Prioritizing and Setting Your Goals

So far we’ve been talking about coming up with abstract visions and ideas for what you want to achieve. Now it’s time to actually prioritize and create your goals. And this is where things will once again often go wrong for a great number of people. The problem is that we don’t know how to write goals that we can accomplish and we instead end up with unrealistic or ill-defined goals.

This is the difference between goals and visions and this is the difference between goals that you can achieve and those you can’t. You have your vision and you have your mission statement. But if you leave it at that, then there is a good chance that you will never execute on your plan – as we saw earlier, this is backed up by research that shows us that having a goal can actually give us ‘permission’ almost to rest on our laurels.

The Problem With Goal Setting

But the types of ‘goals’ many people write are not much better. Let’s say for instance that it is your short-term goal to look and feel amazing. To be in your best shape ever and to really be healthy and happy as a result.

So you make your goal:

“To lose 10lbs by next year.”

That sounds like a perfectly legitimate goal that would work well but in fact it is far too vague and too long-term.
If your goal is to lose weight in 10lbs, then this gives you no structure to how you’re going to get there. And not only that but a year is a long time, meaning that you can end up putting your training off until you get to that point.

In other words, you might wake up one day and really feel low on energy and motivation. So you say to yourself ‘one day won’t make a difference’, ‘I’ll make up for it tomorrow’ or ‘I’ll make up for it next week’. Whatever the case, you then feel that you don’t have to worry about skipping out on your training today because you’re aiming to lose weight over such a long period.

What happens? You end up trying to cram all your training into a very short amount of time because you’ve put it off so many times. 3 months into your training and you’ve made so many excuses that you’ve actually gained a pound.

Now you need to rush. But then you find that life gets in the way. Maybe you get ill, maybe you’re very busy, or maybe your routine changes and you no longer have the time to train. And now you find yourself getting even further behind. By the end, you realize that you’re never going to achieve your objective in time, you feel greatly disheartened and you ultimately end up giving up on your goal altogether.

The problem with this goal was that it was:

• • Too long term

• • Too unstructured

• • Too out of your hands

So let’s think of a new type of goal.

This time, our goal is to work out for at least 15 minutes, four times a week.

That is now a much more straightforward, simple to understand goal that you can follow through and that is entirely within your hands. Whether you lose weight is partly down to genetics and partly down to your metabolism. But everyone has 15 minutes to spare in a day. And that means this is entirely down to your own drive, willpower and determination. This is entirely within your control.

Better yet, it is immediate. And it is pass or fail. That means you can’t say ‘I’ll make up for it next week’ because by that point you’ve failed your goal on that week. This is a simple goal that you either accomplish or fail to accomplish. And if you do fail, you can try again next week with no need to be overly disheartened by it.

The same applies to any other goal, not just fitness. So instead of making your goal ‘to write a best-selling novel’, instead make your goal ‘to write 1 page a night’. The best part is that if you concentrate on these smaller goals, then your overall vision will start to take care of itself. You focus on the day-to-day grind and you let the bigger picture grow on its own.

Creating Three Goals and Going After Them

The key then, is to identify which smaller steps like this are going to be most effective in helping you to reach your broader goals and visions. How do you break your objective down into small goals that you can follow through?
This means coming up with a plan and that means creating a road map. You have your passion now, so the next step is to make sure that everything you’re doing in life is going to be supportive of that passion.

You might be working a job you don’t like right now but that job should be helping you to get closer to the lifestyle you want. This should be part of your plan. So map it out and look at the individual steps you’ll be taking on the way to get to your final destination. Some more considerations are to make sure that the goal you’re heading towards is something that you can personally accomplish and to work with the resources you have available to you.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can’t do the things you want to do. The key is to work out how you can get to the point you want to be at, from your current situation.
For example, we’ve already suggested that you can be a successful music artist by creating a YouTube channel where you share your music. That’s not the obvious or most common way of achieving that goal but it will work just the same.

Try to think about alternative ways to get what you want that play to your strengths. A great example of someone who did this is Sylvester Stallone. Stallone wanted to be an actor in Hollywood movies but no one would really give him the opportunity. His slurred speech and buff physique ensured that he was only ever cast in bit parts as the ‘heavy’ and so he had to find another way to break into show business.

 

What he did to accomplish this, was to create a script for a film (he was a great screenwriter). That film of course was Rocky and film producers and studios were so excited by it that they offered him huge amounts of money to buy the rights. But Stallone was steadfast and he said he would only let them have the rights if he could star in the film as Rocky. The studios were reluctant but eventually they relented – and the rest is history!

Likewise, Arnold Schwarzenegger took a highly unlikely path in his career, becoming a famous bodybuilder before using that platform to springboard himself to success as a movie star and eventually a politician. You have skills, you have contacts and no doubt you’ve already made some progress. So think about what the most strategic way for you to accomplish your goals is and work toward that.

Choosing Three Goals

So look at your overarching vision and your mission statement and now ask yourself what small concrete changes you need to make to your life in order to get a bit closer to making that your reality. What do you need to change and how do you need to change it in order to be the person you’ve dreamed of being? It might start with something very small – like rearranging your home office, getting into shape, or finding a new job.

Make this ‘step one’

Now turn these into simple goals that you can work toward on a daily basis. Remember, these goals need to be short term, pass-fail and entirely within your control. Want to find a new job? That is not a goal in itself because it is largely outside your control and destined for potential disappointment.

Instead, your goal should be to send 3 applications per week. This is now something that is fully in your control and that you can much more easily follow through. And once again, you’ll find that the ‘job part’ takes care of itself if you focus on this small step. Take three of these steps and goals and write them down.

Three is a perfect starting point because it will bring about some real change in your lifestyle but it won’t require too much commitment or too much of a change to your daily routine. Write these goals down and then make a commitment to yourself that you’re going to make it happen.

Goal Crushing Shortcuts
With the suitable set of skills and knowledge, now you establish the work you planned to achieve your goals. Along this journey, there are a few more ways other than the plans you have made to help you conquer certain obstacles especially those which are not work-related.

Visualize Your Goals

How to Set Goals, the imagination of the ‘bigger picture’ and the details is part of a visualization technique used by successful athletes, professionals and business people. In other words, we can comprehend this technique based on the concept “seeing is believing.”At this stage, we should understand the motivational strength of our mental pictures.
However, the focus of the visualization technique in this chapter differs from that of goal setting as this type of visualization is more process-based. Rather than focusing on imagining you achieving the goal and its details, we should also visualize each step needed to accomplish the goal.

For instance, to gain muscles up to the weight of 80kg, we could imagine the body shape, tone and size of the muscles of the ideal body which we want have. What we could have possibly missed out is the process of going to the gym, sweating out, straining each of those muscles to our limits and then experiencing the sore for a few days every week in those few months we try to achieve our goal.

From the example above, while visualizing the process, we have to take our sacrifices and the costs into account, not just the rewards of our goals. This will further enhance our mental strength and ensure that we are better prepared to anticipate the challenges ahead.

Being Accountable

Passion, motivation and inspirations are best paired with a sense of responsibility of our goals. Developing accountability or responsibility is not just an action plan or an action that we can accomplish. It is a type of character building that requires longer time to instill in ourselves.

Subject to individual preferences, many people have various methods of developing such discipline. A few examples such as not avoiding difficulties, announcing our goals to our family and friends, ensuring we complete each task can help us to understand that being accountable for our own goals inspire us to help ourselves and other to be committed.

Some individuals even subject themselves to the reward-penalty system by penalising themselves if they fail to accomplish a job or a goal. While this system sometimes discourages those who are afraid of failure and those who do not benefit from learning of their failure, some organisations prefer to utilise this system to instil fear of failure in their members.

Building Rapport with The Right People

Building relationship with people at work like colleagues, clients, our employers or even friends of our friends means creating an inter-dependence system where both you and them can decide to help each other in the long term. Once such system of relationships is developed, we should look for opportunities to help others first before they are open themselves up to help us back in return.

Why help first and wait for help in return? This mindset is derived from the fact that people usually are too busy with their own lives and work that they rarely think of going out of their own way to help unless they are called upon. Therefore, helping out people without harming ourselves and the chances of reaching our own goals will further strengthen the relationship we have with people.

In helping out, we will not only receive appreciation and gratitude in return but also an open mind and a kind heart. While our efforts and generosity to help might be forgotten or people whom we have helped do not even return us a favor in the future, believing in the goodwill of people and the bigger chances of a return naturally will be in our path.

Instilling Willpower in Ourselves

The basic element of focus and motivation is undeniably willpower. Developing willpower means resisting temporary temptations in order to achieve our goals in the future. When we have developed our willpower to
a certain level, we are able to sacrifice our indulgences just to work more effectively to achieve better results.

For instance, we can practise this by taking an extra hour for more different running exercises to build our stamina for the marathon instead of watching our favourite TV show or skipping a movie date with our friends for that extra progress on the month long project we have been working on. You will be surprised how far willpower can help us improve in anything we do throughout our lives.
Nurture habits which enable us to focus on our progress instead of disrupting us. For instance, the goals of losing weight mainly depend on the diet and exercise designed for the individual. If s/he refuses to follow a particular diet and constantly eats high calories food or unhealthy ones, losing weight will be even more difficult than the plans suggested so.
Following a routine is another way of cultivating a habit but it is more structured and therefore encourages us to build self-discipline. Examples of routines would be our exercise schedules and our budgets whose targets we remind ourselves with
The ultimate aim of following routines and cultivating habits is to build self-discipline which reflects our commitment towards our goals after we have set our plans. For instance, the students with the best grades in class often possess certain amount of control in their lives with the effort and time they used for their studies and work.

Adjustments

A goal or a plan that was put in place would definitely require particular knowledge, methods or tools for us to measure progress as well as to analyse results of our work within stipulated time. Without such necessary measurements of the results and progress, whether qualitative or quantitative, we may not be optimistic of our improvements especially because we could not make significant changes to our methods or work in the future.

Once we have built discipline and have accomplished more than the necessary tasks to achieve a goal, we must constantly track our progress to ensure the development of our work towards goals. There are many ways to track our progress such as providing reports after our work, writing a diary, or recording our work itself in video or other forms.

Recording our progress and our work will not merely be a useless review of it. After the deadline, we can use such records to make further adjustments to our work in the future. As a an example of tracking progress in personal financial planning, some of us collect every single receipt we receive and write down our daily expenses to indicate our next few steps in our budgeting goal.

Whether it is to reduce expenses for future investments or to allocate funds for our children’s education, such are necessary steps to ensure wise financial planning in the long term. This also enables us to gain experience of overcoming similar obstacles in the future.

Conquering Difficulties

Throughout our progress, we will surely face obstacles and different difficulties, whether a problematic one or an easy to solve one. If the problem is one we have experienced before, it will be easier if we have recorded it in our reviews as we would acknowledge better solutions to it.

However, the most important thing in facing every problem is to understand the core of the causes and our options in solving it. Then, whether as a team or individual, we have to stay calm and maintain our composure so that we can evaluate the options we are offered by the circumstances. It is never embarrassing to seek assistance even if it does come with a price.

If we cannot solve a problem but still have time to do so, then it would be best that we use another solution or alter the particular solution we chose to improve the outcome. This is where a backup plan is extremely useful especially if the problem was anticipated and the backup plan was well prepared.

Our decision in choosing the best solution occasionally produces setbacks rather than the outcome we hoped for. Despite the setback, we should be optimistic that we can recover and improve from such setbacks. At least, it would be beneficial if we view it as an invaluable lesson.

Nevertheless, there are certain causes in our work which are beyond our control such as natural disasters, illnesses and accidents. These are the unfortunate events which we must recover from. Besides, we must also focus on what we can control.

Learn from Failures

As it is easier said than done, many people, whether successful or not, face difficulties in learning from their failures, let alone face their failures. Firstly, we must not avoid the fact that our failure does not mean we cannot improve and progress from it. Because of this, we must be physically and mentally flexible to accept failure and move on. The truth of success is that examining our failures can help us to adapt to new situations, assess improvised solutions and progress from our setbacks.

Firstly, we can investigate the causes of our failures by reviewing every step of our preparations. If there was any fault detected there, we could rectify the problem and ensure that such mistake will never be repeated.Then, we also should assess our execution of the plans and be honest about our efforts and mistakes in it. While we might be biased in expecting that we have tried our best and find no fault in our execution, we can also seek the help of experts or more experienced colleagues to assess our work which we have recorded.

Finally, we should find ways or develop a system to help us learn from such mistakes or failures to anticipate similar problems.

Celebrating the Wins

Anything that is not considered a failure should be celebrated as progress. Even if the success you have achieved is not worth the celebration, rewarding yourself by the minimum is encouraged as it will not only inspire you to progress further in achieving your goals, it will also strengthen your faith in yourself and your belief in achieving your goals.