When you create goals, do you tell others or keep them to yourself?
While many people love sharing their goals with friends and family as soon as they set them, it can sometimes be more beneficial to keep your goals to yourself. Working towards your goals takes motivation. As you build towards your dreams, it’s crucial to keep them safe from the attacks of haters and well-wishers alike.
Here are the top reasons why it is better to build towards your dreams in silence.
Avoid Judgment
When you set a goal and share it, you give others a chance to share their opinions. Sometimes, this can be helpful; they might give you feedback on what you can do to achieve the goal, act as motivators, or encourage you along the way.
However, sometimes our loved ones don’t understand our goals. They might give you a list of reasons why it is a bad idea or how difficult it might be to achieve it. They might tell you that it is too ‘big’ or there is too much competition. They project their own fears, insecurities, and past experiences onto you. Often, this is done to protect you and keep you safe. However, at the end of the day, it is your dream and your lesson to learn.
Negative feedback can demotivate you and discourage you from persisting in your goal, causing you to give up.
Stay Flexible
Another reason to keep your goals to yourself is so that you can stay flexible. A goal rarely remains exactly the same as it was when it was first defined.
For example, you might set a goal to go to the gym every day of the week. However, as the week progresses, you realize it is more beneficial for you to play a sport three times a week and go to the gym only four times.
If you share your goals with others, they may think that you are off-track to achieving your goal. While that may technically be true, you know that this is a more effective way to achieve your ultimate goal – to be physically fit. At this point it is easy to start second-guessing yourself and criticizing your movement away from what you initially said you would do. But is that helpful? Not at all.
Rather than wasting time and energy feeling bad or explaining to others why you are still on track, focus on actually achieving your goal.
You Feel Accomplished
When you set a goal and tell others, you trick your brain into thinking you have already achieved it. The feeling of talking about things you are working on lights up the pleasure center in your brain and gives you a “premature sense of completeness”.
Because you already feel accomplished, you are less likely to put in the work required to achieve your goal.
This is especially true when you receive praise for your goal.
For example, let’s assume you want to start a new business. You take some time to think of a new business idea, and you finally crack it. You tell your friends, and they congratulate you on this new business idea. The act of telling your friends about your amazing new idea, paired with them praising you on setting the goal makes you feel great! However, this makes it less motivating for you to actually get to work on the business, because you have already received dopamine, the ‘pleasure’ hormone.
Save Energy
Telling other people about your goals can take a lot of time and energy. You might have to explain why you’re setting this goal, how you’re going to doing it, and why it’s a good idea. If someone doesn’t agree with your goal, you then have to spend energy re-motivating yourself!
Rather than spending so much time and energy on explanations, what if you spent this time and energy on actually working towards your goal?
As exciting as it might be to share what your latest goal that you are working towards is, sometimes it can be much more beneficial to stay quiet until you build it up. Whether it is haters who don’t want to see you succeed or are jealous of you, or maybe even loved ones who just want to keep you safe, it is important to protect yourself and your dreams from any sort of attacks.
So, if you have a dream, start working towards it silently, and become your own biggest cheerleader. You can always bring others up to speed once you get to a certain point in the process.
