Should I Share My Goals?

I've been teaching goal setting for years, and when I started, the research was pretty clear that sharing your goals publicly would help you maintain motivation and make it more likely that you would reach your goals.

It's worked for me for years, and I haven't questioned it. That is, until a client of mine really didn't want to share her goals, and insisted that the research had to be wrong. So I did a little digging to bring you an update.

I was pleased to find that there is research to support the upped commitment attached to sharing goals. This dissertation showed how using social media to publicly commit to a weight-loss goal increased accountability and improved outcomes by making failure more socially costly. It also reviewed studies that showed people who declare their goals publicly tend to stick with weight-loss behaviors more consistently than those who don't. Another study found that sharing goals with someone perceived as having higher status (like a mentor or supervisor), rather than with peers or anonymously, was associated with greater goal commitment and better subsequent performance.

What this says to me is that WHO you share it with counts almost as much as whether you share it or not, and I think that makes sense. We're less likely to blow off a goal if we know that someone we respect is paying attention.

However, there are studies with opposite outcomes. This one found that people whose intentions were “noticed” by others (compared with those whose intentions remained private) were less likely to follow through. The argument is that making a goal public gives you a premature sense of doneness: once you acknowledge the goal publicly, you feel a psychological sense of "I’ve committed,” and maybe even “I feel done” before taking any meaningful action. (This effect seemed especially pronounced when the goals were identity-related (“I am a lawyer,” “I am promoted to associate director”).

So... for some people and some kinds of goals, telling others may reduce the drive to act because the “feeling of progress” comes from social recognition, not actual behavior.

Based on the mix of findings, researchers are now suggesting that whether goal-sharing helps or hurts depends on a few key factors:

• Who you choose to share with matters. Sharing with someone who matters to you has more power than sharing with randos or people you don't respect.

  
  

• The kind of goal matters. If it's about who you want to become, public declarations may feel like fulfillment in themselves, reducing the incentive to take real action.

  
  

• Ongoing feedback/accountability helps more than a one-time announcement. For example, public commitments in health-behavior studies or publicly posted progress/tracking tend to reinforce sustained behavior better than a single declaration.

What this says to me is that instead of just throwing your goals onto social media and seeing what sticks, it's probably more effective to treat goal-sharing as part of a broader strategy: set specific, concrete goals, make implementation intentions, and, if you share, do so thoughtfully (with accountability and real follow-up).

(And coaches are great accountability partners. Just sayin'.)