Questioning your doubts about achieving your New Year’s goals, instead of remaining optimistic, could be a better strategy for achieving them, psychologists suggest in a new study.
Until now, studies have shown that doubting one’s own decisions when unsure about pursuing a long-term goal, such as New Year’s resolutions, can lower commitment and may lead to failure.
However, the latest research counterintuitively suggests that worrying about one’s own doubts over pursuing such goals is actually the key to success.
“What this study found is that inducing doubts in one’s doubts can provide a formula for confidence,” said Patrick Carroll, an author of the study published in the journal Self and Identity.
Dr Carroll, a psychology professor at The University of Ohio, assessed what happened when people worried about achieving an identity goal – a long-term objective centred on what kind of person one wanted to become.
He assessed particularly what happened when a person pursuing such a goal experienced a crisis-doubt, or moments of intense uncertainty, about whether they wanted to continue pursuing it.
In one of the experiments, 267 people revealed their crisis-doubt scale about their most important personal goal.
They responded on a scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” to statements like “I doubt whether I should continue striving for my goal or disengage from it”.
In the second unrelated experiment, half of the participants were asked to write about a time when they felt confident in their thinking, and the other half were asked to write about a time when they had experienced doubt.
All the participants were then asked to rate how committed they were to achieving their most important personal goal on a scale from “not at all committed” to “very committed.”
The findings revealed that the writing exercise in the second experiment made people feel more confident or more doubtful in their own thoughts about their goals, even when it was not directly connected to their goals.
Psychologists found that participants who felt doubtful about their goal, and also wrote about an experience of feeling confident, were less committed to achieving the goal.
However, those who felt doubtful about their goal – and then went on to write about an experience of feeling doubtful in their own thoughts – had higher levels of commitment toward their goals.
“On some level, it may seem that doubt would be additive. Doubt plus doubt would equal more doubt. But this study found the opposite: Doubt plus doubt equalled less doubt,” Dr Carroll said.
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