Goals

1. Describe a goal state in the context of problem solving.
2. Skillfully envision and create goal states.

Goal State (What)

A goal state is a description of the best conditions that can exist for an actor (person or group) in the future given their context (surrounding circumstances).

The present state refers to conditions as they exist right now. The goal state refers to conditions in the future. The term “state” refers to conditions.

When a goal state is skillfully create, it should create two things

1. High levels of motivation and positive affect (feelings and emotions) for the problem solver.

2. Clarity for the problem solving. No ambiguity or uncertainty about the end outcomes.

A goal state answers the question what do you want the most if you can have anything given your context?

Examples of Goal States

• Context: Home appliance broken
  • Present State: Refrigerator has stopped working.
  • Goal State: A refrigerator (current one or new one) that works as it should.
• Context: Home office.
  • Present State: Messy and disorganized
  • Goal State: Super organized and appealing on a sustained basis.
• Context: Sales
  • Present State: Struggling, not making many sales, not making much money, frustrated and angry.
  • Goal State: Easily and effectively make sales and reap the associated financial rewards.
• Context: Welding
  • Present State: Have no idea how to weld and no experience.
  • Goal State: Excellent and productive at welding.
• Context: Auto Repair
  • Present State: A bolt broke while working on the car engine. No apparent way to get the broken bolt out.
  • Goal State: The broken bolt extracted and replace. The car engine repaired.

Goal State (How To Create)

Principles

1. A goal state must be evidence-based. This means it should be grounded in information that can be independently verified by multiple people. Evidence includes observations, measurements, calculations, or other reproducible results that support a claim. An evidence-based goal is one that is objectively defined and open to confirmation through reliable methods.

2. A goal state needs to be highly motivating for the problem solver. This is because problem solving requires grit (passion plus perserverence) to keep moving forward when things get hard and frustrating.

3. A goal state needs to be simple enough to fit within short-term memory (STM). Most people can hold about 3 to 7 items in STM at once. If a goal state exceeds that limit, it becomes harder to focus on and act upon. Keeping goals concise improves mental clarity, focus, and execution.

Framework

• Metacognition: Pay attention to your positive and negative affect.
  • Affect is the way to identify problems.
• Imagination: As appropriate, convert each affect into a condition in the future that is super motivating to you.

Tips

• Affect refers to the combined set of feeling and emotions that a person has.

  • I use “affect” because feelings and emotions have different meanings.
  • These differing meanings turn out to be highly important in the context of wellbeing.
  • For now, you can think of affect as how your feel about things.

• Affect can be positive or negative.

  • Positive affect means that something provokes desire, pleasure, wanting, or similar in your brain
  • Negative affect is when something provokes fear, disgust, avoidance, or similar in your brain.

• Always assume that you can make desired conditions in the future come true. That is, don’t worry about how to reach goals state or whether or not you can reach them. As your skills with problem solving grow, you confidence and abilities to create the future your want will come into focus. You will feel like a magician in the sense that you can conjure up things.

• Don’t do this on every affect. Instead the strongest ones.

• Formulate goal states (conditions in the future that you envision) such that they are highly motivating to you or your group.

  • Envisions goal states that represent the best future that can be given your context (surrounding circumstances)

Examples

Stress

Present State: I feel stressed out far too much of the time. I dislike this.

Goal State: I have negligible levels of negative stress and appropriate levels of healthy stress.

Citations

Present State: Adding citations to writing takes too much time and involves too much hassle. This provokes hatred of citations and procrastination.

Goal State: Adding citations is effortless and takes almost no time.

People Problems

Present State: A team is dysfunctional. I hate being around this group and I dislike working on this project.

Goal State: I am productive, engaged, and I have peace of mind with this challenging situation.

Artistic Performance

Present State: I watch a person drawing and this provides strong feelings of wanting to be able to draw like this.

Goal State: I easily and regularly create awesome drawings.

Summary

A goal state for an actor (person or group) refers to the best conditions that can exist in the future.

The starting point for learning to formulate effective goal states has two steps.

1. Metacognition: In the present state, notice strong affect because there are triggers than you can create a goal state.

2. Imagination: Image the best condition(s) that can happen in the future and write this down. This is your goal state.