How To Set Goals & Reach Them: Inspiration for The New Year.

I must confess: I have never been a big fan of setting goals. 

Whether it’s New Year’s resolutions, performance goals at work, or even forecasting how I want my life to look and feel 5 years down the line, it usually provokes a bit of anxiety as I try to force myself to imagine things that will never turn out the way I imagine them. 

And yet however much I moan about them, I can also see the benefit of having clearly defined goals. Goals allow us to measure our progress and determine where we’ve veered off path. They help us be more intentional and diligent in our decision-making. They help us evaluate whether we’re living in accordance with our values. 

Over this past year, I’ve been reevaluating my own relationship with goals. Where I once cringed at the thought of generating an idea of where I want to go in life, now I see opportunity for aligning my current thinking and behaving in accordance with the outcomes I want. Where I once mapped out vague or impossible-to-meet goals, now I find myself interested in laying out achievable intended outcomes and milestones to determine whether I’m on track to meet them. 

I can now see what I stand to gain from setting clearly defined goals, namely more productivity, smarter decision-making, and a better understanding of cause-and-effect. A goal means I have to project my attention into the future and observe whether my current behavior is in line with what I want down the line. This pays massive dividends, not the least of which is a strange feeling I have often wondered how to obtain: The feeling of having one’s shit together. 

Not only that, but goals can also be used to treat cases of depression, a condition in which our attention is preoccupied on the past. Because goals are future-oriented, it forces our attention away from the mistakes that were made and rechannels it towards making the future better for ourselves and others. Many people, myself included, have experienced the transformative effects of goal-setting on depression (which has been one of my own major personal struggles). 

When considering how to set goals and reach them, the basic recipe is this: Define your goal as a process, determine what intended outcome you’d like from this process, set up milestones along the way to determine whether your process is helping you reach your intended outcome, revise your process as needed. Let’s visit each component of this recipe individually.

Define Your Goal as a Process

For most of my life when I’ve thought about goals, I’ve pictured outcomes. I want to do a handstand. I want to be a landowner. I want to be a project manager. I want to teach yoga online. 

No wonder the thought of goal-setting made my hands clam up. These are tall orders, especially if those outcomes seem really far down the line. Because if I’m in a place where I can’t even bend over to put my hands on the floor, doing a handstand seems almost impossible. If I have no savings and no job, becoming a landowner is a tough gig. I think you see where I’m going with this.  

And yet, this is how I understood setting goals for most of my life. They seemed fuzzy. They seemed far away. They seemed impossible to measure. They became something I attempted to achieve my mere wishful thinking. 

It wasn’t until I started defining my goals as a process rather than an outcome that they started to feel both manageable and achievable. For me now, a goal is a process that may or may not lead to an intended outcome. I don’t have control over the outcome, but I do have control over the process. And this is what makes me feel powerful. 

So, now--instead of wanting to do a handstand, I want to learn about the required joint actions of handstand and do mobility training to perform and sustain those joint actions. Now I have a process. And if this process leads to my intended outcome of being able to do a handstand, then wonderful! But if, for reasons beyond my control, handstand is not in my cards, then I still get the satisfaction of going as far as I could, I get the physical benefits of learning the joint actions, and I have the ability to psychologically move on from it because my goal was never focused on the outcome, it was focused on the process. 

Determine Your Intended Outcome

For a while, all my goals were psychologically structured as intended outcomes. This meant that when I noticed myself thinking about a new goal, I saw the intended outcome first and then I had to go back and develop a process for getting there. 

Whether you notice the intended outcome first or the process first, it’s important to define both. The intended outcome tells us where we’re trying to get to. The process answers how we’re going to go about doing it. 

Both the intended outcome and the process may change in the course of reaching a goal. We have shifting priorities, our interests change from moment to moment, and often the realities of doing something don’t exactly match up to our plan of getting something done. Knowing this, we must be open to changing both our process and our outcome as we set out to reach a goal. 

Set Up Milestones

I don’t know about you, but I often embark on goals from a very uneducated position. I usually have no idea what meeting a goal entails at the time that I set them. 

This is why I often cannot set up milestones at the onset of setting a goal. Instead, my milestones are revealed as I embark on my process, where I may only be able to plot one or two milestones ahead into the future. Milestones represent a date or date-range, and lay out a set of criteria by which to measure my progress. 

Upon establishing a new goal--let’s say learning the joint actions of handstand (intended outcome: to be able to do a handstand), I may have just one milestone: A date by which I will want to have learned the joint actions, and a set of resources (websites, books, movement leaders on social media, etc.). This milestone is simply, but it’s effective. Why? Because it motivates me to get up and do something and it lays out very clearly what needs to get done. In other words, I know what I need to do to be successful at this task, which makes me want to do it and keep going. 

Once I learn my joint actions, I can plot more milestones along my process. Perhaps I learn that handstand requires intense shoulder flexion (arms overhead) and stability throughout the rest of the body to hold itself in neutral while upside down. This first thing I do is develop my process to achieve shoulder flexion and full body stability. Perhaps this means establishing a movement routine, such as doing isolated shoulder work MW, training handstands T/TH and doing full-body stability work every Friday. Now I can plot a milestone along my process, so maybe I set a date by which to evaluate my shoulder flexion and full-body stability. I can do this by scheduling a one-on-one with a movement coach to do an assessment, or set aside time to do a self-assessment if I feel I have a nuanced enough understanding of how to do it. Once this assessment happens, I’m able to map out a continuation of my process--whether I keep it the same or adjust it based on my assessment--and another milestone down the line. 

I think of milestones as my markers for determining whether I should move ahead in the same direction as I have been or adjust my process in some way. This keeps my goals from sliding off my radar because I always have a date in the future set to reevaluate my efforts. 

Milestones should be regularly scheduled and can be determined in a rolling fashion. When one milestone has been reached, a new one is developed based on the lessons learned so far in the process. This is what keeps us from wasting time or moving aimlessly while attempting to reach our goals. 

Revise Your Process

Anything that was ever learned or accomplished by anyone in the history of the world was achieved through the process of trial and error. Instead of fearing or hating failure, we can reprogram our psychology to seek out and celebrate failure. When we allow ourselves to fail big and fail often without psychologically punishing ourselves, we put ourselves in the best position to succeed.

The purpose of milestones is to reveal gaps and areas of the process that could be working better. In essence, our milestones give us the opportunity to seek out failure in our process. When we have a good understanding of what’s not working or what can be working better, solutions are often obvious. This is what revising our process is all about. 

Takeaways

When we sit down to consider how to set goals and reach them, use a recipe that’s tried and true: 

1. Define your goal as a process

2. Determine the intended outcome

3. Establish milestones

4. Revise your process

Make yourself resilient in the face of failure, diligent in your pursuit of progress and open to the possibility that everything you want for yourself is actually possible to get. We all have circumstantial setbacks that make us want to give up sometimes, but I have a feeling that our biggest challenge is overcoming mindsets that keep us from discovering how amazing life can be. 

In 2019 I hope to develop sleek operations for teaching yoga online, learn more about website-based businesses, mobilize my entire body to its full potential, develop my professional process for process-improvement projects, grow my own food (or at least my own salads), and continue to optimize my communication so that I’m a kick-ass team member, teacher, friend and girlfriend. 

Now it’s your turn to go set some goals and reach them. Best of luck to us all. 

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