The good news is you finally made a change after a long period of hard work.  The bad news is you have to keep it.  Sometimes you can get so caught up in getting over a hurdle to reach a goal, that when you finally get there, you feel a let down and an overwhelm.  As change is a process, you don’t just stay changed!  It takes long term commitment and effort to change and then keep it, and this can be frustrating.  But recently I came across an idea by a researcher named Robert Eisenberg that gave me some inspiration about how to keep the momentum when making a change.

Eisenberg called his theory “Learned Industriousness” and it states:  If an individual is rewarded for putting a large amount of effort into an activity, the sensation of high effort takes on secondary reward properties that lessen the effort’s general aversiveness.  In response, reward for high effort involving one or more activities increases the subsequent effort exerted in other activities.  

Yeah, what?  Let me make it simpler.  If you work hard at something you are more likely to achieve a better outcome than if you don’t.  So then, we associate working hard (what Eisenberg calls industriousness) with success and improvement, which makes it easier to work hard at other things because we feel good about our effort having the possibility of success.  The act of working hard itself has a reward component to it; we feel good about our effort and therefore are more likely to stick with it, again reinforcing success.  It is a positive feedback loop of sorts.

This concept of Learned Industriousness is basically the opposite of a theory you may have heard before, and I have written about in the past, called “Learned Helplessness.”  It was posited by Martin Seligman as a theory of depression many years ago.  In summary, if a person experiences aversive conditions in which they have no control or way to stop it, the person learns to stop trying and gives up.  Their failure to have impact generalizes so that they assume that in other areas of their life they will have no ability to make a difference.  In other words if people can’t achieve something, they stop trying, and assume that they are not capable of making any changes at all.  The idea of helplessness becomes reinforced, because the less they do, the less they achieve.  

So, how does this help us with change?  If you combine the theories of Learned Industriousness and Learned Helplessness, you can see how important it is to set goals that are both hard to do and yet, achievable.  If we choose a goal that is too easy, we will lose the reinforcement of the hard work that becomes associated with the effort and discipline required to do it.  If we pick goals that are too difficult, we can easily become dejected, feeling that no matter how hard we try, we will fail, so why bother.

Take weight loss for example, as it’s a challenge most all of us can relate to.  Many people begin a journey of weight loss setting their dream weight as the goal.  Inevitably they hit plateaus and some setbacks, making the dream weight feel unachievable.  How many times have you given up on your eating plan because you tried really hard and after days and days of logging your food and watching your calories, you felt so far away from your goal weight?  You started to feel that no matter what you did, you would never be able to reach your desired weight.  You felt helpless and powerless and give up, as it seemed more painful to try with no result than to not try at all.

In contrast, if you set goals that move you in the direction you want to go and give you accomplishments as you get there, you feel a sense of success.  And the more varied your goals, the more ways you can experience success.  For example, instead of focusing on your dream weight, you set the goal in several areas that will be a moderate challenge, such as losing 5 pounds, running a 5 k, and eating more fruits and vegetables.  In this way you give yourself the opportunity to achieve success and thus associate your industrious effort with a rewarding sense of accomplishment.  It makes it much easier to stick to your plans because you feel a sense of control and associate your hard work with a positive outcome that increases your motivation to work at it.

In thinking about this continuum of goal difficulty versus the effort required to have some success, it makes me think about all the ways it can be applied.  As teachers, parents, or in any role of leadership, setting people up with the right amount of challenge is an important element of supporting motivation and effort.  But also within ourselves, having goals that stretch us to grow but don’t overwhelm ourselves is important.  When we have unrealistic expectations, we set in motion a chain of learned helplessness.  But when we acknowledge our successes, we reinforce the effort we put into getting there.  So, the next time you reach a goal and feel challenged at the idea of going further, remember that just by making a change you have reinforced the process and made it way more likely to keep it up.  So celebrate and acknowledge the effort it took to achieve your success.  Enjoy your hard work and it will make it easier to work hard again.  Now just look at you, you industrious little go getter!