Personal goals are better to be private.

Why am I writing this article?
Since my childhood, I have observed that whenever I share my goals like waking up early in the morning, buying a new toy, studying daily etc with others, I always get this feeling of uneasiness as if my mind is reminding me not to expose my personal goals to others. Whenever someone asked me about my personal goals, I always feel confused whether to share my goals or not.

I realized that the feeling of uneasiness has a source, it is as if my mind is saying to me "Last time you made your goals public and they dint work out, so it is better not to tell this time".

And I am sure, each one of us has felt this feeling of uneasiness. Did you?

Lately, I came across some articles, research work which further solidified my conception that personal goals are better to be private. It prompted me to write an article on the same. So here it is.


We all have few goals which we would like to achieve in a fixed amount of time. Goals like reducing weight, preparing for something important, working out daily, quitting smoking etc. There is a misconception that if we make our goals public, there are higher chances that we will stick to it because others may help us in achieving our goals and because we would like to project our self-consistent image, we will have to show our commitment.

But that's not true practically, we have often realized that every time we made our goals public, they dint work out and in fact, there is a psychological reasoning behind it.

First of all, why do we set goals? The answer is to get satisfaction. And we know that to achieve a goal we need motivation and when we tell our goals to others, we achieve kind of false satisfaction. Because of this false satisfaction our motivation level goes down. By making our goals public our mind creates an Illusion Of Progress. It basically gives us a good feeling and our mind creates a social reality that we are more closer to our goal. But that's simply not the case, physically we are still at the starting point where we were. But because of illusion of progress we feel less motivated which basically takes us away from our commitment i.e. it widens the intention-behavior gap [Gollwitzer (2009)]. 

And finally if we fail our commitment we feel bad and lose some self-esteem with it, or we employ some kind of defense mechanism and start giving excuses for why things dint work out.

On the other side, if we keep our goals to ourselves, we are always in sync with reality. We only get satisfaction when we see ourselves making some actual progress. And finally when we achieve our goal, it adds up to our self-esteem and motivates us further.

So, personal goals are better to be private if we don't want our mind to trick us. Because our mind mistakes the talking for doing, and it's better to control it :)

References: 1. 

 2.  PM, Gollwitzer : When intentions go public: does social reality widen the intention-behavior gap (2010), Psychol. Sci. 2009 May.