Why It’s So Hard to Know If You’re Really Making Progress

Think about the last time you tracked your progress on a personal goal. Maybe you were trying to exercise more frequently, be more patient with a spouse or partner, or learn a new skill. Chances are, you had a rough sense of how it was going. And chances are that sense was more optimistic than the evidence warranted.

This is not a character flaw. It is one of the most reliable findings in behavioral science: We are systematically poor judges of our own progress, and during periods of active change, we tend to get worse.

One reason is what psychologists Terence Mitchell and Leigh Thompson at the University of Washington termed rosy retrospection. This is our consistent tendency to remember past experiences more favorably than we rated them in the moment. When we look back over a month of trying to exercise more or sleep differently, our memory selectively surfaces the days we succeeded. The days we failed are there, but they are not as memorable. We feel we’ve been doing better than we really have.

A second explanation is subtler. Motivation isn’t a fixed state; it shifts gradually, often well before behavior changes in any visible way. The enthusiasm that felt solid in January has usually started to erode by March. But because the erosion is incremental, we rarely catch it in real time. We trust that how we feel today is roughly how we’ve been feeling all along. It almost never is.

Together, these two patterns create a specific failure mode: We assume the feedback loop is running when it isn’t. We trust that because we know our own goals and intentions, we know how we’re actually doing. But intention and behavior are not the same thing. How we feel about a change is not the same as how we’re enacting it. And until we close that gap with something more rigorous than a gut check, we’re optimizing for a version of our progress that may not exist.

In researching what separates change successes from failures at organizations for my book, my coauthors and I found that leaders designing change were consistently more confident about employee progress on change than the employees’ actual behavior or stated experience supported. They trusted their read on the room. The data, when they gathered it, told a different story. The wider the gap, the more likely the change failure.

The same gap operates in personal change. And the same remedy applies: Use measurement, not instinct.

This doesn’t require an elaborate system. Research by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin shows that the act of writing specifically about your experience—not vague journaling, but naming exactly what you did, how it felt, and where the friction was—produces measurable improvements in self-understanding and in the likelihood of follow-through. Writing forces the brain to translate impression into information. The gap between what you felt and what actually happened becomes clearer.

Social accountability produces a related effect. A study by psychologist Gail Matthews at Dominican University found that people who wrote down their goals and reported progress to a friend were 42 percent more likely to achieve those goals than people who kept them private. Part of what accountability does is discipline the story you tell yourself. You can’t smooth over the gaps as easily when someone else is watching for them.

Both interventions do the same thing: They replace vague impressions with actual information. When people begin gathering that information honestly, they usually discover not only the gaps in their efforts, but also the progress they had stopped noticing.

Teresa Amabile, a psychologist at Harvard Business School, spent years studying what helps people stay motivated during sustained effort. Her research, drawn from the daily diaries of 238 professionals tracked over several months, produced a counterintuitive finding: The single biggest day-to-day motivator wasn’t recognition from a manager or a meaningful reward. It was the perception of making progress on work that mattered. Small wins, when noticed specifically, produced outsized improvements in engagement and follow-through. The operative word is “noticed.” Progress that goes unobserved doesn’t produce the same effect. It needs to be named to become fuel.

This is what honest self-assessment makes possible. When you journal about your week in specific detail, you often discover you accomplished much less than your vague, optimistic impression suggested—and you'll have a record you can point to as concrete evidence. That specificity matters more than it might seem. Ayelet Fishbach at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business has shown across repeated experiments that concrete progress feedback strengthens goal commitment more than encouragement does. What keeps people going isn’t being told they’re doing well. It’s seeing, with some precision, that they truly are.

Motivation Essential Reads

Why Taking It Easy, or Even Giving Up, Can Be the Smartest Move

1 Habit That Kills Motivation for Most Adults

The story you’re telling yourself about your progress probably has some blind spots. But it may also be overlooking real growth that felt too small or too ordinary to count. Learning to see your progress more clearly, without judgment, isn’t self-punishment. It’s an invaluable form of self-support.