How confident are you about your goal commitment? When you’re uncertain about your commitment, you can sustain your motivation by looking at the glass half full. What have you already achieved? When you’re committed to a goal, the glass half empty will keep you going. Ask yourself what is left to be done.

These examples illustrate three traps in setting and framing a goal: framing it as a means to another goal instead of the end goal itself, setting a goal that is too specific or concrete instead of an abstract goal, and setting a goal in terms of something you wish to avoid rather than something you wish to approach.

Applied to motivation, cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we tend to adopt goals that match our past actions and abandon goals that are a mismatch.

Finally, pursuing approach and avoidance goals feels different. Successfully pursuing an approach goal will make you feel happy, proud, and eager. Failing to pursue an approach goal will result in feeling sad and depressed. For example, when I got a promotion at work, I felt proud. In contrast, successfully pursuing an avoidance goal makes you feel

These challenging targets motivate you because when facing a difficult task, you recruit resources, or energize yourself, to meet the upcoming challenge. The expectation that the task you’re facing will be difficult—but not impossible—results in shifting more mental and physical energy to do

Regardless of whether you’re conscious of your mental preparation, you’re mostly energized when expecting a difficult but not impossible task. Easy tasks don’t require preparation, and for impossible ones, you don’t bother. You give up. But when people prepare to meet a medium challenge, their motivational system gets geared up. They’re energized.

To determine the degree to which a given activity is intrinsically motivating, we should therefore ask: To what extent does pursuing the activity feel like achieving a goal rather than a step toward achieving a goal?

Overall, a nuanced understanding of the approach/avoidance distinction implies that, once you realize which goal type is more effective for you and your situation, you can best set your goal. Absent such personalization, the general rule is that, for many of us under most circumstances, defining our goals as approaching a state of success and good

Powerful goals feel worth the price tag—they pull you toward your greatest wish. And in order to pull you, a goal has to feel more like an aspiration and less like a chore.