So, you’ve got ideas for your top goals. Excellent!
The next step is to refine your goals so they’re in a format that can guide your actions. We want to avoid goals that look good on paper, but fail to move you forward day-to-day.
There are 3 keys to defining powerful goals that will move you forward:
- Make your goals specific.
- Give your goals a deadline or end date.
- Ensure your goals are achievable.
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
Change non-specific goals to specific goals
The more specific your goal, the more quickly you’ll see what to do — and the better you’ll be able to find the resources to achieve it. (This powerful advice comes from the book Your Best Year Yet by Jinny Ditzler.)
Let’s look at an example.
A nonspecific goal could be “Reduce my stress level and increase my peace of mind.”
While this is perfectly valid as an area of life that’s important to you, it’s simply not specific enough to look at on a Wednesday morning and know what you should do next.
In contrast, you could rewrite this into a specific goal: “Meditate at least 15 minutes each morning.”
Now, it’s clear what you need to do, and it’s clear how you track your progress.
Change open-ended goals to time-bound goals
Goals must have deadlines. (It can also be helpful to set milestones throughout the year, too — we’ll come back to that technique later in the program).
For now, let’s focus on rewriting open-ended goals so they have an end date.
An open-ended goal could be: “Write my first book and find an agent and publisher.”
You’d rewrite this as: “Prepare a complete draft of my first book by October 1st, so I can send it to potential agents.”
Change overwhelming goals to achievable goals
It’s important to avoid setting goals that will overwhelm you with complexity or difficulty.
Goals that are overly ambitious may cause you to go “numb” and avoid looking at your goals because you sense that failure is inevitable.
To return to the example of writing a book, the goal of “prepare a complete first draft” could actually be overwhelming for many new writers.
So what would a more achievable goal look like for a new writer?
How about:
- Sign up for a local writer’s group and bring something to share and get feedback, every week for the next 6 months.
- Save $3,000 by August 15, so I can hire a professional writing coach.
- Practice the ‘morning pages’ technique every weekday morning, for the next 8 weeks.
These goals will lead to more and better writing — which can lead naturally to writing a draft of the book.
But unlike the big, scary goal of preparing a complete draft, these goals feel more concrete, more approachable, and less risky. That means they’re far more likely to actually happen!