What’s your health goal? To lose weight, exercise more, cut down on alcohol, cut back on junk food, improve your time in a two-mile run? Whatever your aim, there’s a good chance that you’re following the common advice to set a reasonable, specific, numerical target—for instance, to drop two pounds per week or to work out for 30 minutes per day.
The problem is, if you fall short, you’re likely to get demoralized and give up. Yet finding the will to try, try again is key to success in reaching just about any type of goal.
So it’s very interesting to note what researchers found when they compared two different strategies for expressing personal goals in terms of numbers. As it turned out, one way was significantly better at encouraging people to stick to their guns.
RANGE RATIONALE
Participants included 45 women who were enrolled in a 10-week weight-loss program that involved weigh-ins and group instruction about healthy lifestyles. Participants set their own weekly weight-loss goals. However, half of the women were instructed to express the goal as a single number—for instance, two pounds. The other half were asked to express the goal as a number range—say, one to three pounds. Participants could change their single-number or range goals each week if they wanted to, but they had to stick with the type of strategy they’d been assigned throughout the study.
The rationale: Unbeknownst to the participants, what the researchers were really exploring was how these different number strategies would affect participants’ level of reengagement, meaning their willingness to keep on trying and not give up. After all, achieving almost any goal requires that a person commit himself to the pursuit of that aim not just once, but over and over again. A big factor influencing reengagement is the feeling of accomplishment that a person gets as progress toward the goal is made, because that feeling is highly motivating. Previous research has shown that such a feeling of accomplishment is most likely to occur when a person sees his goal as being both attainable and challenging.
That’s why the researchers hypothesized that expressing a goal as a range rather than a single number would be more effective. With a range, you get the best of both worlds—the low end of the range (say, to lose one pound) offers easier attainability, so you’re likely to enjoy some success…while the high end (say, losing three pounds) offers an ideal and a challenge that, if met, leads to justifiable pride.
With a single-number goal, however, you are forced into a compromise. For instance, that two-pound goal is not easily attained, so there’s a good chance you’ll fall short—and even if you lose a pound or a pound-and-a-half, you’re likely to feel discouraged. Yet if you lose the full two pounds, you may feel that because the goal was not sufficiently challenging, you do not deserve that highly motivating jolt of pride.
ENGAGING RESULTS
So what happened to the women in the study? Participants who set a range goal did a little bit better at losing weight, dropping an average of 0.89 pounds per week compared with 0.76 pounds in the single-number group. Much more important, though, was their level of reengagement. At the end of the 10-week weight-loss program, 80% of participants who had set a range goal reenrolled for another 10 weeks, signaling their willingness to continue trying to lose weight…while in the single-number goal group, nearly half of participants gave up on the weight-loss program and decided not to reenroll.
How you can put this to work: This range-setting technique can be helpful with various types of goals, the researchers suggest. Examples: You might set a range goal for the sit-ups you’ll do daily or the miles you’ll run this week…or for the number of bills you’ll deal with or the number of e-mails you’ll answer tonight. In such cases, where you’re trying to increase positive behaviors, the lower number represents the attainable end of the goal range and the higher number represents the challenge.
Remember, though—if you want to decrease negative behaviors, the higher number in your range represents the easier, more attainable goal while the lower number represents the challenge. For example, if you normally smoke 20 cigarettes a day, your goal range could be to smoke 10 to 15 per day. If you reach the challenging end and smoke only 10, good for you! But even if you reach just the attainable end and smoke 15, you’re still likely to feel successful and motivated to stay on track.
