Big goals can feel overwhelming. Here’s how to stay on track

The University of Nebraska women’s volleyball team spent the 2025 season ranked number one. That wasn’t by chance. The Cornhusker players trained hard all season. They won game after game, often sweeping their opponents in just three sets. Their goal was to win the national championship.

But the team didn’t get there by focusing on the finals. They did it by taking their season one game at a time.

For each game, the women set several smaller goals for themselves. Get three aces (serves that aren’t returned by the opposing team). Block at least three balls during each set. Avoid returning any serves that would have landed out of bounds.

They met these goals by setting even smaller ones during training. Players practiced serving until each could land the ball where she wanted it. They lifted weights to get stronger, so they could jump higher and hit harder. They practiced blocking to stop the ball from making it over the net. Defensive specialists dove for balls most people would miss.

Focusing on these smaller goals worked. The team consistently outplayed their opponents — until illness and injuries kept them from reaching the Final Four. They ended their season as the Big 10 Champions for the third year running. Though they didn’t win the national championship, the Cornhusker players did become experts at achieving big things.

Working toward a big goal — like winning a tournament or running a marathon — can feel overwhelming. Same goes for mastering a musical instrument, getting into college, writing a novel or becoming an artist. All require hard work and dedication. They may also take months or years to achieve.

Despite this, people work toward such big goals all the time.

So why do some people succeed while others struggle? Scientists are starting to unravel the secrets. From setting mini goals and narrowing focus to maximizing the learning process, science points to steps we can take to help us achieve our dreams.

Start with focus

Big goals take time. Staying focused helps achieve them. That can be hard as life happens all around us. But keeping your attention on a goal gets easier when you’re driven to reach it. That’s the finding of a 2021 study by social psychologist Micayla Lacey. She studies motivation at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Without goals, our attention can flit from one thing to another. That lets us be flexible in our thought processes, she says. “It allows us to take in more information about the world around us,” which can help us find or consider new goals.

Once we settle on a goal, though, our attention narrows. We’re “kind of switching from seeing the forest to seeing the individual trees,” she says. That helps us take in information tied to our goal while ignoring things that aren’t. And it happens automatically.

“Think about what happens when you walk into a restaurant,” Lacey says. If you’re really hungry, “you’re looking at everybody’s food, right? You’re zoomed in on the waiters bringing the food by. You’re scoping out what’s at all of the tables.” If you’re not hungry, you won’t pay as much attention to the food. Now you may notice other things, such as the décor, cleanliness or people sitting at nearby tables.

The more motivated we are to meet goals, the more focused we tend to become.

One way to stay focused is to set mini goals that help you move toward some major objective. Say you want to become an astronaut. Small goals might start with taking math and science classes. You might seek extra help from teachers. Or you might sign up for space camp.

The more specific your mini goals, the better, Lacey says. Setting a goal to raise $100 for space camp tends to be more motivating than saying you simply want to raise some funds. Setting specific mini goals for each game likely helped the Cornhusker’s volleyball team achieve its 2025 season wins.

Avoiding distractions

As we close in on goals, our view of them tends to change. For instance, they begin to appear even closer than they really are. That’s what psychologists Shana Cole and Emily Balcetis report. Cole is at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Balcetis works at New York University in New York City.

There’s a benefit to this shift in perception, they’ve found. The closer a goal seems, the harder we push to achieve it. We tune out distractions better. That lets us pour more energy into finishing the task at hand.

In one 2025 study, their team studied runners. As these athletes approached a targeted goal, their focus on it intensified. One consequence: They ran harder.

“You can narrow your eye gaze, rather than looking all around,” Balcetis says. That’ll “help you walk farther or run faster.”

Long-distance runners spend most of their run looking around, these researchers found. It allows them to use less energy. But periodically throughout their trek, these athletes focused on specific landmarks. And each time they did, they sped up.

This shift doesn’t just happen in athletes. And it doesn’t always require use of your eyes. “You can narrow your thoughts on a goal,” Balcetis says. Doing so helps us avoid distractions. And as we approach the goal — or some sub-goal that we’ve set — we’re motivated to work even harder to achieve it.

In one study of people trying to eat healthier, Cole recalls, “we used an eyetracker to measure where people looked when we showed them a refrigerator full of both healthy and unhealthy foods.” Those who were committed to healthy eating looked at fruits and vegetables. They avoided looking at soda and ice cream as they reached for more nutritious fare.

Building confidence

“Focusing on smaller goals helps us to better assess our progress,” Balcetis finds. Smaller goals not only keep us moving toward the big payoff but also build confidence.

“Large goals can sometimes feel overwhelming or impossible,” Cole points out. But each time we reach some small interim goal, we prove to ourselves that we can achieve hard things. “Smaller goals,” she says, “help make big goals feel more manageable.” In that way, she says, “we’re able to stay calm, confident and focused.”

And confidence matters. Rebecca Lewthwaite and Gabriele Wulf find it aids mastery of new skills. Lewthwaite works at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center near Los Angeles, Calif. Wulf is at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The two study how to improve learning and performance in sports and other movement-based activities.

When people feel confident about their skill, they perform better. “Confidence has a way of reducing a tightness of mind and body, enhancing fluidity and freeing up movement,” Lewthwaite says. “It is a key to being able to perform at your best.”

Athletes, for instance, can warm up with small, relatively easy tasks. In this way, Lewthwaite says, “Success can build success.”

Lewthwaite points to one champion golfer who warmed up for tournaments by putting the ball a short distance to the hole. Slowly increasing the putting distance built up her confidence. Just before she left the practice green, this golfer made a short, successful putt.

While learning a skill, you also can fake it ’til you make it. “Plant the thought in your mind that you are, indeed, capable of the task ahead,” Wulf says. This works best, she adds, if you can visualize what a skilled performance looks like. Then imagine that you, too, can perform at this high level. Odds are, it will boost your chance of doing so.

To improve faster, try focusing on things outside your body.

Say you’re learning to play a tricky piano concerto. Rather than focusing on how your fingers move, pay attention to the keys as they move. In sports, focus on where you want a ball to go, rather than how you throw it. When singing, focus on the sound of your voice or on singing expressively for the audience.

“Adopting an external focus results in more effective and efficient movements,” Wulf says. It lets our bodies do what they need to do, she says. “Brain and muscle activity are optimized for smooth, efficient and precise movements.” That’s true no matter your age or skill level.

Improving how we learn

When we first start building a skill, we tend to really focus on it. Over time, though, we’ll learn that some general rules apply. Now we can learn faster, say Gaia Molinaro and Anne Collins. They’re cognitive scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. Their particular work combines computer science, neuroscience and psychology.

Take making pottery. “Every day, your pottery teacher gives you a different kind of pot to make,” Molinaro says. In the beginning, you’ll need “to keep comparing your pot to [an example] pot you’re trying to make.”

This requires working memory. It’s the type we use to remember something for a few seconds — long enough to type a one-time password, for instance. This type of memory lets us recall specific details. Fast and efficient, it’s also fleeting.

To get better at making pots, you’ll need to store some of your production techniques in long-term memory. Less detailed, these memories “conserve the gist of the information,” Molinaro says. Their advantage: “They can last for a long time and they can be retrieved without effort.”

After several classes, she notes, you might “realize that there are a few features of what makes a good pot.” You can use these general rules to decide if the new pot you’re making is on track to becoming a good one. You no longer need to focus on designing a particular pot, Molinaro says. That frees up mental energy, allowing you “to focus on the learning part.”

In fact, the hardest part of achieving a big goal may simply be getting started, she says. As we shift into using long-term memory, moving toward our goals gets easier.

At this point, Collins adds, a goal also tends to become sticky. Once it’s set, people “tend to persist with that goal,” she says. And that’s fine when it’s something that will help you in the future. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes things change. Now our original goals may no longer be the best course of action.

Sometimes, that can work against us.

People often stick to a goal, even when it’s no longer in their best interest to do so, finds Sneha Aenugu. Her work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena focuses on decision-making.

In a May 2025 study, she tasked people with accumulating sets of tokens. These were grouped into three types. One related to cars. Another to cats. The third comprised hats. A set consisted of seven tokens of any one type. The goal was to complete as many sets as possible in 40 minutes. At any time, one set of tokens would be easier to complete than the others. But even when it would have been better to switch, people tended to stick with their current type.

That tactic might make sense in a changing world, Aenugu says. When you’re switching all the time, “you’re not building steady progress in any one thing,” this neuroscientist points out. But when sticking with your current goal doesn’t make sense, it might be time to move on to a new one.

“Have a series of backup options,” she advises. A set of diverse goals gives you the ability to pivot when needed, so that you can keep moving forward. “Persist in your goals, but also be flexible,” Aenugu advises. “You don’t have to quit altogether” when the going gets tough. Just tackle some other goal when the one you’d focused on starts to overwhelm you.

“Successfully achieving goals requires grit,” adds Cole at Rutgers. Grit is the ability to forge through obstacles. To keep going when things get tough. And that may require looking at things a new way or considering a different solution to a problem.  

“Setbacks and challenges,” she notes, “are bound to happen when working toward a difficult goal. Being able to keep going when things get tough is what separates people who are really successful in life from those who don’t achieve such successes.” The key, Cole says, is to be flexible and learn from your failures. And, of course, “keep trying!”