Mind talk

4th October 2010, by Jacqui Lennon

Autumn is one of the most exciting times in the creative industry as it hales the beginning of two things - the final commercial push for our clients as they approach year-end, and the start of the planning process for the new financial year.

We painstaking draft plans every year and I often consider what we can do to ensure they go on to deliver maximum return.

So I was particularly interested to learn of research completed by a number of psychologists that challenges the conventional wisdom of how we should behave once we have developed new goals.

The commonly held belief is that goals should be shared because once they are, we are publicly committed to them and the fear of failure acts as a motivational force.

However, according to experts the opposite is in fact true.

They say that when you announce your intentions to others, your own mind as a business leader is tricked into feeling the task is already part complete and the wave of satisfaction you subsequently feel leaves you far less motivated to actually do the hard work of driving home the actions needed to ensure the goal is actually realised.

It’s a phenomenon called ‘social reality’, and the resulting recommendation is that if you have a goal you really want to achieve you need to keep it to yourself.

Of course, it’s impractical and too literal to actually adhere to this principal in the business world.

This aside, there’s a key insight amongst this theory - your mind is a wonderful, obeying instrument and therefore easily mistakes talking for the actual doing.

This perhaps then explains why only one in ten firms successfully manage to drive strategy throughout their business. After all, business success does not come from simply stating our annual goals, but from driving them through all actions, at all levels, on a daily basis.

A good analogy would be that planning is a fertilizer for business growth but it’s only the beginning of the process, not the end - don’t let your brain fool you into thinking you’re ready to enjoy the fruits of success too soon.