Page 138 - The Power to Change Anything

Surpass Your Limits 127

didn’t keep my elbow in.”) Poorer shooters offered vague expla-
nations such as, “I lost concentration.”
The role of mini goals in maintaining motivation also
deserves attention. With certain skills, people are deathly afraid
that they won’t succeed. And once they do fail, they fear that
bad things will happen to them. As you might imagine, when
people predict that their actions will lead to catastrophic results,
these failure stories lead to self-defeating behavior. Individuals
begin with the hypothesis that they will never succeed and that
the failure will be costly, and then they look for every shred of
proof that they’re about to fail so they can bail out early before
they suffer too much—which they do anyway.
When fear dominates people’s expectations, not only do
you have to improve their actual skill, but you have to take spe-
cial care to ensure that their expectations of success grow right
along with their actual ability. But how? As we learned earlier,
simply using verbal persuasion isn’t enough to convince them.
(“Go ahead, the snake won’t bite!”) For example, in one line
of research scholars learned that you can teach dating skills to
shy sophomores, but the students need to see proof of constant
progress before they’re willing to admit that they’ve learned any-
thing useful or before they put the new skills into practice.
And where do people find this proof of progress? From
progress itself. Nothing succeeds like success. As people suc-
ceed, they learn through personal experience (the real deal for
changing understanding, which can be a powerful tool for
changing minds) that they actually can achieve their goals.
Unfortunately, skeptical people aren’t likely to attempt behav-
iors that they perceive to be risky, so they never succeed. Now
what’s a person to do?
Dr. Bandura points out that to encourage people to attempt
something they fear, you must provide rapid positive feedback
that builds self-confidence. You achieve this by providing short-
term, specific, easy, and low-stakes goals that specify the exact
steps a person should take. Take complex tasks and make them