Most goals fail, says financial psychologist—4 steps to actually achieve yours

If you find yourself setting goals — particularly financial ones — and failing to achieve them, you're not alone. Among Americans who made resolutions in 2024, 70% abandoned their goal altogether, per a survey from the Harris Poll on behalf of Original Financial.

"The gym memberships gather dust. The savings plan falters. The manuscript remains unwritten," Charles Chaffin, co-founder of the Financial Psychology Institute and a professor at Iowa State University, writes in his recently published book, "The Goal Standard: The Psychology of Defining, Pursuing, and Achieving What Matters."

"The reality is that we fail at our goals far more often than we succeed," he writes.

There are two main reasons we tend to fall short, he says. One is that we set the wrong kinds of goals. "That could be anything from, we set goals that are too big, we set goals that don't match with our identity or we set too many goals," he tells CNBC Make It.

The other is that we don't put ourselves in environments to succeed. "That often means that we don't have the social support network to help get us there," he says.

To give yourself a better chance of turning your aspirations into reality, Chaffin recommends following these four steps.

When thinking about what you want for yourself, consider why you want it, Chaffin says. Often, goals are borne of societal expectations, pressure from family or an idea of what you should be doing in your career.

When obstacles arise, Chaffin says, goals that aren't integral to our identity are easy to abandon.

A classic goal that follows this mold is setting a dollar amount as a savings target, he says. The more sustainable approach, he says, is thinking about the kinds of things you want to be able to do with your money.

"Now what I've done is, I've taken something that's extrinsic, which is just a number for the sake of a number, and I've made it intrinsic," Chaffin says. "I've made it part of me. I'm now motivated to accomplish this because I really want to do it."

Ideally, your goal has a set deadline. But if you're thinking in terms of years, you'll have a higher chance of success if you break things down into smaller increments, Chaffin says.

"Even a one-year time horizon is too far in the distance," he says. "You can have a one-year time horizon, but you need to have a bunch of intermediate goals in between."

The reason, he says, is that a goal that's sitting way out in the distance will always have trouble competing with things that come up in the here and now. Chaffin cites the example of someone with annual savings goals who faces the urge to spend.

This person might be more successful setting weekly savings targets, Chaffin suggests. "If I can develop a series of shorter goals, that's going to be a good thing."

It's one thing to know that you want to make a change. It's another to put it into action. For successful goal setters, that starts with making a concrete, detailed plan, Chaffin says.

"We know that writing goals down helps," he says. "We need to memorialize that, and we need to be specific about it."

From there, enlist your social network to help keep you on track. That could mean sharing your goals with people in your household or working alongside friends to hold each other accountable.

"Dry January is a great example," Chaffin says. "If you do dry January with the people you go out drinking with, your chances of actually being successful go way up because you're going through that with someone. You're policing each other. You're encouraging each other. Those are all really, really good things."

The other environmental factor that can make or break your goal comes down to what Chaffin calls "friction." How easy is it to do good things, and how tricky is it to do the things that might derail your progress?

"Operationally, we're talking about setting up an environment where I create friction for the things that get in the way of my goal and eliminate friction for things that help," he says.

For an over-spender looking to save, easing friction might mean setting up automatic withdrawals from their paychecks into a savings account named after the goal in question, Chaffin says.

Adding friction might mean hiding credit cards or decoupling them from online shopping accounts.

"You have to really change your environment and be conducive to what it is that you want to do," Chaffin says.

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