Whose Goal Is It? What the 1999 Self-Concordance Study Found

Goals you pursue for your own reasons get more effort and are more likely to be reached; goals you pursue out of guilt or pressure get less of both, and reaching them doesn’t make you much happier. That is the core finding of the self-concordance model, published by Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot in 1999 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It is a better explanation for a lot of abandoned goals than “lack of discipline.”

What did Sheldon and Elliot actually study?

The paper is titled “Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model” (volume 76, pages 482 to 497). Across three studies, Sheldon and Elliot used college-student samples to track personal goals over time.

Participants listed goals and rated why they pursued each one. The reasons came from self-determination theory, which sorts motives along a scale of how much the goal feels like yours:

• External: you do it because someone or something forces or rewards you.
• Introjected: you do it to avoid guilt, shame or anxiety.
• Identified: you do it because you see its value and endorse it.
• Intrinsic: you do it because it’s interesting or enjoyable.

Goals driven by the last two are “self-concordant.” The first two are controlled. The model then predicts a chain: self-concordant goals attract sustained effort, sustained effort produces attainment, and attainment raises well-being, but only when the goal was your own. A goal reached for controlled reasons doesn’t deliver the same lift, because the psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness don’t get fed by doing something you never wanted to do.

I couldn’t check every sample size against the full text, so I’ve left them out. The chain itself is the part to remember, and later work has kept testing it, including a 2004 paper by Sheldon and colleagues covering four cultures.

Why would a borrowed goal fade?

Think about what a controlled reason needs in order to work. Guilt only motivates while it’s loud. An outside expectation only motivates while someone is looking. The model’s claim is that effort on these goals depends on that pressure staying switched on, while effort on an owned goal comes from the person.

You can see this at 6:00 a.m. A goal like “become a morning person” is a good test, because the alarm doesn’t care why you set it. If the real reason is that a podcast host and your sister both seem to think mornings are virtuous, the part of you that decides whether to get up has no stake in the outcome. It will take the extra nine minutes. A goal like “have an hour before the house wakes up to write” has someone inside it who wants the hour.

The practical reading is blunt: a goal you would never have chosen yourself is a goal your brain has little reason to wake up for.

Does it matter if the goal is “avoid” instead of “approach”?

Separately from self-concordance, a research line from Andrew Elliot and colleagues looks at approach goals (moving toward something good) versus avoidance goals (steering away from something bad). Elliot, Sheldon and Church (1997) in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin examined avoidance personal goals in relation to subjective well-being, and Elliot and Church (1997) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology built a hierarchical model of approach and avoidance in achievement settings, where avoidance-flavored goals grew out of fear of failure.

The overlap with self-concordance is practical. “Don’t be a lazy person” and “don’t let my family down” are avoidance goals with introjected reasons stapled on. They tend to arrive together. Rewriting a goal as something you move toward is often the quickest way to find out whether there is a real reason underneath.

A four-question self-test

This is an informal adaptation of the idea behind the reasons scale, written in my own words. It is not the validated instrument and shouldn’t be scored like one. Pick one goal you keep failing and rate each statement from 1 (not at all true) to 5 (completely true).

1. If I dropped this goal, I’d feel guilty or ashamed.
2. People in my life expect me to do this.
3. I enjoy the activity itself, or I expect to.
4. This matters to me personally, apart from what anyone else thinks.

Add questions 1 and 2, then add 3 and 4. If the first pair clearly outweighs the second, you’re probably carrying someone else’s goal. Questions 3 and 4 map roughly to intrinsic and identified reasons; 1 and 2 to introjected and external ones. A mixed result is normal, since most goals have more than one reason.

Where does accountability fit?

This is the part that tends to get mangled in either direction. Accountability can’t create a desire you don’t have. If the goal is borrowed, a friend watching you fail at it just adds a second borrowed reason, and the pressure model above predicts the same fade once the watching stops. That is my inference from the model, not a finding from the 1999 paper.

What accountability can do is protect a goal you chose. Owned goals still lose to a 6:00 a.m. brain that bargains well. A consequence that bites at the moment of temptation covers that gap without replacing the reason. An app like DontSnooze, which sends a random camera-roll photo to your friends if you miss your wake-up check, is built for that second job: making the alarm count for a goal you already want. It would be a poor fit for one you’d quietly dropped. If the self-test says the goal is borrowed, fix that first.

If a goal has already died and you can’t say why, writing its obituary in advance is one way to dig the reasons out. For the goals that survive the test, grading your predictions the way forecasters do shows whether your plans for them hold up. Mornings are only one of the places people put stakes down, as this list of other goals shows.

What to do this week

Run the test on three goals, not one. Most people find one clearly owned goal, one clearly borrowed goal and one in the middle. Give the owned goal your best hours. Rewrite the middle one until your own reason is stated in a sentence. Release the borrowed one on purpose, which is a decision, unlike quietly not doing it for another six months.

Releasing a goal isn’t failing at it. By the logic of the 1999 model, reaching it wouldn’t have made you much happier anyway.