As we approach the end of January, there's lots of media attention to making resolutions happen.

Recently, a free webcast offered by the Harvard Business Review website featured Heidi Grant Halvorson, a psychologist who has done extensive research in the area of motivation and achievement. In that interview, she discussed some of the traps that stand in the way of achieving your goals.

The power of positive thinking

Halvorson first addressed the widespread view that being confident about achieving your objectives and visualizing success are key to success. This attitude is expressed in the title of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking and the well-known aphorism by Napolean Hill: "What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve."

In fact, having a positive attitude towards achievement does correlate with success.  Research was conducted with a group of obese women about to embark on a comprehensive weight-loss program. Those who believed they would lose weight going into the program lost on average 26 pounds more than those who didn't.

However, there is an important corollary: to maximize your chances of success, you need to also anticipate the difficulties and challenges of achieving your goal. In that same experiment, the women who believed that it would be easy to resist temptation or to stick to their exercise regimen lost 24 pounds less than those subjects who believed it would be difficult.

This finding has been widely replicated in follow up research with students looking for jobs or patients about to undergo a hip replacement operation. Those who thought that finding a job or recovering full mobility would be easy had significantly less success than those who went into the process believing that achieving their goal would take lots of effort.

Quite simply, people who believe their goals will be difficult expect to have to work hard and as a result put in more effort, plan more and take more action. The result should be no surprise - if you anticipate that a goal will be challenging and work harder as a result, your chances of success increase significantly.

A five minute exercise in mental contrasting

From this research, Halvorson identifies the optimal strategy to achieving goals:

First, think positively about what life would be like when you achieve your goal.

Then, think realistically about what it will take to get there.

To achieve this, she recommends a strategy called mental contrasting, designed to bring into focus and rewards of achieving a goal as well what you need to achieve it.

Here's how mental contrasting works

1.       On a clean piece of paper, write down a goal and describe what life would look like and the benefits if you achieved that goal

2.       Then, write down the obstacles and barriers to achieving that goal.

3.       Then write down another benefit

4.       And another obstacle

And continue this process until you're out of benefits and obstacles. Then look at what you've written down - and ask yourself whether you're prepared to truly commit to this goal. One of the advantages of this exercise is that it helps us identify objectives that are unlikely to happen and to abandon unrealistic fantasies. (So much for that call I've been waiting for from Julia Roberts, or my chances of winning that Olympic medal I've been thinking about.)

The evidence is clear cut - a five minute investment in mental contrasting can lead to greater planning, energy and effort, and greater success as a result. Before finalizing your key goals for 2012, run them through this test, and then reassess whether these goals are right for you.

As a side note, Halvorson's research also shows that the best goals are also difficult and challenging - difficult goals engage the subconscious in ways the easy ones don't. So if all your goals sail through this process with ease, ask yourself whether you're challenging yourself sufficiently, and need to set more ambitious objectives for 2012.

Click here to listen to a short interview with Heidi Grant Halvorson:

http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2011/11/what-successful-people-do-diff.html