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When we set a goal, most of us never follow through on it, let alone achieve it. Failing our goals is so common that New Year’s resolutions are almost seen as a joke: “Let’s see if I can stick to this one – bad track record so far, haha”.
Despite Nike telling us to “just do it” as if that were easy, we typically don’t stick to our goals despite our good intentions (hint: this phenomenon is called the “intention-behavior gap”)
What makes it so hard to stick with a goal and follow through with it? Why don’t we just do what we say we are going to do?
Let’s explore what psychological research has to say on the matter.
Is it normal to fail at a goal you set?
That’s what goal researcher Pascal Sheeran wanted to know.
He figured we could only achieve the goals we actually work on, the ones that make it off the pages in our journals and into the real world of messy action.
So he figured out that one way to find out how common it is to fail our goals is to see if we even take action on our goals at all.
How many goals are followed by any action at all?
Pascal Sheeran was serious about finding out how often we take the first steps with a new goal we set. Instead of conducting his own study, he analyzed 10 meta-analyses (aka 10 studies that analyze the results of many other studies.) Meta-analyses are a great way to answer research questions because they aggregate the findings of lots of other researchers.
The result? Only 28% of goals are followed by any action whatsoever This means about two-thirds of our goals never make it past the “I want to do this” stage.
In other words: If you had to bet on whether or not your friend would stick to their New Year’s resolution, bet on failure.
Forbes Study: Only 6% of people stick to their resolution
Every year, Forbes publishes a statistic on the success of New Year’s resolutions in America.
In 2024, they found that only 6% of people stuck to their goal for over a year.
Those are bad odds of success, right?
But why is it so hard to set a goal and stick to it?
Where there is a will there is a way. Or maybe not?
When researchers first started wondering about goal success, they thought surely our intention to do a certain behavior would mean that we would actually do it. There should be a strong correlation between wanting to do something (intention) and actually doing it (behavior).
See, in the beginning, researchers were optimistic and believed that if people set the intention to do something, they would actually do it. But it turns out the intention-behavior correlation is pretty weak, and so they had to come up with more and more elaborate models to explain how we go from wanting to do something (intention) to actually doing it (behavior).
And while there is a correlation between intention and behavior of about 30-40%1 , which feels quite high, judging from my work with clients – I’m a psychologist. If a client and I decide on a goal, I certainly don’t think we have a 40% success rate just because they want to follow through on it. It takes a lot more to succeed at a goal. Ingredients like careful planning and establishing strategic habits to put your goal on autopilot as much as you can.
While it’s helpful, intention alone really doesn’t predict what a person is going to do.
That’s why saying: “I will tackle the mountain of laundry today” doesn’t automatically mean you’ll end up with clean sheets by tonight. Humans procrastinate, we get distracted, and there are so many factors that influence what we end up doing. You get the idea.
The Intention-Behavior Gap
Researchers have been puzzled by the fact that we don’t do what we say we want to do so much that they gave it a name.
They called it the intention-behavior gap (sometimes also called the “intention-action gap”), and they didn’t like this gap at all. It was confusing.
Understanding the intention-behavior gap
The intention-behavior gap theory says that there is a weird gap between what we intend to do and the behavior we actually end up choosing. That gap is essentially where goals and good intentions go to die.
All of this confirms what you and I already know: Following through on a goal is hard.
Why Failing Our Goals Is So Common
So why is it that most New Year’s resolutions stay in our journals instead of turning into the before-and-after success stories we hope for?
There are several reasons why we fail most of the goals we set. Here are the ones I have been able to identify in my client work so far:
We choose the wrong goals (poor Goal Fit)
We choose goals that we don’t 100% believe in (poor Goal Trust)
We choose big goals and aren’t sure if we can do the work to achieve them (low self-efficacy)
We cram our intentions into the SMART goal-setting formula even when that makes the goal lose its meaning
We choose too many goals, get overwhelmed, and make little progress because we jump between projects all the time (no Goal Focus)
As you can see, it takes quite a few ingredients for a goal to be achieved in the end. Intention alone is not enough.
Summary
People generally don’t follow through on a goal just because they set one. Researchers call this the intention-behavior gap. Bridging that gap is our job when we are serious about a goal, but to do that, we have to be very careful with the goal we pick and what action plan we develop. The odds are stacked against us – which doesn’t mean setting a goal is hopeless, but it does normalize failure. It’s not you, it’s complicated.
- Armitage CJ, Conner M. Efficacy of the theory of planned behaviour: a meta-analytic review. Br J Soc Psychol. 2001;40(pt 4):471-499.
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