What is the difference between a goal and an affirmation

What are affirmations exactly? There are so many benefits of using affirmations: They help increase your awareness of your thoughts. Soul fuel: I am worthy of manifesting my biggest desires. I believe in myself and my ability to succeed something wonderful is about to happen to me I allow love to fill me up and guide me in all of my actions.

Everything is alway working out for me. I always choose happiness. I look for the good in every situation. My desires are fueled by an unlimited belief in myself. I have faith in myself and in my abilities.

I have what it takes to reach my goals. I can handle anything that comes my way. Great strength lies within me at all times. I have the courage to keep going. My faith lifts me higher than fears. Today I face everything with great courage. It is impossible for me to fail. I am focused, persistent and will never quit. I am totally in charge of my life.

Similar to the procedure of AA manipulation employed by Koole and van Knippenberg , we informed the participants in the AA condition that they may find that they have some positive characters and some negative characters; however, their personality is fundamentally strong. Next, adopting the procedure employed by Liu et al.

We informed the participants that the abilities involved in this challenging task are key to success in the endeavors of life and that we intended to test certain students to assess their related abilities. After showing an example of this task, the participants were informed that they would be required to resolve 10 items sequentially in front of other students. Then, in addition to some filler scales, they sequentially completed the measures for self-integrity, tendency to undertake the task, perceived ability on the task, and state PAGs refer to Measures.

Finally, participants were debriefed, thanked for their participation, and dismissed. The achievement goals of participants were measured with a three-item MAG subscale e. Since we translated this scale into a Chinese version, an exploratory factor analysis EFA using the principal component factoring method was conducted on the six items to test the validity of the scale.

All the MAG items loaded above 0. We measured the perceived general ability of the participants with a three-item perceived ability scale Liu, ; e. We measured the general self-esteem of the participants with a classical item self-esteem scale Rosenberg, ; e. We assessed the self-integrity of the participants with four personality self-integrity items constructed by Liu and Huang ; e.

These items were included to check the manipulation of AA. We assessed the tendency of the participants to undertake the challenging task with six items of Liu et al.

We measured the perceived ability of participants on the object-embedding task with three items of Liu e. Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics and correlation matrix for all measures. This revealed that AA generally increased the sense of self-integrity and state PAGs of the participants.

In this moderation analysis, we entered MAGs and PAGs as moderators of AA on tendency of students to undertake the task with the effect of self-esteem being controlled. The results of an ordinary least squares regression can be found in Table 2 Model 1. Figure 1. First, a regression analysis was performed to examine the effect of AA on SPAGs with the effect of self-esteem being controlled as shown in Model 2 in Table 2. Next, a regression analysis as shown in Model 3 in Table 2 not only included the effects of all the previously constructed regression terms in Model 1 on tendency to undertake the task, but also added parallel terms replacing AA with mean-centered SPAGs to the equation i.

In addition, the results revealed a significant indirect effect of the highest order interaction i. In the current study, we examined the effects of AA and dispositional achievement goals on motivation of junior-high-school students to confront a challenging task. We used Taiwanese junior-high-school students as participants.

Overall, the results were mostly consistent with our predictions. Below we interpret the findings and discuss the implications. According to self-affirmation theory, the AA intervention may increase motivation of the students to confront challenging tasks. These results did show that for participants possessing low MAG and low PAG simultaneously, those who received positive personality feedback exhibited stronger tendency to confront the challenging task relative to those who received a neutral personality feedback.

This reveals that AA would help motivate these students to confront challenging tasks. However, for those exhibiting a dominant PAG orientation, attribute-affirmed participants exhibited a weaker tendency to confront the challenging task relative to non-affirmed participants. This reveals that being attribute-affirmed may decrease the tendency to confront the challenging task for these students.

In addition, for participants possessing high MAGs including those with a dominant MAG orientation or a combination of MAG and PAG orientation , no difference was noted in the tendency to confront the challenging task between participants in the control and attribute-affirmed conditions. It should be noted that the MAGs held by participants can positively influence their motivation to confront challenging task.

This reveals that individuals with high MAGs would enhance their motivation to confront the challenge, but AA may not add further benefit for motivating these students to face challenging tasks.

Overall, these results indicate that whether the AA intervention increases the motivation of junior-high-school students to confront a challenging task depends on the dispositional achievement goals of the students. However, the mediation analysis revealed that the mediation of AA on the tendency of students to undertake the task through SPAGs only occurred in participants possessing low MAGs and low PAGs simultaneously but did not occur in participants holding the other three types of goal orientation.

We interpret this to mean that for students lacking any motivation when facing learning tasks possessing low MAGs and low PAGs simultaneously , AA would lead them to exhibit higher SPAGs, which in turn increased their tendency to confront the challenging task. However, for students holding a combination of MAG and PAG orientation or a dominant MAG orientation, even though AA increased their SPAGs, such goals were minimally helpful because this motivation was less relevant to the primary motivation learning from tasks and increasing abilities of these students facing a challenging task.

In addition, for students holding a dominant PAG orientation, even though AA also increased their SPAGs, the main source of motivation of these students to confront a challenging task came from a quest to maintain the positive opinion of others. This need may have been satisfied prematurely during the AA operation process in that AA increases self-integrity of the students , so they did not need to participate in the challenging task to satisfy their needs.

Therefore, AA did not help increase their tendency to accept the challenging task but rather reduced their tendency to proactively accept the task. This study was the first to integrate self-affirmation theory and achievement goal theory to investigate student motivation; it discovered that if AA is used to increase motivation of the students to face challenging learning tasks, then the original goals and reasons for the students to face the learning tasks must be considered.

For learners lacking the motivation to face learning tasks e. This is consistent with the results of studies on person praise.

In addition, for students who cared more about receiving positive opinions about their ability and cared less about learning and improving their abilities through a learning task, the intervention of AA might prematurely satisfy their need in this regard and consequently reduce their motivation when facing learning tasks; however, as for students who cared about learning from a learning task to improve their abilities, no matter whether they also cared about receiving positive opinions from others through the learning task, the AA intervention might have offered limited help in motivating them to face learning tasks.

But it is noteworthy to mention that, possessing MAGs itself will enhance individuals to confront challenges. In summary, this study discovered a novel result that when AA is to be used to improve student motivation, the dispositional achievement goals of the students must be considered.

These findings have critical practical implications in the educational setting where teachers often adopt measures related to AA such as person praise to encourage students to face challenging tasks. Specifically, these results indicate that if teachers adopt this method to encourage students, they must consider dispositional achievement goals of the students.

If students lack motivation while facing challenging tasks for example, not wanting to learn from tasks or improve their abilities or wanting to receive positive opinions from others , then using measures related to AA to encourage student motivation may be conducive. However, when students tend to care about maintaining positive opinions of others about themselves and care less about learning and improving their abilities, then measures related to AA should be avoided because this application may weaken the motivation of students to confront challenging learning tasks.

By contrast, if students face challenging tasks and tend to focus on learning from the task to improve their abilities, then even without measures related to AA, they still exhibit high motivation. Therefore, it is suggested that educators may promote MAGs of students, which can effectively enhance their tendency to confront challenges. There are several limitations in the current study. First, we only have results from a single study to report.

In this experiment, participants were all junior-high-school students, and only one challenging task was used. We suggest that future studies use samples at different stages and adopt different tasks in their experiments to see if the results from the present study are robust.

I will complete an action every day. None of us are perfect, part of being a functional adult is trying to do the little things that make us incrementally better. For me improvements usually come in the form of habits. Both starting new good habits and stopping older bad habits and replacing them with those good habits.

I have a few links that might really help you find the goals that are right for you. Click the image to read the posts. I will face my fears head on. I will learn from them. Lack of confidence plays no small part in procrastination. Many of the reasons people procrastination on getting things done is that they are unsure what to do and if they have done well enough. Almost all of the time the quality of work is more than fine.

This is why confidence affirmations and self love affirmations can be so important to stopping procrastination. These simple repetitive phrases can boost your sense of self, making you feel more confident in your work and make it easier to feel that good is good enough, when it comes to the work you procrastinate on completing.

I am willing to explore new and uncharted territory. Hopefully you got some good ideas for goal setting and focus affirmations that you can use in your own life. Maybe even one of the 10 large picture goal setting affirmations you can look at daily to give you a quick boost of encouragement to succeed in your goals.

Let me know what you think? Do you enjoy these goal setting affirmations? Or do you think they are lacking? Do you have a specific affirmation that resonates with you? Are there some affirmations you think will simply not be helpful. In the comments below please share your thoughts on goal setting, goals, focus, affirmations, habits and anything else discussed on this page. I appreciate and look forward to your input. It could simply mean your journey toward change uses a slightly different route.

A therapist can offer guidance and help you plot a better course. Crystal Raypole has previously worked as a writer and editor for GoodTherapy. Her fields of interest include Asian languages and literature, Japanese translation, cooking, natural sciences, sex positivity, and mental health.

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