Write your big goals as growth stories — for understanding and for connection

Describe your major life goals in narrative form, and check whether they include growing in understanding as well as in feeling good and close to others.

Pourquoi ça marche

In a three-year study, the kind of growth people emphasized when describing their major life goals predicted the kind of growth they later showed: goals centered on intellectual growth predicted rises in ego development, and goals centered on social and emotional growth predicted rises in well-being. One plausible reading is that the way a person frames a goal shapes what they attend to while pursuing it. Writing goals as stories makes that framing visible and lets you deliberately include both kinds of growth.

Comment faire

1. Choose two goals that matter most to you over the next few years.
2. For each, write a short paragraph: what you are after, why, and what you hope will be different in you if you get there.
3. Underline anything about learning, understanding, or seeing things in a new way. Circle anything about relationships, contribution, or how you want to feel.
4. If one kind is missing, add a sentence about it — not to balance the page, but to ask whether it belongs in what you want.
5. Reread the paragraphs every few months and note what you have actually been attending to.

Données probantes

Bauer and McAdams (2010) followed college freshmen and seniors for three years. Ego development rose for men and for those who started as freshmen, while subjective well-being did not change on average. Intellectual-growth goals (especially agentic ones) in narratives written at the start predicted increases in ego development three years later, and socioemotional-growth goals (especially communal ones) predicted increases in well-being, independently of Big Five traits. (observational)

The participants were college students, and the study shows prediction, not that rewriting your goals causes development. No study has tested this writing exercise as an intervention.

Sources

• Bauer, J. J., & McAdams, D. P. (2010). Eudaimonic growth: Narrative growth goals predict increases in ego development and subjective well-being 3 years later. Developmental Psychology, 46(4), 761–772.

Erreur fréquente

Writing goals only as outcomes — the job, the house, the number. The study coded what growth people emphasized, and a goal with no picture of how you hope to change gives you nothing to attend to along the way.