their level of commitment to achieving their most important personal goals on a scale from “not at all committed” to “very committed.”
Findings showed that the writing exercise in the second experiment made people more confident or more skeptical about their ideas about their goals, even if it was not directly related to their goals.
Psychologists found that participants who felt doubtful about their goals and wrote about confident experiences were less willing to achieve their goals.
However, those who felt doubt about their goals—and then went on to write about the experience of doubting their ideas—had higher levels of commitment to their goals.
“In a way, doubt seems to be additive. Doubt plus doubt equals more doubt. But this study found the opposite: Doubt plus doubt equals less doubt,” Dr. Carroll said.