You Can’t Hit What You Don’t Aim At
It’s the start of 2023. Who here spent some time reflecting on 2022 and thinking about 2023 over the break?
Did anyone write down some goals or plans? Great work.
Is anyone still intending to sit down and set goals? Having trouble getting started?
Why do we torture ourselves by thinking we should set goals?
It’s because we know that goals can be a great source of satisfaction and purpose in our lives.
Goals give us something to look forward to, they give us direction.
Goals help us track and measure our progress and understand our shortcomings.
Goals are popular for a reason: they work.
Start At The End
Sometimes we struggle to produce goals.
Here is another way to approach it; instead of looking forward and trying to work out what you want to achieve, project yourself forward to the end of the year or a future point and look back and imagine what you have achieved or your desired situation then. It’s a much more powerful technique.
Visuals and the artistically gifted might want to draw an actual picture of what their vision looks like. This physical picture is a powerful anchor and reminder on your wall or fridge.
Specific Goals Are Best for External Pursuits
Probably the most popular way to use goals—and the way you’ve used them in your own life—is to pursue a specific result.
Examples:
I want to be an author, so I set a goal to write a book by the end of the year.
I want to have financial freedom, so I set a goal to be debt-free by December 2023.
Specific goals act as a sort of GPS for your life. And just like the GPS on your phone needs a specific destination to be useful, external goals really only work when you have a specific outcome in mind.
When you set specific goals, they become measurable and actionable, which then allows you to track your progress.
These are sometimes referred to as “SMART Goals”. SMART stands for:
·Specific
·Measurable
·Achievable
·Relevant
·Time-Bound
So, instead of “Be debt-free,” you could say, “Save $25,000 by December 12th.” Now you know exactly what you need to do. If you start saving on January 1, you have 345 days to save, so that’s:
·$72.46 per day
·$521.00 per week
·$2,100.00 per month You can then devise a strategy to save that money and track progress.
General Goals Are Best for Internal Pursuits
All right, so throw a parade for specific goals. They got us to the moon, built the pyramids, and invented Disneyland. What’s not to love about specific goals?
The problem is that sometimes what we want is not specific.
General goals like have more financial freedom, improve a skill are in many ways more useful than specific goals because they are endless and internal. You can never fully achieve “being a better writer.” There’s always something you can do better. Mixing general goals in with specific goals can produce even better results.
Your external goal could be, “I want to have a six-figure income.” The internal goal could be, “Because I want to have financial freedom and not feel stressed about money.”
Now your external goal is oriented in a value (freedom) and you’ve set up guard rails for yourself in pursuing it—i.e., you won’t pursue a six-figure income in a way that creates less freedom for yourself.
Putting It All Together
So we’ve learned that we should ground our external, specific goals with internal goals that reflect our values. We know we should break down difficult, long-term goals into more attainable micro-goals. And we’ve learned that our goals should be ambitious but not so ambitious that they seem unattainable.
Putting it all together it would look something like this:
•Think of your specific goals as a pyramid with your big, ambitious goal on top, and then all of the sub-goals underneath.
•Underneath those goals are even smaller, more easily attainable goals.
•But notice, the pyramid of specific goals is enveloped in a circle of more general, internal goals.
•This way, your goals are oriented by your values (general goals) and are broken down into smaller steps that can keep you motivated over a long period.
Summary
The value of our goals is not in what we accomplish, but in the direction, they give us. Goals orient us toward what we’d like in life and give us a little kick in the ass to start moving toward it. But if we discover on the way that actually, we don’t want that goal in our life, then we should drop it!
People who show flexibility in their goals turn out waaay better than people who rigidly pursue their goals, especially when those goals aren’t working out.
Remember, goals are just made-up markers. The truth is, we won’t know if they’re right for us until we try them on. We often don’t know what we want until we get it, or try to get it. We often don’t know what we value until we try to live out those values.
If you haven’t already in 2023, make an appointment with yourself or your adviser and set some direction for the year.
