Policy & Practice October 2018

Long-term, complex goals, such as financial and familial stability and security, are often at the heart of human services programs. Supporting people in successfully achieving their goals, however, can be challenging. Although much progress has been made in recent decades, many gaps remain in moving families living in poverty toward self-sufficiency. As a result, there is growing interest in applying new understanding from psychology and brain science to help program participants not only identify goals related to employment and well- being, but also more effectively attain those goals. Goal setting and goal pursuit have long been studied as important ingre- dients for success across a variety of contexts 1 , and evidence suggests that specific psychological skills—known collectively as self-regulation skills— are needed to successfully set, pursue, and achieve personal goals. 2 Figure 1 presents a conceptual framework for how self-regulation supports goal achievement and personal goals related to employment and increased well-being and self-sufficiency.

trying to achieve goals far in the future, even in the face of challenges. 8 Self- efficacy is a person’s belief that he or she can succeed. Evidence suggests it powerfully influences outcomes across many contexts, including academic achievement, job retention, and parenting. 9 In practice, the skills of self- regulation do not fall so neatly into categories. Neuroscientists and psy- chologists have long recognized that cognitive and emotional skills interact and the expression of personality is influenced by, and influences, both cognition and emotion. 10 In daily life, people draw on cognition, emotion, and personality skills simultaneously. As Figure 1 shows, self-regulation skills enable people to set and pursue goals. For instance, people use execu- tive function and metacognition to plan and organize their approach to solving a problem during goal setting, and to initiate a task and prioritize, organize, and manage their time most efficiently to pursue a goal. 11 Emotional skills, motivation, and grit may help people persist toward goal achievement. Practice in setting and pursuing goals, especially when goals are broken into smaller steps or milestones, can support and enhance self-regulation skills. 12 The framework in Figure 1 suggests that a certain mind-set is a necessary precursor to setting and pursuing goals, based on evidence that people must be willing to change before they take steps toward change. Aspects of personality, such as self-efficacy and motivation—may influence one’s readiness for change. The framework also proposes that, after pursuing a goal, people assess the extent to which they succeeded, learn lessons from their experience, and, if they did not fully achieve their goal, revisit earlier steps in the process when they might have faltered and try them again. Such feedback and self-reflection (which draw on skills such as meta- cognition and cognitive flexibility) can prompt people to change both their mind-set and behaviors to meet their goals. 13 Thus, in the frame- work, the goal achievement process has four components—readiness for change, goal setting, goal pursuit, and

What is Self-

Regulation? Self-regulation is an umbrella term describing skills across three categories: cognitive skills, emo- tional skills, and personality factors. Cognitive skills are made up of executive function skills, as well as selective attention and metacognition. Executive function skills help people regulate and control their actions and are usually thought to include inhibitory control (the ability to stop automatic or inadvisable actions in favor of more appropriate behaviors), working memory (the ability to hold information in mind while performing complicated tasks—for example, fol- lowing multistep directions), and cognitive flexibility (the ability to hold more than one idea at a time, and to switch between tasks or thoughts as needed to adapt and adjust to new circumstances). 3 Selective attention is the ability to attend to the most impor- tant or relevant aspects of a task while filtering out distractions, 4 and meta- cognition is the ability to reflect on one’s own thoughts and actions. 5 Self-regulation skills also include understanding and regulating emotions. Understanding emotions enables people to use physiological, visual, and environmental cues to identify feelings in themselves and others. Regulating emotions involves using strategies to make emotions manageable or useful. Emotions can focus and guide attention and action and can be motivational. 6 Regulating emotions can include lowering one’s level of expression (cooling off when angry) or raising one’s level of expres- sion (also called up-regulating) so that one can react to demands and persist. Aspects of personality—in particular, motivation, grit, and self-efficacy— interact with emotional and cognitive skills. Motivation drives people to pursue, persevere, and accomplish tasks. Determining what motivates people can be challenging. Incentives— both external (such as money) and internal (such as satisfaction)—are motivating. 7 Goal setting in and of itself can also be motivating. Grit often is described as motivation over a long time, and it enables people to persist in

Elizabeth Cavadel is a Senior Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research.

Jacqueline Kauff is a Senior Researcher

at Mathematica Policy Research.

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