Setting Goals That Actually Help You Get What You Want

Here’s the gist:

1. Start with Personal Reflection: Understand where you are now, clarify what truly matters, and identify the gap between your current situation and where you want to be.

2. Prepare to Act by Creating Sub Goals: Break down your larger goals into actionable, realistic steps that align with your values.

3. Keepin’ It Real: Be realistic about your timelines, prioritize what’s most important, and allow room for setbacks.

4. Act and Process Emotions: Execute your plan while acknowledging and processing your emotions, adjusting as needed to stay resilient on your path to success.

The Missing Element: Effective Goal-setting

We’ve been told to aim high our whole lives, and goal-setting as a concept is likely nothing new to you. What I posit is that despite the prevalence of discussions around setting objectives and SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) goals, many of us do not articulate and work toward goals in a deliberate, meaningful way. Often, workplace goal-setting exercises are seen as perfunctory administrative tasks rather than tools to unlock personal and professional growth. And goal-setting outside of our city offices is usually done haphazardly in our minds, rather than purposely on paper (physical or otherwise). Goal-setting works, but we have to take it seriously and remember that setting goals is actually the easy part of a larger process that requires taking action.

Start with Personal Reflection

Effective goal-setting begins with knowing the answers to the following questions:

• Where am I now?
• What do I care about?
• Where do I want to be?
• Who do I need to be to get where I want to be?

Let’s look at them in turn.

Where am I now?

Set your baseline so you can accurately map your progress. There are many ways to assess yourself, but you can use my PARCS framework as a starting point:

1. Professional: Work achievements, attainment of skills, knowledge and experience
2. Alliances: Building and maintaining a diverse set of personal and professional relationships
3. Resources: Identifying resources and people who can help you and leveraging them at the right time
4. Career vision: Figuring out where you want your career to go in the long term and having a realistic path to get there
5. Self-care and personal interests: Making physical and mental self-care a must rather than a luxury; having the space to enjoy life with those dear to you; living life in awe and feeling a profound sense of balance, happiness, gratitude and peace

Rate yourself in each area from poor to great and see which require the most immediate attention so you can focus your efforts. Do this with candor and compassion. Contrary to how you might feel at times, beating yourself up isn’t the best way to propel yourself forward.

What do I care about?

This is a values exercise, which is of critical importance to do before going to the next step. Values aren’t immutable, so even if you’ve articulated them in the past, take the time to think about where you are now and see if the values and principles by which you’ve lived your life thus far are still most relevant. If you’ve gone from single life to marriage to having children since you last examined your values, you might find that your priorities have changed over the intervening years. Similarly, if you’ve moved from someone barely getting by (an experience to which many of us who have moved to the world’s major cities at a young age can attest) to living in relative financial comfort, you might need to shift your mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance.

There are many values exercises you can use to help you clarify what you care most about, including looking at a list of values and selecting the ones that resonate with you, or thinking about individuals you admire and identifying the qualities you wish to emulate. This part of the process is of central importance, so take your time with this and be honest. Don’t set your values and priorities based on what you think others expect of you or you might find yourself pursuing dreams that are not relevant or meaningful to you.

Where do I want to be?

Now that you know where you are and what is important to you, you can start thinking effectively about what you want the future to look like. I suggest creating a vision for what you want to achieve by again using the PARCS framework, adapted slightly:

1. Professional: What do I really want to be doing to earn income?
2. Alliances: How can I use networking to help me make my personal and professional dreams come true?
3. Resources: What people, affiliations and tools can I leverage to make my personal and professional dreams come true?
4. Career: What are the process steps to take me from my current role to the career I want? If I am already in it, how do I increase my impact?
5. Self-care and personal interests: How can I have fun and work toward my dreams in a healthy and sustainable manner so that I can enjoy the relatively short time I have on this earth?

For each of the five elements, state in words what you would like to achieve. Also give yourself a score, again from poor to great, based on how well you would need to be exhibiting that element to achieve what you want.

Start by thinking big. Throw all of your perceived notions about what is possible out and just dream. Even still, you’re likely to dream smaller than you should at first, so magnify what you come up with by a factor of 1.4. Write down what comes to mind and read them out loud. If you’re excited and also somewhat uncomfortable because achieving them seems a bit out of reach, you’ve likely dreamed big enough. If not, you probably have more work to do. Once you feel that discomfort, you should have a good set of high-level goals to work with.

You might find that you’re already on the path you’d like to be on. You might instead find that you’re going in the completely wrong direction. Either way, you’ll need to take some steps to close the gap between where you are and the vision of where you’d like to be so you can actually get what you want.

Who do I need to be to get where I want to be?

Before getting into tactical process steps, think about your personal growth and how your current challenges can assist you in evolving. Create a detailed avatar of the future version of yourself who has gotten to where the present version of you wants to be:

• What actions do they take?
• How do they think?
• Who do they associate with?
• How do they solve problems?
• What/who do they jettison from their lives?
• How do they treat others in positions lower/higher than them?
• How do they treat their bodies?

If you don’t know who you need to be to get what you want, do some research. Discuss with people who exemplify qualities you admire. Go to talks, read biographies, and utilize resources like YouTube to learn from those who have achieved goals similar to those you’re working toward. Adapt their strategies to fit your unique circumstances. You are of course not them, so you have to do things in a way that’s authentic to you. But their experiences can serve as a starting point as you figure out who you need to become so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can instead direct that energy to focusing on answering questions unique to you and your circumstances.

Once you have created your avatar, think of where you need to start and the small changes you can make to get closer to being the person you need to be to achieve your goals. This is an ongoing process. Remember that change happens slowly, so don’t expect overnight results. You’ve spent years, or potentially decades, practicing certain thought patterns and actions. It will likely take a considerable amount of deliberate work to change course.

Prepare to Act by Creating Sub Goals

You’ve now created a high-level aspiration list and have thought through the identity you need to embody. Now, work on operationalizing things. For each of the goals you set for each element above, create sub goals based on the SMART goal framework. As you do so, think both about the tasks needed to reach your goals and the mindset you need to have to actually take those steps. For example:

Main goal: To get in the habit of being better to my body so I’m healthy for the long run and can do all of the things I enjoy as I age.

Sub goal (the task): Go to the gym three times a week (two days cardio and one day strength training) for 45 minutes each time.

What I need to think (the mindset): This is an investment in myself that is nonnegotiable.

How to remember this:

1. Calendar reminders
2. Having a buddy who will check in/go with me
3. Asking my spouse/kids to remind me
4. Putting my workout clothes out in a conspicuous place/sleeping in them the night before
5. Hiring a personal trainer

Maybe you need to do all of (1)–(5) or maybe just a couple of them. Create a system such that failure is not an option. Some of these things, such as (5) in the above example, might cost money. If you know you don’t have the discipline to follow through consistently, make the investment so achieving your goals becomes virtually assured.

Keepin’ It Real

I touched on this above, and it is a component of the SMART goal framework, but it’s worth stating it explicitly here because failing to do this step could make all of your good work thus far for naught: prioritize what’s most important first, get comfortable being “good enough,” and be realistic about what you can accomplish by when.

Prioritize

Remember that you can’t do everything at once, so you need to figure out what’s most important. Sometimes everything feels important, and it well may be. Sometimes we have to put out the most important fires and let others burn for a while. For each of the sub goals you’ve created, decide which are the most important to work on now and rank them accordingly. Look back at your values exercise to help guide you if you are unsure what to do when.

It’s crucial to audit what’s going on in your life. Think about how soon you need the goal accomplished and whether you have the resources to achieve it within your desired timeframe. For example, money in the abstract might not be something you focus on, but you may still need a certain amount of it to give you the freedom to pursue other things. As such, even if money does not show up as a top value for you, it can still be important. With respect to feasibility, keep in mind that just because something is of high importance to you, it does not mean that obtaining it right away is possible. Some sub goals (such as becoming a world-class pianist) might require consistent effort over many years. Prioritize your goals based on their significance to your overall vision and set deadlines that make sense in the context of the time required to achieve them. Don’t forget to consider everything else you have to do in your life. You only have so much attention, time and energy.

Get the B-

We can make accomplishing goals tougher than it needs to be, especially if we strive for perfection. Often, we set very ambitious goals from an idealized point of view. We may be prone to think that if we focus all our energy on our goals, we should be able to hit the mark. For example, perhaps we say we will go to the gym five days a week for 90 minutes each time (which becomes more like 2+ hours each time when factoring in travel, shower and changing time), even though we may be working 14-hour days and have home commitments. Then we fail to do it because we get overwhelmed by even the thought of trying to meet the goal.

For many of us, we were taught to go all in and give everything we have to everything we do. Anything less feels like we’re not meeting our potential. These lessons have driven us to succeed in the past, but there’s a downside. When we set overly ambitious goals based on this all-or-nothing mentality, it can backfire. We may feel demoralized when we eventually miss one of those goals, or worse, we might not even start because the task seems too overwhelming. The danger here is that we start to equate not meeting a goal with personal failure, which can lead to a downward spiral of self-doubt and lost momentum. Aim lower. It’s okay.

Give yourself time

A critical part of setting goals is being realistic about timeframes. I would posit that it is better not to set your goals based on what you can achieve under ideal circumstances. Life is complex—we have jobs, families, responsibilities, and our mental health to consider. Energy is a finite resource, and devoting all of it to one goal can leave other areas of our lives neglected. If achieving a certain goal is existential, by all means, prioritize it accordingly, but otherwise, give yourself permission to aim lower and slower in certain areas of your life. This doesn’t mean you’re underperforming; it means you’re balancing your ambitions with your other priorities.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, I still advocate setting aggressive, reach deadlines for two reasons: (1) work generally fills the amount of time you give it and (2) you don’t know what’s lurking around the corner that might disrupt your plans. If you know you want to lose 20 pounds in a year, shoot for 9 months. If you’re clear that 9 months is the stretch goal, you don’t have to be dejected if you don’t meet it.

Even if you try to anticipate what might go wrong, you will more than likely discover along the way that you need to change the timeframe to meet a goal based on things you learn as you go. Having a buffer helps prevent a situation where goals that are contingent on each other all get behind and lead to lost momentum.

Planning for Derailment and Your Worst Fears

You’re human. You’re therefore going to mess things up sometimes. Embrace it and plan for it. You’re also likely going to worry about whether you’re really able to pull things off. By transforming that worry, you can actually use it to your advantage.

Derailment

Once you’ve set SMART goals, do a sanity check and identify risk factors: ways you might get in your own way and not follow through on the actions you need to take to accomplish your goals. While you can’t account for everything, one important action to take for each sub goal is to think about everything you could do to get in your own way. Think about your level of discipline to take the actions you’ve laid out for yourself, the time available, the other priorities on your plate and the support mechanisms you currently have in place. What can keep you focused (see “How to remember this” above)? What if you do still fall off track, how will you get back on? What buffer time have you allowed for this? You’ll notice there are some redundancies in this process, but they’re here on purpose. Double- and triple-check that you are being realistic about what you can accomplish. There’s no shame in modulating things down—especially if that makes it more likely you’re actually going to achieve what you’ve set out to do.

Your fears can save you

If you feel a bit of fear and anxiety about the goals you’ve set, it is likely a sign that you have set them at the right level. We usually want to get rid of those emotions, but, when kept to manageable levels, they can be motivators and help us avoid getting too comfortable. They can also help us avoid major potential issues if you use those feelings constructively. I propose the following steps:

1. Figure out why your goals bring up feelings of fear and anxiety and ask if those feelings are merited. You may find that the feelings are irrational and that you just need to let them go.

2. If the feelings are valid, consider why. Your mind will likely create a list of all the ways things could go wrong. List them all out on paper so you can see them.

3. Now that you’re clear about the perils lying ahead, create detailed countermeasures for each one. If you’re not sure what to do, talk to people you trust and research until you are.

By taking these three steps, you will have created a risk-mitigation plan, which will increase your chances of achieving your goals.

This process also helps you to separate out imagined and actual risks so you can focus on how to address the latter in a constructive manner. This will clear unhelpful chatter from your mind. You will also have a protocol to follow, which should mitigate your fears and anxiety so that you can better focus on achieving your goals.

Act

You’ve actually got to follow through on what you said you were going to do. Don’t delay it. Once you have your plan, get started as soon as you can.

When you start following your playbook to achieve your sub goals, you’ll likely come across issues you hadn’t thought of before that will necessitate adjusting what you had planned to do. Make those adjustments and keep moving. If you’ve allowed yourself adequate buffer time, such setbacks should not materially impact your progress.

If you know you struggle with following through, having someone who you share your goals with and who you can check in with periodically can help you stay on task and motivated when things get tough. I’d recommend you choose someone who is equally as ambitious as you, if not more. Ambitious people are more likely to understand your vision, encourage you to stay on track and inspire you to work harder than someone who is not on the same wavelength—even if they are a person who is well meaning. This is also a key place where a coach can help you out.

Have Your Own Back

You might still fail along the way, and you need to be okay with that. Use your failures as data points to better tune your goals, sub goals and action steps. That can be difficult to do after facing setbacks. You should spend time on learning how to process your emotions. When your mind is clear, it is much easier to take in and effectively use learnings from failure. You should also remember that even if you feel momentarily like a failure, if you do all of the things outlined in this article for a number of months or longer, you will be far further along the path to getting what you want than if you do nothing or make only a partial attempt.

Conclusion

Holistic goal-setting is a powerful tool for achieving a fulfilling life, but it has to start with you articulating what you want to achieve clearly so you can put the right goals in place. Goals by themselves are for naught. You have to make them actionable and operationalize those actions accounting for as many potential issues as you can to give yourself the best chance of succeeding. Recalibrate as you go so that you’re pursuing goals you actually care about in the best possible way. Goal-setting isn’t hard, but it does require work. You’re not the type of person who does mediocrity, and your dreams are on the line here. Put in the effort to give yourself the best possible chance of making them happen.