Goal Setting
A step-by-step guide to setting and achieving your goals
Drowning in to-do lists? Struggling to prioritise between what’s urgent and what will have the biggest impact? You're not alone. Successful goal-setting is no easy feat. Whether you're aiming for fitness milestones, personal growth, or professional success, goal setting relies on a few simple concepts.
In this step-by-step guide, we'll dissect the process of goal setting, providing a roadmap that can be applied to any aspiration. As they say, you are what you do, not what you say you will do and never quite get around to.
First: Choose the right goal
Ask yourself which goal you are going to prioritise within a given time frame. You can’t learn Arabic, train for a marathon and start a podcast all at the same time. If you concentrate on one goal, you are much more likely to achieve it. Struggling to decide? Write down all your goals on a piece of paper and start crossing off the ones you can live without in the next 6 months to a year until you get to your highest priority.
Many of us have quite a few goals in the back of our minds – ranging from ambitious and ambiguous to small, specific and urgent. It’s important to differentiate between mission-level goals, high-hard goals, and clear goals (or daily to-do lists). Peak performance expert Stephen Kotler explains the difference with an example. While becoming a great writer could be your mission or purpose, writing a book “is the next level down, a high hard goal that could take years to complete”. A clear goal is “writing 500 words between 8:00 am and 10 am that produce a feeling of excitement in the reader.”
Next: Make it specific
If your goal is to ‘get better at running’ you will find it hard to evaluate your success – and to get satisfaction from all the work you put in. The problem is that as you get stronger and faster, ‘better’ is a moving target. Instead, make the goal specific. Do you want to run 10k in 45 mins? Whatever it is, write it down.
Think about how hard your goals should be. If you make all your goals easier, you’re more likely to achieve them right? Not always. In order to complete a goal, it must be difficult enough to recruit the amygdala – the arousal network involved with fears which helps maintain motivation. Your goal should involve some anxieties and frustrations. Simply put: easy goals aren’t exciting enough to hold our attention. Check the goal you wrote down earlier. It should be slightly above what you know you can do.
Then: Set a timetable and timeline
Some goals are harder to define than running specific distances at specific times. This is where the concept of ‘process goals’ comes in handy. These goals are measured in terms of work done as part of the process. For example, if your goal is to get better at drawing, it is much harder to measure success. But what you can measure is how many classes you attend, how many different techniques you research, or how many hours a week you spend practising. This will not only help you measure your progress but also increase the chance of achieving your goal. As Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers, becoming an expert in anything takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
Write out actions you will take that are specific to the process instead of the endpoint. You might want to go to the gym a set number of times a week. But try to be more specific. How many hours do you want to spend on resistance training, cardio, or stretching?
Some goals have specific deadlines (like getting your 1st draft ready in the next 6 months), and others may be more ambiguous (like spending more time with your family). Either way, make sure you set a date to check in with how they’re coming along. Using 3-month (or 12-week) slots has been proven to work. So plan out the next 3 months then review your progress.
Throughout: Use visualisation to maintain focus
Now you have set your goals and know what needs to be done, the actual work must start. To help you maintain motivation for each bout of work, try the following visualisation technique.
Before starting a task, ask yourself ‘Am I feeling motivated to do this work?’. If the answer is yes, you can visualise the positive outcomes and feelings you will experience when you achieve your next goal. This will motivate you to continue.
If the answer is no, visualising the positives won’t help. Instead, imagine the consequences of failing to achieve this goal on time or at all. Visualising the negative repercussions for 1-3 mins will activate the amygdala, associated with fear and anxiety, releasing epinephrine and dopamine in your brain. This fear response should give you a boost in alertness and motivation, helping you get started.
For more tips, read my blog 6 Simple Techniques to Improve Focus and Motivation.
Finally: Make rewards random and intermittent
The neural circuits that control motivation and the desire to pursue things are very closely linked to those that control brain chemical rewards. In order to keep motivation high, rewards shouldn’t be predictable. Instead, they should be random and intermittent – just like the slot machines at casinos. If you reward yourself too regularly the potency of those rewards is diminished.
Whether rewards are physical (food, activity, gifts) or cognitive (congratulating yourself on a job well done) make sure you don’t overload yourself with them. Keep things random by flipping a coin. If it comes up heads, allow yourself the reward.
Common pitfalls to avoid
Telling everyone about your goals
Some believe that if we share our goals, we are more likely to make them happen. That we will hold ourselves accountable to our promises. In fact, telling people all about our ambitious goals activates our brain’s reward systems giving us that sweet, sweet dopamine hit. Instead keep your goals to yourself, tell your journal or tell one trusted person who will hold you accountable to the process goals along the way.
Not aligning them with your passion and purpose
If your smaller goals don’t align with your passion or purpose, those mission-level goals we talked about earlier, then you are less likely to be motivated to achieve them. Take a step back and see how your goals fit into the larger plan. Are they getting you closer to your mission-level goals?
The danger of a Post-it
You may have tried putting your goal on a Post-it note and sticking it somewhere obvious so you are constantly reminded of it. This can work for a short time but our visual system quickly adapts. Soon you will no longer see the note, it will become part of the wall and lose its power over you. Instead, re-write your goal every week or even each morning on a fresh piece of paper. Writing with a pen and paper has been shown to engage the brain, effectively embedding knowledge and activating focus.
Putting too many things on your to-do list
I said it up top but it bears repeating. You are only human. You only have so many hours in the day. Be realistic as to how many goals you can focus on and you are much more likely to succeed at them and be satisfied with your work.
Last thoughts
All in all, goal setting is a fine art. But by choosing the right goals for you, making them as specific and measurable as possible, setting a timeline, and using visualisation tools and random rewards, you stand the best chance of achieving them. Good luck!
