Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.d

Author:Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.d. [Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.d.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101475157
Google: Bo6TJfLipqEC
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-12-23T08:00:00+00:00

How the Goals You Are Given Become Your Own

The other great thing about giving people a sense of choice and autonomy when you assign them a goal is that it is by far the best way to get them to eventually freely adopt the goal as their own. Psychologists refer to this process as internalization. It is what happens when people take externally based rules and requests and come to personally endorse them as values. It’s what happens when children embrace the ideals and advice of their parents as their own. It’s what happened to me, when I went from being someone whose mother had to yell at her about tracking mud in the house to someone who yells at her own daughter for tracking mud in the house. Along the way, I internalized my mother’s reverence for cleanliness and her goal of keeping a clean house. (Well, not completely. I still don’t live up to my mother’s standards. But she’s German, and in my experience Germans take cleanliness to a whole other level. There was no surface in our house you couldn’t eat off of—not that you were actually allowed to eat anywhere other than the table. I don’t think I even knew what dust looked like until I went to college. But I digress.)

Internalization is facilitated when our basic needs are supported. It occurs when we are experiencing feelings of relatedness to others—be they our parents, our friends, or our employers. It also requires that you feel competent with respect to the value being internalized—that it is something you can live up to. The main reason that my cleanliness standards aren’t quite as high as my mother’s is probably that I can’t actually pull it off. (I suspect there is magic involved.) Feelings of relatedness and competence are greatly enhanced when we are able to understand the rationale behind the value—in other words, when someone explains why the goal is so important. Understanding is absolutely critical for internalization. Excessive controls or pressures can disrupt this process, robbing individuals of their sense of autonomy and ensuring that the goal remains something they pursue only if they have to. In my case, my mother not only went to great lengths to explain to me the value and importance of cleanliness (including many references to “what people will think”), but she also made me responsible for cleaning my room entirely on my own. Keeping my room looking nice was something I came to be proud of because I had done it all by myself, until eventually it had nothing to do with Mom, and everything to do with me.

Does that matter? You bet it does. Obviously, if a goal is internalized, you get all the benefits that go along with increased intrinsic motivation (i.e., creativity, deeper processing, better performance, enjoyment, increased desire to work). You also avoid the hassle of having to provide rewards, punishments, or constant monitoring to bring about the behavior you are after. But internalization has another important benefit—we achieve greater well-being, greater happiness , from the goals we embrace as our own.

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