The anti-willpower plan to reach your goals

I've been working on my goals and resolutions for 2026, and it's made me realize how much my approach to goal setting has changed over time. Those changes have led to me reaching my goals and sticking with my resolutions much more consistently. So, I wanted to share my current process with you. Most people set goals something like this. Wake up earlier, build muscle, save money, find a relationship. This style has a number of very predictable problems. There's a real lack of specificity inside of it. There's no plan for how you're getting there. At least one of those goals, finding a relationship, isn't fully under your control. You can do a lot right and still not get the outcome that you want. And at least three of them, waking up earlier, building muscle, and saving money, are what I'll call struggle goals. They're framed in terms of taking away things we like, uh, sleep or spending money as examples, or doing things that we find difficult, working out or eating differently. Related to this, there's no motivation in those goals. Why do you want those things? Our behavior tends to follow two general rules. First, something called the law of effect. This is what's rewarded is repeated and what's punished is avoided. And then second, what's called the principle of least effort. All else equal. We usually choose the option that requires the least time, energy, or cognitive work. This means that we reach our goals by making the behaviors that move us toward them more rewarding and less effortful. In other words, we approach things by adding rewards and reducing friction. And we move away from things by reducing rewards and adding friction. Moving through these four steps has consistently helped me reduce the friction associated with my goals and has led to a lot more happiness along the way. And those four steps are setting smart goals, focusing on motivation, getting to the target, which I'll explain in a second, and then treating our resolutions as experiments. Step one, smart goals. There is a lot of ambiguity in the goals that I named earlier. How much earlier do you need to wake up in order to wake up earlier? How much money do you need to save? Fuzzy goals are really easy for us to procrastinate, and having something clear to aim for reduces our anxiety. If you're watching a video like this, you've probably already heard of smart goals. This stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound. And it's a way to turn fuzzy goals into clear ones. Specific means that the goal is clear and unambiguous. Measurable means that you can track progress using some kind of objective indicator like a number or yes or no. And achievable means that the goal is realistic given your life, your constraints. And uh relevant means that the goal is attached to larger things that you care about. Timebound means that the goal hey has a deadline. These are more general guidelines than firm rules. And some research suggests that smart goals aren't actually a good fit for some tasks, particularly those that involve a lot of creativity or exploration. But setting goals that check those boxes is typically a good rule of thumb. So let's start by making our goals a little more smart. We might set the time that we're waking up at, the amount of weight that we're trying to gain or lose, the number of dollars we want to save a month. Uh maybe something like improve my dating life over the next 3 months by taking a set of more specific actions like going to social events each week or spending time per day on dating apps. This is already going to improve your outcomes, but I've actually found that this whole thing gets better when we turn the whole process around with step two, focusing on motivation. You can apply the concepts here to almost any goal. So, let's take a simple one as an example. I want to wake up at 7 a.m. consistently. Why do I want to do this? And what are the bigger desires or wants or motivations that are underneath it? Maybe you're like me and you want to capture the most creative part of your day or be able to finish your work at a reasonable time or clock enough hours consistently so you feel just less generally stressed about your work tasks. Maybe it's more that there are certain things that you want to build time for like getting a runin or spending some time with your dog or whatever else is meaningful to you. Maybe you find that certain activities that you're trying to move away from uh tend to happen after 10 p.m. That's a big one for me. And forcing yourself to get up earlier is a good way to add some friction to those habits. Write down whatever it is for you. So that becomes your motivation. Capturing the most creative part of my day, being able to finish work at a reasonable time, and clocking enough hours so I feel unstressed about work tasks. I don't actually care about waking up at 7:00 a.m. This is a really important point. And if I focus on the 7 a.m. part, I'm narrowing in on the aspect of the goal that is both the highest friction and the lowest reward. I don't care about waking up at 7:00 a.m. for its own sake. I want to use waking up at 7:00 a.m. to fuel something else. And it just so happens that waking up early is a good way to do that. In other words, it's a means to an end. It's not an end itself. If waking up early isn't really the end goal, then why have I written it down as my goal? So, let's change it. Now, the goal is capture peak creativity, finish on time, and feel calm and caught up. And that kind of narrative shift might seem just sort of pedantic, but to me, this goal feels way more exciting. It's given me something to move toward rather than just a list of punishments that I'm thinking of as goals. And then we need a means that gets us there, which we've already found. So now our target is wake up at 7:00 a.m. consistently for a month. Step three, we're going to get to the target. It's easy to say, "I'm going to wake up at 7:00 a.m. consistently on January 1st when you're feeling yourself." And another thing entirely to do it on February 4th after you were out until 1:00 a.m. the night before. We achieve our goals by hitting targets consistently. And we hit those targets consistently by making them easier to hit. There is a lot of good content out there on this topic, some of which I've talked about in other videos. You want to make the first steps too small to fail. You remove decisions by standardizing your routines. You change your environment so the right action becomes the default. There's a lot to do here. These general ideas help, but you're going to get the most mileage out of customizing interventions based on your tendencies and vulnerabilities. So, using myself as an example, I have been an avid video gamer since I was about 8 years old, and my grandparents uh bought me a Super Nintendo, much to my parents chagrin. It is very easy for me to fall into a hole at 9:00 p.m. and suddenly realize that 4 hours of my life have vanished. And this behavior makes it much harder to wake up at 7:00 a.m. So, I need to put some bumpers around it. Hitting that 7 a.m. target is supported by turning my computer off at 1000 p.m. every night. It's also supported by putting my phone far away from me in the bedroom. So, when the alarm is blasting away, I need to actually get out of bed to turn it off. This also adds a lot of friction to my scrolling on my phone in bed behavior. So, we can write down those behaviors as a list of supported buys. So, we have supported by electronics off at 10 p.m., phone across the room, little things like that. And these behaviors create systems that make it more likely that we'll keep on hitting the target even when we don't have that much willpower. Step four, using your resolutions or your goals as experiments. Most people approach their New Year's resolutions with this very all or nothing framework. You wake up on January 1st. You pick a few changes you're supposed to stay committed to for the entire year. And if you miss a few days, it is very easy to slide toward, "Oh, why bother? I'll try again next year." A much more useful frame for people is to treat our goals as ongoing experiments rather than a kind of commentary on whether or not we're a good person. This means practically shortening the time horizon, learning from our misses, and then iterating. In other words, making changes. A year is just too much time for most people. I have gotten much more mileage out of running 30-day tests that help me learn what gets me to hit targets consistently. And then really importantly, does hitting those targets actually get me any closer to my goals? It's possible that waking up at 7:00 a.m. isn't actually a good target because I don't really care about it as I already said, and it turns out that I'm not any more productive when I wake up early. Why would I keep on sticking with that target if it's not getting me closer to my goal? Changing the frame and approaching our resolutions in this way helps us learn from what we would previously have called a failure. If you don't wake up at 7:00 a.m., it's not an indictment of your character. It means the supports weren't strong enough. If you wake up at 7:00 a.m. but still feel frustrated with your work life, maybe you just need to add a different target. The goal is to build a system that works for you over time. And the only way to do that is through regular self assessment. So, now we're going to add a checkpoint. We're going to check in on our target supports and progress toward our goal after 30 days. This check-in could include asking yourself some questions like how often did I hit the target on the days that I hit it? Did I get the rewards I cared about? What supported by behaviors helped me the most? And then when I missed a target, what happened? In order to answer these questions, we need to adopt a behavior that is going to support pretty much anything that you do in life, including every goal. Tracking. You need data. And the only way you're going to get it is by keeping some kind of a record. And you want to take that information and then turn it into a summary of what happened, what happened the previous month, what you might uh change based on what you've learned, and anything else you want to add to your process. For example, something like I hit the target on 18 out of 30 days. When I turned electronics off at 10 p.m., I hit it consistently. When I woke up earlier, I ended work earlier and felt calmer. Then finally, you might have something like turning the computer off at 10 is inconsistent, so I need to add a support that helps me. Let's go all the way back to our resolution. Remember, we started with that list of, you know, build muscle or lose weight and find a relationship and all of that kind of stuff. But now we have a very different looking goal. We want to capture peak creativity, finish on time, and feel calm and caught up. That's supported by a target. Wake up at 7:00 a.m. consistently for a month. That's supported by electronics off at 10 p.m. phone alarm across the room. And then we're going to track along the way. Finally, we're going to have a checkpoint, a 30-day review. If you did something like this, do you think you would be more or less likely to reach your resolutions? This kind of clear planning helps you design structures that support you so you still have a good chance of hitting your targets even when you're not feeling great. Turning your motivation into the real goal gives you something genuinely rewarding to focus on. It has totally transformed my relationship with goals in general. And when I treat misses now as a normal part of the process and as frankly an essential part of the whole thing because we're gathering information based on them, that makes it easier to be kind to myself and also to get back on the wagon. All right, if you've made it this far, here are my top recommendations if you try this. First, focus on the real end goal you're trying to reach. What's the motivation? How can you turn it into a goal? And what would make it genuinely exciting for you? Then second, could you start small with your targets and then increase difficulty over time? What is a target that's too small to fail? Third, you want to treat your misses as information. You didn't miss because you're a bad person. You missed because the system is not supporting you enough. How are you going to then use that information to strengthen the system? Fourth, think in terms of 7 to 30day experiments. And then fifth, and finally, this is the annoying one, track it to change it. You want to keep a detailed record of what you actually did, which many people find very frustrating cuz they have to kind of confront reality. If you do this for a year, you will be absolutely shocked at how far you go. It has been completely transformative to me. This has been one of the biggest changes that I've made to my life over the last 5ish years and I've gotten a ton of value out of it. I would love it if people tried it on and then let me know how that went for them. If you have any stories you want to share down in the comments, I would really appreciate that. It's always great to hear about other people's experience with this kind of thing. If you're already down there and you're wondering, hm, what should I do while I'm down in this comment section? You can hit the like button. That really helps me out. You can also subscribe to the channel. You can check out episodes of the Being Well podcast. And uh yeah, I hope you're having a great day. Hope you're having a great year. Hope you're making some progress towards whatever goals you have, including if those goals are just to live a really enjoyable, calm life and have a good year and uh you know, be kind to other people. So until next time, thanks for watching and I'll talk to you soon.

I’ve been working on my goals and resolutions for 2026, and it’s made me realize how much my approach to goal-setting has changed over time. Those changes have led to me reaching my goals and sticking with my resolutions much more consistently, so I wanted to share my current process with you. Key ideas: 0:00 Introduction 0:15 How most people set goals 1:00 What actually helps us reach goals? 1:53 SMART goals 3:31 How to focus on motivation 4:34 Most people pursue goals they don't care about 5:36 How to hit your targets 7:28 Using goals as experiments 9:00 Using checkpoints 10:38 Reaching your goals I'm not a clinician, and what I say on this channel is not medical advice. Subscribe to Being Well on: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5d87ZU1XY0fpdYNSEwXLVQ Who Am I: I'm Forrest, the co-author of Resilient (https://amzn.to/3iXLerD) and host of the Being Well Podcast (https://apple.co/38ufGG0). I'm making videos focused on simplifying psychology, mental health, and personal growth. Subscribe to Rick on YouTube: http://youtube.com/@RickHanson?sub_confirmation=1 Get Rick's Free Newsletters: https://rickhanson.com/writings/newsletters-from-dr-rick-hanson/ Follow Rick Here: 🌍 https://rickhanson.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/rickhansonphd You can follow me here: 🎤 https://apple.co/38ufGG0 🌍 https://www.forresthanson.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/f.hanson