MOVEMENT BEGINS WITH A DECISION
We all have something in mind that is waiting to be started.
Moving more. Learning something new. Working on an idea. Starting a project we have been putting off for a long time.
Setting the goal is often the easy part.
The difficult part is turning that goal into real action.
Because wanting to do something and actually doing it are not the same thing.
Psychological research has long been exploring precisely this gap.
A GOAL MAY NOT BE ENOUGH
In a meta-analysis published in 2006, Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran took a broad look at the relationship between goals and actions.
The researchers reviewed 94 independent tests, examining a body of evidence showing that simply setting a goal does not always guarantee that people will achieve it.
One of the key ideas was remarkably simple:
Deciding in advance when, where, and how we will act on a goal can make a difference.
In psychology, this is known as an implementation intention.
The basic idea looks something like this:
“I will move more.”
becomes:
“After I leave work, before I go home, I will walk for 20 minutes.”
The first sentence contains a goal.
The second defines the moment when action will begin.
Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis reported that these kinds of plans had a positive, medium-to-large effect on goal attainment.
Perhaps starting to move does not always require greater motivation.
Sometimes, it may simply require knowing where the first step will begin.
FROM DECISION TO ACTION
An earlier paper by Gollwitzer, published in American Psychologist in 1999, explained the foundations of the same idea.
People may know what they want and still struggle to get started, become distracted, or fall back into old habits.
Implementation intentions create an advance link between a particular situation and a particular behavior:
“When this happens, I will do this.”
When the alarm goes off, I will get up.
When I sit down at my desk, I will write the first page.
When I leave work, I will start walking.
Instead of waiting for the perfect moment, you define the point at which action will begin.
A goal that once seemed large can then become a more concrete next step.
THEN COMES REPETITION
Starting matters.
But the story does not end there.
Phillippa Lally and her colleagues at University College London followed 96 volunteers for 12 weeks to investigate how habits form in everyday life.
Participants chose an eating, drinking, or physical activity behavior and attempted to perform it each day in the same context.
The study found that as a behavior was repeated in a consistent context, automaticity increased over time.
But there was another important finding:
Not everyone progressed at the same pace.
Among participants for whom the model could be fitted, the time required to reach 95% of the estimated asymptote of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days.
In other words, it would not be accurate to speak of a single magical number of days in which everyone forms a habit.
Even more interestingly, missing one opportunity to perform the behavior did not materially affect the habit formation process in the study.
Missing one day did not mean the journey was over.
MOVEMENT DOES NOT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE BIG
Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about progress begins here.
We often associate movement with major change.
But movement can sometimes be much smaller.
Writing the first sentence.
Walking the first kilometer.
Making the first phone call.
Opening the first page to learn something new.
Trying an idea for the first time after it has been waiting for too long.
None of these small actions guarantees an outcome on its own.
But they all have one thing in common:
You are no longer only thinking about it.
You have started.
MOVE FORWARD
For MOTION, movement is not limited to physical motion.
Starting.
Starting again.
Building.
Learning.
Discovering.
Creating.
And continuing to move forward on your own path.
Every journey can move at a different pace.
Every goal can follow a different path.
Sometimes plans change. Sometimes a day gets missed. Sometimes you need to start again.
But there is a point where movement begins.
A decision.
Then one step.
Then another.
MORE THAN ENERGY MOVE FORWARD
SOURCES
Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Effects and Processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. DOI: 10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W. & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.674