Make Powerful Goals

This is the second in a series of five posts pertaining to my initial entry “Five Tips For Making Goals That Stick”:Part 1. The “WHY” Matters More Than The “HOW”
Part 2. Make Powerful Goals
Part 3.
Part 4.
Part 5.

Make Powerful Goals

A surefire way to set yourself up for failure, is to not make goals that are incredibly powerful and compelling. If you aren’t motivated about it. If it isn’t something that you would get up early and stay up late for. If it isn’t something that you would do at almost any cost….than how do you expect to put in all the effort to achieve it?

I used to set incremental goals, taking something I did moderately well and just adding to it. I would get very specific and create a plan for achieving the goal….but would quickly lose the motivation to pursue it. I wouldn’t put the goal in a broader perspective. I’d just follow what I was doing in the past and extrapolate into the future.

For example, I’d run 5 miles one day, and decide that my new goal was to run 6 miles at a stretch within the next month. A few weeks into the process, something else more interesting would catch my attention, and I’d forget about my goal altogether.

Sometimes I would achieve the goal, sometimes I wouldn’t….and when I did achieve the goals…I often said “so what!” The more I did this, the more I stopped trying to set goals to begin with. I just started to go with the flow….that’s a definite way to ensure mediocrity! Something nobody should aspire to.

Now, I make it a practice to set really powerful goals. It is OK to have some smaller goals that you know you can achieve, but is the really big things that will keep you motivated and excited. How do you figure out what these big goals should be?

Here is a process I use to come up with life goals that are really worthwhile.

Step 1: Sit in a comfortable chair, with a paper and pencil. Start by writing out a list of all the things that you really enjoyed over the past year. Think about all aspects of your life (health, relationship, career, etc.). Spend about 5 minutes creating this list, and focus on getting more items written down as opposed to more details and fewer items. It’s about quantity at this point!

Step 2: Circle the top five things that you really felt were truly incredible experiences for you. For each of these five, write a short paragraph about why they were so impactful.

Step 3: Think about all the things you want your life to be in the future. These could be places you want to travel to, skills your want to learn, health related things, things you want to acquire, money you want to make…really anything. They could be big or small. Spend about 10 minutes to generate a list of things you want to bring into your life in the future. Don’t worry about timeframe…they could be 1 year things or 10 year things…just make the list.

Step 4: Go back through your list and write a number next to each item, corresponding to if the goal is a 1, 3, 5 or 10+ year goal.

Step 5: Look at the 1 and 3 year items….and circle the five most compelling ones. These are the things that would really get you excited to work towards and proud to have achieved. Write a paragraph about why these are absolutely critical to your future. If you can’t write more than a sentence or two about it…it probably isn’t a very powerful goal…best move on to something else.

That’s it! Through this simple process, you will have taken some time to reflect on past successes (of which we all have many, if you take the time to think about it). You will have carried that momentum through to think about what you want to bring into your life….and used that to focus on some near-term goals that really have some power behind them.

Now, depending on how ambitious you might be….five big goals might be too many to handle at once, so decide on the one or two you really want to focus on….and get to work!