learning-goal

Learning Goal: A Claude Code Skill for Structured Goal Setting with Mental Contrasting

This skill guides you through semi-structured, interactive goal-setting using the technique of Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII), an evidence-based psychological exercise that draws on a self-regulation strategy to improve learning motivation and follow-through, decrease stress, and increase engagement and persistence. The exercise takes about 10-15 minutes and produces a concrete learning goal card you can keep, revisit, and reference in your agentic coding projects.

Pairs well with Learning-Opportunities, a skill that uses an adaptive "dynamic textbook" approach to help you integrate science-based expertise building exercises while doing agentic coding.

Installation

This repository is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. To install:

1. Add the marketplace:

   /plugin marketplace add https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-goal.git
   

2. Install the plugin:

   /plugin install learning-goal@learning-goal
   

3. Restart Claude Code to activate

For more on Claude Code plugins, see the plugin documentation.

Why You Might Want to Experiment with This Skill

Across my research and qualitative interviews with people doing technical work, one of the top concerns I've heard from practitioners is that using AI will stifle their ability to learn and decrease the amount of active learning that happens in their workplaces. This Skill helps you build back a protective habit into your day: developing a concrete learning goal with a plan to recommit to it when encountering obstacles.

Most people believe that their personal learning goals will be obvious and easily remembered. But in practice, people often fail to achieve learning goals not for lack of desire to achieve them, but because the goals themselves are underspecified. Because of this, when we encounter real obstacles in our lives, we often lack concrete plans that cue us how to work toward our goals when things get hard. This pattern can undermine learning progress and sap our motivation.

Closing the gap between wanting to learn something and actually following through on learning can be made more likely by using brief interventions developed by empirical psychology to help you build better "virtuous cycle" habits. This Learning Goal Skill creates an interactive scaffold for you to work through one such intervention, the MCII. Claude will walk you through through a short interactive coached exercise that encourages specific goals about what you want to learn, visualizing how the goal connects to meaningful change in your life, surfacing a few of the real obstacles that are most likely to get in your way, and building concrete and actionable if-then plans that help you turn obstacles into action triggers.

How It Works

Claude offers this exercise when you make an explicit learning goal request ("I want to get better at X," "help me set a learning goal," "how should I approach learning this?") or when you're starting a new project and describing what you want to build. Claude will not offer this mid-task or if you've already declined this session.

The exercise is conversational and interactive, and intended to force you to do the thinking. This design is aligned with research that shows self-generated goals and obstacles create stronger mental associations than ones suggested to you.

The Exercise

The exercise moves through these key steps:

1. Set a learning goal. Name a specific skill or area you want to grow in. Claude should help you sharpen vague goals into concrete ones without rewriting them for you.

2. Strengthen the goal. Using the SMART framework as a guiding lens, Claude probes the 1-2 dimensions where your goal is weakest. If your goal is already well-formed, this step is brief.

3. Visualize the outcome. Briefly describe why this goal matters to you and what changes when you achieve it. Mental contrasting requires pairing a desired future with present reality, and this step establishes the desired future.

4. Identify obstacles. Describe real, concrete situations where you'd realistically face obstacles to pursuing your goal. Claude should not suggest obstacles for you. Specific, real and self-generated obstacles activate stronger cue-response associations, which is the mechanism that makes the intervention effective.

5. Build if-then plans. For each obstacle, Claude prompts you to draft a specific if-then plan: "If [obstacle/situation], then I will [specific action]."

6. Reaffirm or adjust. After confronting a few likely obstacles, adjust your goal if needed or affirm if it still feels right.