In order to get what you want from life, you first need to know what that is. How can you fulfill your potential if you don’t know who you are or what makes you happy?

This is why goal setting is such a crucial skill to cultivate and something that everyone should spend more time learning. If you don’t know what your goals are, then life becomes a little like going on a journey with no destination. Even if you might enjoy the journey, you’re still going to risk ending up somewhere you don’t want to be and you certainly won’t take the most efficient route to get there!

You have to ask yourself what you really want from life and then go and get it.

What Makes a Good Goal vs a Bad Goal?

Goal setting is anything but easy and is very much a skill in itself. The problem is that not many people realize this and they never think to assess the quality of the goals themselves. They blame their motivation, their circumstances or even other people. But rarely do they assess whether the fault might lie with the goal itself.

We must discover how to formulate goals and targets that you can actually stand a good chance of completing. Then you might realize why life hasn’t yet turned out quite the way you want it.

Bad Goal Setting

To understand how to write a good goal, it can help to first take a look at what makes a bad goal. Why is it that some goals just don’t work out the way they should? What should we do differently to avoid this happening the next time?

Let’s imagine for a moment that you want to get into shape. You’re planning on losing weight and building muscle, which is a pretty popular goal that an awful lot of people are interested in accomplishing.

In this case, a typical goal might involve writing down the ideal body weight and/or measurements that you are trying to reach and then setting yourself a target of 3 months, 6 months or 1 year. And then you get to it!

But this is a goal that is destined to failure. Why? Because it is far too vague, far too distant and far too out of your control. Let’s fast forward two weeks, at which point you have hopefully been training hard for a while and changing your diet. Suddenly, life starts to get in the way. You find yourself bogged down with other things you have to do and you just don’t have the time or energy to make it to the gym today. Or tomorrow. And Wednesday is looking tricky. So is Thursday.

But it’s okay. Because you don’t need to work out. Not working out on those days is not breaking your goal. You have plenty of time to reach your goal and it is up to you how you are going to go about making it happen. So, if you take time off today, you’ll just put some more time in tomorrow. Or the next day. If this week is a write-off, then you can always make up for it next week. And so it continues, week after week, until you get to the end of your allotted time span and you realize you’ve blown any chance of accomplishing that goal.

How about this alternative scenario?
Imagine that you did put in the time and you worked very hard every day to get into shape. But the pounds just didn’t come off. Maybe this is due to a slow
metabolism, maybe it boils down to people offering to take you out for dinner too frequently.
Either way, you get to a certain point and you realize once again that you aren’t going to make it. Even though you tried your best.

So, what do you do? You give up, disheartened, and you leave it a long time before you ever try again.

Good Goal Setting

So, let’s imagine that same scenario but this time write the goal correctly. What would a good goal look like if you wanted to lose weight and build muscle?

For starters, you should remove the time element. Instead of aiming to accomplish something in X number of days, how about you instead aim to do something every day. Look at the goal that you want to accomplish and then break that down into much smaller steps. In order to lose weight, you need to eat 2,000 calories or less a day. And you need to work out three times a week.

If you can do that, then you will eventually notice changes, be they big or small. So instead of focusing on the end goal, set yourself a short-term goal. This is something that is entirely within your control, meaning that you cannot ‘fail’ for reasons outside of your control.

It is also completely resistant to being put off or delayed. You can’t ‘work out today’ tomorrow! Likewise, a slow metabolism isn’t going to prevent you from eating only 2,000 calories.

A technique to use in order to make sure you stick to these kinds of goals is called ‘the chain’. The idea is you build a chain to complete your daily targets and this then creates an immense pressure not to break the chain.

You can do this with a calendar and a pen. So, every day that you successfully work out, you put a tick on the calendar for that day. This will then start to gradually build up a row of ticks and over time, you will come to feel proud of that row of ticks and not want to ruin it by missing one.

You won’t want to ‘break the chain’. Whether you use this additional strategy or not, the point is that you should write goals that are immediate and simple. Meanwhile, you can let the overarching objective ‘take care of itself’

@bitdollar

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