Internal Locus Of Control And Goal Setting

How Taking Control Of Your Actions Creates Meaningful Progress

Internal locus of control and goal setting are closely connected because effective goals depend partly on believing your actions can influence what happens next. This is the foundation of an Internal Locus of Control: recognizing that while you cannot control every outcome, your choices, behaviors, and learned skills can affect the direction of your life.

But why do we pursue some goals and not others? Why do we persist with one goal while giving up on another?

Rotter’s Social Learning Theory (SLT) helps answer these questions by showing how what we value, what we expect to happen, and how we perceive our situation influence our behavior. Julian Rotter’s work on Social Learning Theory and locus of control has had a lasting influence on clinical and personality psychology.

Together, these ideas provide a practical way to move from personal concerns to meaningful goals and Focused Action.

One of the most important insights from Social Learning Theory is that human behavior is goal-directed. Whether we clearly define our goals or not, what we value and what we expect to happen influence the choices we make.

Three concepts are particularly important:

Reward Value (RV) refers to how much you value or prefer a particular outcome
Expectancy (E) refers to how strongly you expect a particular behavior to lead to that outcome
Psychological Situation (PS) refers to how you perceive and interpret the situation in which you are acting

Together, these factors help explain Behavior Potential (BP), or the likelihood that you will choose a particular behavior in a particular situation.

This helps explain why simply wanting something is not enough. You may place tremendous value on an outcome, but if you have little expectation that your actions can produce it, you may never take the steps necessary to achieve it.

Internal Locus Of Control And Goal Setting In Practice

An Internal Locus of Control does not mean believing you can control everything. Many circumstances remain outside our control.

The important question is:

What can I do within this situation to improve the likelihood of the outcome I want?

This shifts attention away from simply wishing circumstances were different and toward identifying behaviors you can actually perform.

As a clinical psychologist, I often saw people describe goals in vague terms:

“I want to feel better.”

“I just want to be happy.”

These desires may be genuine, but they do not provide a clear direction for action. What does “better” mean? What would happiness look like in your life? What would you need to do differently?

The clearer you can define the problem and the desired outcome, the easier it becomes to identify meaningful action.

A Personal Concern Is A Goal At Risk

In the Mulry Method and Positive PERFORMANCE Psychology, a personal concern is a goal at risk.

This concept connects goal setting directly with Rotter’s ideas of Reward Value and Expectancy.

Personal concerns generally develop in one of two ways:

You have a high expectancy of losing a valued reward. You have something important and believe you may lose it. For example, you may deeply value a relationship while fearing the loss of your partner because of illness.
You have a low expectancy of achieving a valued reward. You strongly want something but do not believe you are likely to obtain it. For example, you may value attending a particular school while believing you will not be accepted.

In both cases, the outcome has significant Reward Value, but your Expectancy creates uncertainty, conflict, or distress.

This is why concerns can tell us so much about our goals.

What concerns you often reveals what matters to you.

Once you clearly identify a concern, you can begin asking a more productive question:

What can I do about it?

Using The Personal Concerns Inventory To Identify What Matters

I developed the Personal Concerns Inventory (PCI) to help people identify and organize the concerns affecting their lives.

The PCI examines more than 1,000 potential personal concerns and can usually be completed in about 20 minutes. Your results generate a private “This Is Me!” report that provides a snapshot of the concerns most important to you at that moment.

The purpose is not to tell you what your goals should be.

It is to help you identify your concerns, your priorities, and your direction.

The PCI can also be repeated over time, allowing you to see how concerns change as circumstances, expectations, and priorities change.

Because the process is self-guided, you can respond without trying to satisfy another person’s expectations. This reduces what psychologists call evaluation apprehension, the tendency to alter our responses because we are concerned about how another person might judge them.

The result becomes a starting point for Self-Learning.

From Personal Concerns To Focused Action

Identifying a concern is only the beginning.

The next step is Focused Action.

Focused Action means translating what you have learned about yourself into specific behaviors directed toward a meaningful goal. Instead of remaining with “I want things to be different,” you begin defining what you can actually do differently.

This strengthens an Internal Locus of Control because you focus attention on the part of the situation where you have the greatest influence: your own behavior.

The process becomes:

Identify what you value → Recognize the concern → Examine your expectations → Define the goal → Choose a behavior → Take Focused Action

Progress then provides new information.

You learn what works, what does not, what needs to change, and what skills you may need to develop. Your expectations can change through experience, and your goals can become clearer as you learn.

This is one reason Self-Learning is central to the Mulry Method.

Goal Setting Is A Process Of Self-Learning

Meaningful goals do more than give us something to pursue. They help us learn about ourselves.

The connection between internal locus of control and goal setting becomes especially important here. When you understand what you value, recognize the expectations influencing your behavior, and identify what you can do within your present situation, goal setting becomes much more than making a list of desired outcomes.

It becomes a process of developing an Internal Locus of Control.

You cannot control every outcome, but you can learn to recognize your choices, develop your skills, evaluate your progress, and adjust your behavior.

That is also the foundation of In The Zone Skills Training: learning the psychological and mind-body skills that help you remain relaxed, balanced, flexible, and focused while pursuing what matters to you.

The objective is not simply to set more goals.

It is to become a better Self-Learner and make meaningful progress your way.