Are you still keeping your New Year’s Resolutions? And/or working toward the goals you set for this year? Or did your plans flop? If you’re thinking they flopped, you need a new way to set goals — one that motivates you to follow through instead of breeding self-criticism.

Why do you think the plan flopped?

If you think your plan “flopped,” your attention is in the wrong place — on self-criticism, not on what you need to do to achieve your goals! Self-criticism is a great distractor. It makes it seem like you know exactly what your problem is, when in fact it obfuscates the real problem.

For example, sometimes a goal needs to be dropped, and it’s not a flop. If you or a family member gets seriously ill, you can and should drop some commitments so that you can put sufficient attention to the health issues. When it turns out that working on your goal is not practical, you should decommit from it.

If you are thinking your plan flopped, but in 20:20 hindsight your goal needed to be dropped, there is a problem with your goal-setting process. You’re probably setting goals as absolutes. But this means that even if something valid gets in the way of pursuing it, the goal will hang over you as an ongoing commitment. Since you can’t work on it, this is a prescription for unearned guilt.

If you remain committed to a goal, you will feel guilt if you don’t work on it. This will happen no matter how good your reasons are for not working on it. That’s the way the memory-affect system works: setting a goal registers it as personally important to you. Emotions are then generated automatically based on that personal importance. If you are not doing what you have stored as personally important, then self-critical thoughts will be triggered and you will feel guilt.

Guilt is a great demotivator. It is ennervating. It makes you want to curl up in a little ball and avoid the world. This is a motivational disaster. It undercuts your motivation to pursue the other values you hold, and if unchecked, it can lead to full-fledged depression.

Experiencing guilt is no fun. But the consequences of unchallenged guilt are much worse than the unpleasantness involved in examining whether guilt is earned or unearned. So, if you are thinking that your plan flopped, you need to investigate what happened. Was it proper to stop working toward your goal? You should not set or maintain goals that you cannot pursue. That is a motivation killer. If you are not pursuing the goal, your first question should be: should this really be a goal? You need to go back and validate your goal using your goal-setting process because the situation may have changed.

Did you get new information?

When you investigate why you aren’t pursuing your goal, you may discover that you had a mistaken assumption in your plan. That’s why it “flopped.” This doesn’t mean you should give up the goal; it means you should pivot.

For example, a Thinking Labber recently pivoted on her goal of creating an in-person book discussion group because she discovered that her target group couldn’t read the book in English. (It required too much vocabulary.) Moreover, the Spanish translation of the book wasn’t good enough for her purposes.

This was information she didn’t have when she set the goal and wouldn’t have gotten if she hadn’t started working toward the goal. She dropped her goal guilt-free. Then she figured out a different book-related project that could achieve a similar deeper purpose. It has a completely different set of tasks and deadlines, but it is another way to share this book.

In one sense, she didn’t drop her goal because this new project is just a different means to an end for the same deeper goal. But in another sense, she did drop her goal — like a hot potato — when she discovered it was not practical.

But in no way did her plan “flop.” It was by following her plan to reach out to people that she discovered the problem with the plan! More thinking at her desk would not have made the difference. She needed action toward the goal to discover this issue.

A pivot is absolutely justified when you discover the original plan is not doable. You should never feel guilty about pivoting. Nor should you think of it as your plan “flopping.” If you think your plan flopped, but in hindsight you see that you could not have pivoted effectively without the plan, then you are being unjustly self-critical. The guilt triggered by that self-criticism will get in the way of pursuing your new plan!

On the other hand, maybe your goal-setting process is at fault. With 20:20 hindsight, are you certain you knew better? That with a bit more planning, you would have avoided this problem? Planning is part of a goal-setting process. A good goal-setting process includes contingency planning so that you avoid all avoidable problems. This makes a huge difference in your motivation. When you’ve done due diligence in the goal-setting process, you feel curious rather than guilty if things don’t work out. You are ready to figure out plan B.

A proper goal-setting process takes into account that you are not omniscient. Things may happen that are outside of your control. Or you may learn something new. In these cases, a good goal-setting process helps you regroup rather than criticize yourself.

Or do you think you “just need to follow through”?

On the other hand, maybe you think that the self-criticism is totally justified. When you investigate the roots of your guilt, you conclude that the problem was that you didn’t follow through. You have the right goal and a good plan, but you just didn’t put in the effort.

I would challenge even this conclusion. The purpose of a goal is to guide and motivate action. If you weren’t motivated to follow through, then there is a problem with your plan or your goal. Lack of motivation is a predictable problem in pursuing any goal! A good goal-setting process helps you plan for this contingency. Predicting your motivation and planning accordingly is a big subject, which I will discuss in another article. The short version is you need to make sure that the actions you take will have a payoff, even if they don’t succeed the way you hoped and you need to pivot. With an appropriate goal-setting process, you can plan every step you take to be worth it. Then if you are not motivated, you know there is some new information that you need to identify in order to motivate action toward this goal!

No planning process guarantees success. But if you are criticizing yourself for “flopping,” you need a new goal-setting process. A good goal-setting process motivates you to act without deluding you into believing that nothing can go wrong or triggering guilt when you discover relevant new information. New information is progress, not flopping.

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I have a lot to say on this topic. There are two major self-study courses in the Thinking Lab on how to set goals and plan so that you are motivated. I coach people through this process in my Launch program. If you are interested, I have a freebie on “Set Goals that Motivate” in which I explain the basics. I hope you can join me.