Revealing your ambitions and plans changes your self-perception to the illusion that you have already attained the identity toward which you are striving – and that is where your ambition ends.
Success is not a goal, but rather the moment when you have reached your goals. Many have tried to find the perfect recipe for success, and many have succeeded. However, on the road to success, there is one thing that keeps the successful going: goals.
Ranging anywhere from short-term to long-term goals, these steps and ideals toward which we strive and work hard to achieve are what makes the recipe for success. And no matter your profession, it is goals that make up the stepping stones to the top.
You may have heard people saying that you should never reveal your plans for success. Many think that this is just a superstitious or selfish claim that has nothing to do with your real ability to succeed.
However, psychologists will agree that speaking about your plans and intentions is indeed bad luck. While this has nothing to do with superstition, the very act of revealing your goals will lead to losing the necessary energy that you have had in the first place.
In a paper published in Psychological Science, researchers from New York University, Universitat Konstanz, and the University of Sheffield have shown how announcing your intentions regarding your future success ideals, in fact, wears those same intentions down.
They attribute this to the vital role of our identity goals. An identity goal is a goal which influences the way you perceive yourself – your concept of who you are. There are many identity goals, and one of them is your career choice.
Our aims for success are in fact part of the picture we create about ourselves of who we want to become one day – our identity goal.
The difference between the reality and the goals is one that requires work, and we are not satisfied until we reach that goal.
However, the studies have shown that once you announce this identity goal to others, you already start creating it in your head as if it already exists. It is because the people you announce this goal to start perceiving you as the person you want to become.
This perception that others have begun creating about ourselves actually starts fooling our minds that we have already achieved part of that identity goal. This makes our energy for that goal to start waning, and we eventually lose our grit.
It is no wonder that those who have been laughed at when announcing their ambitions and goals are usually the ones who succeed in achieving success.
The more convincing you seem about for what you want to become, the more people believe that you can – and they start seeing you as one.
The more they see you as being successful, the more you start perceiving yourself as being successful – and thus you stop working toward that success.
So, next time you have something planned, keep it to yourself and talk about it only when you have achieved it.
In the end, success is recognized without you saying anything about it. If you plan on bragging before you do anything, consider that you will not manage to do it (unless you are being laughed at).
Success comes quietly.
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Copyright © Curious Mind Magazine
Based on a work at http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Seifert_Michalski_When_Intentions_.pdf.
A professional writer with over a decade of incessant writing skills. Her topics of interest and expertise range from health, nutrition and psychology.