Thinking back over my academic career, there are several things that stand out to me. The first derived from my good fortune to collaborate with Chuck Carver (who also has a chapter in this book; see Chapter 60). We were both graduate students at the University of Texas, and we were doing work on self-awareness, trying to understand more fully how thinking about oneself impacts how one behaves. At the same time, Chuck audited a course that offered on overview of control theory. Control theory provides a framework for thinking about self-regulating or self-guiding systems. Most importantly, it helps to identify the component processes that are needed in order for a system to be self-correcting.

When people think about self-guided or self-correcting systems they often think of things like thermostats in heating systems, which function to keep the temperature at a set level, or, perhaps more recently, how self-driven cars keep themselves in the proper lane as they go down the highway, self-correcting as they negotiate turns and curves, and get buffeted back and forth by wind. At some point, Chuck had the epiphany that these same principles might apply when people try to make progress toward the goals they are striving to reach.

It was Chuck's insight that caused us to begin to recast the work we had been doing on self-awareness in terms of behavioral self-regulation. That is, the research findings on self-awareness were showing that the behaviors people engaged in were more closely aligned with their intentions and goals when they were more self-aware or more self-reflective. This sounded a lot like something a self-regulating system would do. The system would operate in a way that kept the person's behavior aligned with the endpoints the person was trying to achieve (e.g., the person's intentions, values, attitudes, and beliefs).

At some point, our thinking began to shift from what happens when goal pursuit is going smoothly to what happens when it's not going so smoothly. We began to think harder about what happens when people are engaged in goal-directed action and they are having a hard time making progress attaining what they want to attain.