Whether you’ve been in a corporate training seminar or signed up for a personal training session, odds are you’ve heard the term goal-setting. More than resolutions or personal promises, goal-setting is a focused, intentional activity where you set your goals along with a timeline to achieve them.
Sounds straight-forward, right? So how come we don’t always reach our set goals?
Start By Asking The Right Questions
Effective goal-setting starts with visualizing your goal while setting up a plan of action to achieve in a designated amount of time. And constructive visualization begins by asking the right questions.
Often, when we’re asked to visualize a goal, many of us think of the moment of success — what things will look like once we’ve achieved the goal. We paint a rosy picture of success, and it’s usually better than it is likely to be in reality. This is a clear example of asking the wrong question. While thinking of success is important, focusing on the steps leading into that success is more important.
If we begin our goal-setting with the wrong questions, we’re setting ourselves up for failure before we even begin. Here’s four questions to help get your goal-setting on the path to success.
- How much will you regret not completing the goal?
While regret is often described as an emotion, it’s actually part of our logical thinking process, helping our brain make decisions. It’s processed in the part of our brain where rationality and executive functioning behaviors are regulated.
Conversely, the feeling of success is all emotion, meaning that even imagining success gives the brain a dopamine release. This release is immediate and fills us with a sense of happiness. This chemical rush motivates us, making us want to get started on our goals right away. Which is a good thing. But if we haven’t properly laid out a plan, our motivation and dopamine filled brain may not look at obstacles or loopholes that could prevent us from achieving success.
By asking yourself how much you’ll regret not reaching your goal, you force your brain to consider the idea of failure. Known as regret aversion, this one question is one of the best cognitive aids in decision making. It stops the dopamine rush and helps transition your brain away from chemical emotions and more into your logical reasoning.
If you find that your goal isn’t something you’d regret failing, maybe it should be dropped, or at least given less priority. Would achieving this goal lead to regret in other areas of your life? For example, if completing every work assignment the day it’s assigned can be reached, but it requires you to work long hours, perhaps achieving your goal would harm other goals, such as spending more time with your family. In this case, your goal needs to adjusted, dropped, or aligned in a way so that higher priority goals can also be achieved.
Simply asking yourself to evaluate your potential regret in a multitude of ways will help you identify which goals are higher priority in your life, along with creating a list of obstacles or problems that could stand in the way of achieving your goal.
2. How will you explain your goal to someone else?
Goals are often vague things. They’re ideas that sound great in our mind, but maybe they leave out important details. Explaining your goal to someone requires you to give shape and substance to that idea, taking away the emotionality or ‘feeling’ of the goal and making it something contextual and real.
Explaining your goal forces you to evaluate the cause and effect of your goal. Is it tangible? Achievable? Realistic? How that person reacts could be an instant reality check on your imagined success.
Further, presenting your goal to an outside person requires you to consider specific questions regarding your plan. Do you have a timeline and can you complete the steps within that timeframe? What are your own strengths and weaknesses, and how can you use or counteract them? What are your assets and liabilities?
Be sure to engage with someone you trust, someone who can help you ask the right questions so you can become your own impartial judge for future goal-setting. It’s vital you learn to be ruthless in finding faults with your plan. By being able to explain details of your goal-setting and the specific steps to achieve it, you hold yourself accountable to both the goal and the plan.
3. Does this goal interfere with other goals?
We all have a multitude of goals in our lives. Some are things we do frequently, and may not think of as goals. Waking up at a specific time, for example, may not be an intentional goal you’ve set, but if it’s important to you, it’s a goal nonetheless. Or, they’re things we have a high priority on, but still don’t view as goals. Spending more time with your family or taking a walk everyday are a few examples.
It’s important to assess our goals on both an individual and collective basis. And evaluating how one goal interferes with another is exactly how we accomplish this. Sometimes these examinations lead to major goal-setting changes. If spending more time with your family is a higher priority than achieving a promotion at work, you may have to consider adjusting other goals within your life — such as financial planning — in order to continue having actionable plans and reachable goals.
If you simply assess your goals on an individual basis, you may not realize you’ve set conflicting timelines, unrealistic action steps, or impossible levels of success for one or more goals. This puts you at risk of failing to reach not just one goal, but perhaps several. However, a more holistic approach allows you to make micro adjustments to multiple goals, keeping them all relevant and achievable.
4. How much you can sacrifice for this goal?
Whether big or small, goals necessitate a change in habits. And change requires sacrifice.
Let’s take the example above. Even if you decided not to go after a promotion at work, perhaps you’ve been given sales goals that require you to spend more time at work. If you stay late, this new goal will impact your family time, and that may not be a sacrifice you’re willing to make. On the other hand, if you don’t achieve these new goals, you may not be able to keep your job, which will impact a large number of other goals in your life. Therefore, figuring out how much you can sacrifice in order to achieve a balance in your life and continue moving forward in actionable steps is necessary.
In this example, perhaps the answer is giving up an hour each morning to go to work earlier. This will require sacrificing maybe an hour of sleep, or not going to the gym. Maybe it means skipping breakfast with your spouse and eating on the train. Of course, it could also mean you need a new goal of finding a different job.
Finding which sacrifices you are willing to endure allows you to make the appropriate adjustments to your current goal, along with refining your existing goals so that they all remain intact.
Conclusion
Goal-setting can be an extremely effective tool in building motivation and momentum in the things you want to achieve. But it can only be effective if the goal is a right fit for your life. Asking these questions can help ensure you are on the right track in developing achievable goals with actionable planning.
