Personal goals and well-being during critical life transitions: The four C's—Channelling, choice, co-agency and compensation

The aim of this paper is to present the life-span model of motivation comprising four key processes or the four C's – channelling, choice, co-agency or co-regulation and compensation – in the context of several longitudinal data sets focusing on people's personal goals during critical life transitions. The life-span model of motivation posits that the challenges, demands, and opportunities people encounters at a particular stage of their lives channel the kinds of personal goals they construct [Little, B., Salmela-Aro, K., & Phillips, S. (2007). Personal project pursuit: Goals, action and human flourishing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers]; that personal goals play an important role in the ways in which people make choices and direct their own development [Baltes, P. B. (1997). On the incomplete architecture of human ontogeny: Selection, optimization and compensation as foundation of developmental theory. American Psychologist, 52, 366–380]; that people regulate their development by co-agency [Edwards, A. (2006). Relational agency: Learning to be a resourceful practitioner. International Journal of Educational Research, 43, 168–182]; and that people compensate for failure experiences by adjusting their personal goals on the basis of previous developmental transitions and life events [Brandtstädter, J. (1989). Personal self-regulation of development: Cross-sequential analyses of development-related control beliefs and emotions. Developmental Psychology, 25, 96–108], and that such compensation and adjustment has consequences for their well-being [Heckhausen, J., Wrosch, C. & Fleeson, W. (2001). Developmental regulation before and after a developmental deadline: The sample case of “biological clock” for childbearing. Psychology and Aging, 16, 400–413].