Blog #6: omg, goalz

*blows thick layer of dust off of this blog* HELLO?!? IS THIS THING ON????

 Sorry for the prolonged absence, but I’m BACK. And this time, I’ve got a DOCTORATE.

Last month, I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis and submitted my dissertation! Writing a dissertation is no joke, and it’s the main reason why I haven’t written a blog in like 8 months lol. There were a few months there where I put in 12 hour days, 7 days a week and was STILL falling behind and not meeting deadlines. And, to be honest, the last thing I wanted to do during my short breaks from research and writing was to do MORE research and MORE writing for this blog. Hence, the radio silence here.

Buuuuutttt now that I’ve completed the toughest goal I had set for myself to date, I’ve had some time to relax and regroup and get back to, like, life and hobbies and stuff! I’m really excited to have free time to dedicate to writing-for-fun again!

The topic of this blog is Goal-Setting. Actually, I started planning to write this blog just before New Year’s 2021. I figured the New Year would be a good time to write about goals because it’s a super common time for people to set goals for themselves. Dec 2020-Jan 2021 was coincidentally also around the time where things kicked into overdrive for my thesis projects, so this blog got pushed to the back burner until I finished. Now that we’re closer to New Year’s 2022 than 2021 (yikes lmfao), maybe the ~New Year’s Resolution~ aspect of this blog it won’t be relevant anymore. Let’s be real though, you can set goals for yourself whenever you want! And, since I just completed this big goal of mine and I’m looking forward to what’s next, maybe it’s still a good time to talk about goal-setting!

Goal Setting Theory, as described by Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham (source) has been a topic of behavioral research for decades. This field, which is typically studied in the context of the workplace, characterizes the many factors that go into setting, executing, and achieving goals, ranging from studies that explore the effectiveness of goal setting, to defining different mediators of goals and the relationship of goals to wellbeing. Now, this type of research is a Social Science – which is totally not where my strengths lie (both because my educational background is in physical/biological science and also because as an introvert even the word “social” makes me nervous lol). So, this blog post isn’t really a comprehensive summary or a thoughtful, constructive critique of the theory. It’s just a collection of things that I read about that made sense in my brain, and that I think will be helpful to me (and hopefully you, too!) when I set goals in the future!

Studies exploring Goal Setting Theory (which are further summarized here and here) have claimed that performance is improved when specific, as opposed to vague, goals are set. However, this greater performance (the definition of which, I guess, is subjective) is also dependent on whether the person is committed to achieving the goal, if the goal is within the person’s ability to attain, and if they have conflicting goals. The goal: “I will read 30 books in the next year” will result in a higher performance than the goal: “I will read more books”, as long as I really do want to and am willing/able to make time to read more, I have access to books that I can read, and I haven’t set a previous goal of never reading a book again.

With these conditions, studies have also shown that there is a positive relationship between goal difficulty and task performance. The harder the goal (within reason), the better you perform. Generally, harder goals also tend to increase motivation and wellbeing or affect. Tough (but attainable) goals are motivating because you usually need to put in more effort to achieve them, and once you do achieve them, you feel good because of all that effort you put in to get to that point!

Setting a deadline is also a motivating factor in working towards a goal. With deadlines in place, you’re more likely to work at an appropriate pace – especially if the deadline is quickly approaching. (Anecdotally – I totally found this to be the case when writing my thesis. When my research progressed to a certain point, I gave my committee a four-week notice to submit my dissertation. From that day on, I was more motivated than ever to wake up and write every day!).

Goals are moderated by a few different factors, one of which is feedback. While working towards a goal, receiving feedback helps you to evaluate your progress, so you know how close or far you are to achieving your goal. If the feedback isn’t quite where you’d want it to be, it gives you a way to evaluate your current methods and approaches for achieving your goal – what’s working well, and what’s not working so well? Receiving feedback while working towards a goal provides an opportunity to reflect and improve on these methods, in order to improve performance and increase our chances of achieving what we set out to do.

One last goal-oriented tid-bit that I found interesting is that Learning-oriented goals, as opposed to Performance-oriented goals, tend to result in better performances. One of the examples provided in this review summarized a study which showed that students who had a learning-oriented goal (i.e. “I want to learn how to do X”) generally had more success, in the form of a higher GPA, than students who had a performance-oriented goal (i.e. “I want to get a GPA of Y”). To me, this seems like maybe we should frame our own goals based on how the outcome will benefit us internally, as opposed to how the outcome will stack up against others externally.

I have professional goals that I will be setting soon (I just started a new job as a postdoctoral research scientist!), and I also have some personal goals to set, too. I’ll be keeping these techniques outlined in the Goal Setting Theory in mind as I do so!

One new goal I am setting is: I’m going to post on this blog every weekend! The specific topics and themes will change from week to week, but I’ll always be talking science of some sort! I really enjoy researching and writing about new subjects and ideas (… new, to me at least lol), and I want to continue building my science communication skills through this medium. I hope you’ll tag along for the ride! As I set this new goal for myself, as you may have already noticed, I’m changing the title of my blog from “Science Communication with Sam” to “Sam-Splaining Science” (it’s like mansplaining, but not patronizing lol).

If you have any goals you’d like to set (personal, professional, or otherwise), I hope you consider these aspects of the Goal Setting Theory while making and working towards them! And, if you feel so inclined, please reach out and share your goals with me! I’d love to hear from you and provide moral support if/whenever you need!

Thanks for reading, friends!

See you next weekend!

-s