Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

Do you ever wonder how some people make success look so simple? In Succeed , award-winning social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson offers counterintuitive insights, illuminating stories, and science-based information that can help anyone:    • Set a goal to pursue even in the face of adversity    • Build willpower, which can be strengthened like a muscle    • Avoid the kind of positive thinking that makes people fail Whether you want to motivate your kids, your employees, or just yourself,  Succeed  unlocks the secrets of achievement, and shows you how to create new possibilities in every area of your life.   "A must-read." —Matthew Kelly, New York Times bestselling author of The Rhythm of Life "Both brilliant and practical, entertaining and rigorous." —Edward Hallowell, M.D., author of Married to Distraction "If you have goals, then you should read this book. If you manage others or are in a position to help others achieve their goals, then you have to read this book! It's filled with fascinating studies revealing the secrets of success." —Peter Bregman, CEO of Bregman Partners, Harvard Business Review blogger, and author of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done "Strategies people can utilize to help themselves achieve success." —CareerBuilder "Halvorson makes academic studies palatable by writing with clarity and interspersing personal anecdotes along the way." — Publishers Weekly HEIDI GRANT HALVORSON is a social psychologist, educational consultant, and most recently assistant professor of psychology at Lehigh University. She has received several grants from the National Science Foundation. In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals , she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals. Dr. Grant Halvorson is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and was recently elected to the highly selective Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She received her PhD from Columbia University working with Carol Dweck (bestselling author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success ), and her BA in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Introduction Why do we fail to reach our goals? Whether it's wanting to impress our bosses, find a loving relationship, straighten out our finances, or take better care of ourselves—we all feel that there is at least one part of our lives that is in real need of improvement. (And, in reality, it's usually more than just one part.) We want to do better, we even try to do better, but somehow we fall short or miss the mark—sometimes over and over again. So we go looking for something to blame for our failures, and most of the time we blame ourselves. We feel like we just don't have what it takes—whatever that is—to reach our goals. And we could not be more wrong . As a social psychologist, I've spent years studying achievement. I've carefully observed thousands of research participants pursue goals at work, in the classroom, on the playing field, and in my own laboratory. I've asked people to fill out weeks of daily diary reports, telling me all about the goals they pursue in their everyday lives. I've reviewed hundreds and hundreds of studies on goals and motivation. And I've come to a few conclusions, two of which I'll share with you now. Most of us blame our failures on the wrong things. Even very smart, accomplished people don't understand why they succeed or fail. Before I started studying this for a living, my intuitions about achievement were no better than anyone else's. I thought that I was good at school and disastrous at sports because I was born that way. I wasn't—actually, no one is simply "born that way." I had a lot to learn. Another conclusion I've reached after all these years of studying achievement is that anyone can be more successful at reaching his or her goals. Anyone can. I really can't emphasize that enough. But the first step is to put aside your beliefs about why you've succeeded or failed in the past, because they are probably wrong. And the second step is to read this book. You may not be aware that the government keeps track of this, but on its website www.USA.gov, you can find a list of the most popular perennial New Year's resolutions Americans make. On that list, you probably won't be surprised to find both "lose weight" and "quit smoking." Every January, millions of people—and like me, you may be one of them—have set one of these two goals for themselves, vowing that this is the year that they will finally get healthy, fit into their skinny jeans, or stop spending a small fortune on cigarettes. According to the latest reports issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), two out of three Americans are overweight, and one in three is obese. The majority of thes