Marie Curie not only broke new scientific ground by winning two Nobel Prizes for her pioneering work in chemistry and physics; she was also a devoted mother. After the early death of her husband, Pierre Curie, she raised two girls, then just one and eight years old, alone.
Was she torn between her roles as scientist and solo mother? Perhaps. However, we believe it is also possible that she experienced these roles coexisting in harmony, introducing her daughters to her world of science. The result? His eldest daughter also won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Your life requires attention to multiple goals. You may care deeply about your family, health, leisure, community, and career. These goals shape who you are. Letting go of any of them can feel like losing a part of yourself. While juggling too many goals is inevitable, feeling torn between them shouldn’t be.
In our new research, we discovered that pursuing a career doesn’t have to mean constant tension with everything else. Work-life balance doesn’t have to feel like life is in constant dissonance. It can feel like a symphony.
Across 11 samples across 10 countries, we found that how people see the relationship between their goals matters.
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In particular, those who experience the greatest harmony between aspirations tend to view their goals in one of two ways: they see how one goal can drive the other (for example, being successful in a career can help finance a desired trip); or they see success in one goal as complementing the other (for example, enjoying a vacation helps them come back refreshed and ready to do good work).
Most people experience goal harmony, at least some of the time. But across multiple studies, we found that those better able to draw many connections between their activities were more likely to persist in them, felt higher levels of motivation, were more productive, less stressed and burned out, and felt greater anticipation about the future than those who saw few connections—or even conflict—between their goals.
Best of all, our research provides evidence that this habit of building connections can be learned. We build on our study to help you work toward your goals more productively and with fewer sacrifices.
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How to create harmony of goals
The first step to creating harmony between your goals is finding a way to mentally integrate them by imagining the ways your goals might be connected.
In one study, we asked online workers to think about how their work and leisure, health and financial, or family and community goals might be linked.
Simply identifying these connections between pairs of goals increased their sense of goal harmony by 22% compared to another group who considered how the goals in each pair might conflict. Some of his reflections were especially insightful. They wrote:
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“By becoming more relaxed, I will be able to work more efficiently” (work-leisure pair).
“The healthier I stay, the more money I can save” (health-finance pair).
“I could take my parents to volunteer with me at church” (family-community pair).
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In another study, we asked online workers to identify actions that serve multiple goals at once, and then also encouraged them to reflect on how pursuing one goal could also help another.
For example, a customer service employee told us that learning more about consumers’ personalities not only improved his ability to connect with them and succeed professionally, but also deepened his understanding of people, even fictional but complex characters on television.
Participants in this condition reported a 12% increase in their sense of goal harmony.
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Make a list of objectives and necessary activities
To practice mental integration, start by listing your main life goals and the specific activities needed to achieve each one. Then look for connections between the objectives.
Maybe one goal directly helps another, or two goals complement each other to make life feel richer and more meaningful.
Alternatively, consider whether an activity that serves one goal can also bring you closer to another, allowing you to achieve multiple goals at once.
Harmony of goals also develops through social learning and over time. Our culture teaches us how goals are related.
For example, we often hear that pursuing family goals means something different for mothers than for fathers: Women are expected to invest time in caregiving, while men are expected to provide financially.
These cultural expectations shape perceptions of work-family harmony. Because a job provides financial support for the family but also competes for time with the family, working fathers tend to report greater work-family harmony than working mothers.
Collectivistic cultures place a high value on harmony and conflict avoidance, which extends to the way people experience their goals as interconnected rather than competing.
Growing up in China, one of us (Jiabi Wang) often heard that “being a diligent student is an integral part of being a good daughter.” Today, she experiences her family and professional aspirations as naturally aligned.
Consistent with this, our study participants who were from countries with collectivistic cultures – India, China, Indonesia, Egypt and Mexico – reported greater natural goal harmony than those in more individualistic countries, including the US, UK, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands.
The benefits of goal harmony
Goal harmony increases motivation because pursuing one goal also helps others.
If you see regular exercise as a way to sustain your energy at work, you’ll feel motivated to stay active not only for your health, but also for your career. This way, training doesn’t take time away from work; It looks like progress on multiple fronts.
These motivational benefits persist over time. In a two-month study, we tracked people’s adherence to their New Year’s resolutions.
In January, online workers listed three resolutions, such as finding a new job or getting promoted, exercising more and eating healthier. They also reported their experience of goal harmony.
Two months later, those who perceived greater goal harmony were significantly more likely to persist with their resolutions.
Goal harmony also promotes well-being by reducing the anxiety that comes from time pressure and goal conflict.
When your goals feel connected, you’re less likely to feel overwhelmed or burnt out. In fact, in the study above that linked work-leisure, health-financial, and family-community goals, those who reflected on goal connections not only reported greater motivation, but also lower levels of stress and burnout, and greater anticipation for each day, compared to those who considered how their goals might compete for resources.
Furthermore, we found that reflecting on goal connections can have a positive impact on workplaces, even beyond the individual.
In one study, we examined the common workplace dilemma present in mentoring: Given there are limited resources, should you spend time training a junior colleague or focus on your own work?
We asked online workers to think about how helping another worker could also benefit their own performance. Then they completed a typing task, first to earn a bonus for another worker and later to earn one for themselves.
Those who first reflected on the overlap between helping others and advancing their own goals completed 17% more work to earn a bonus for the other person, while working just as hard to earn a bonus for themselves.
This study revealed an important implication for leaders: to encourage mentoring, highlight the harmony between supporting the growth of others and your own. Far from being a sacrifice, mentoring can be understood as a way of leveraging personal interests.
Conflict of goals is sometimes beneficial
But here’s the twist: Harmony helps goals in core domains like work and family. However, there are times when priorities must be set; pursue some goals while leaving others aside.
Maybe the demands are too great and you have to make choices. Possibly what you want is not really a goal; It is a temptation that will undermine your achievements.
You can’t always have your cake and eat it too, and it’s just as important to recognize conflict as it is to cultivate harmony.
Sometimes there is a conflict of self-control: you may be tempted to stay in bed and call in sick instead of going to work, or scroll through social media instead of finishing that report.
Your overarching goals represent what you should do, while temptations are those things you may want to do but shouldn’t. Decades of research on self-control finds that the first step to resisting temptations is recognizing the conflict they pose.
Research by Gabriele Oettingen and colleagues introduced the WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) method.
After defining a goal – identifying a desire and an outcome – recognizing potential obstacles is key, as it allows people to plan how to overcome them.
Similarly, research on counteractive control, which one of us co-authored, found that anticipating temptations enables people to resist them and remain committed to their goals.
For example, in another study, students who anticipated a difficult homework assignment were more likely to complete it sooner. In a self-control dilemma, ignoring or minimizing conflict can undermine goal achievement and make impulsive choices easier to justify.
Multiple goals need not create dissonance; they can form a symphony. More motivated people are not simply more disciplined; they are more strategic. They know how to restructure and realign their important goals so they work together, and when to draw a clear line and prioritize one goal over another.
Companies that invest in work-life balance – through flexible schedules, remote options or subsidized childcare – already promote harmony of goals between employees’ professional and family roles.
However, more can be done. A workplace that encourages movement, such as standing or walking meetings, allows employees to advance their professional and health goals at the same time.
Likewise, neighborhood partnerships or “bring your friends to work” days strengthen both social and community ties to work life. Perhaps the best place to start is by guiding yourself and your employees to reflect on how goals align and what drives they might conflict with.
Marie Curie did not choose her career over her family; she navigated both wisely. She allowed her roles as scientist and mother to reinforce each other, inviting her daughters into the scientific world she loved and building a legacy that spanned generations.
His life reminds us that the most remarkable achievements often arise not from choosing between goals but from skillfully weaving them together.
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