The start of each new year brings about thoughts of goals and resolutions. Maybe you want to lose weight, learn a new skill, or adopt a more healthful lifestyle this year. You might wonder what strategies you can adopt to help you actually achieve your goal. After all, many resolutions fall by the wayside after a month or two.

The typical thought is that announcing a goal makes you accountable to others, thus making it more likely that you will succeed at reaching your goal or keeping your resolution. If you plan to exercise five days a week, wouldn’t it make sense to share your intention with others? Wouldn’t an announcement to friends and family about what you to intend to accomplish provide extra motivation? Well, not necessarily.

Research from 2009 by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and colleagues has shown that the opposite may be true: Announcing your goals to others may lessen your desire to achieve them. It’s as if announcing the goal feels the same as actually achieving the goal (“a premature sense of completeness”), making it less likely that you’ll follow through on the intended behavior. So, keeping your goals and resolutions to yourself might be a better strategy for success.

This article gives a summary of Gollwitzer’s research: Talking the Talk

Want to know more? The video below features a brief talk from the Ted Conference that discusses research (some of it predating Gollwitzer’s experiments) on this theory of goal achievement: