Many people decide to set goals at the beginning of the year. Rather than resolutions it’s better to set the destination and allow the journey to take care of itself. Many people have talked about setting “SMART” goals, I would like this to be a little bit more about the format of the goals. This article will discuss brainstorming fine tuning and getting going on achieving your goals.
The first thing you need to do is brainstorm all those things that you’d like to accomplish in the new year. Whether they are achievable, big, or small, it is important to get them on to paper. A convenient way to organize them is to place them on post-it notes and see if any natural categories come up. You may find that you divide them into personal goals, health goals, or professional goals. You may even have a category that is specific to some portion of your life as in athletics or relationships. It is important to not edit out any crazy ideas, but to get them onto a piece of paper for our next step.
The next step is fine tuning to those things that you must do. In the first step we simply talked about all those things that you would like to do. Now it’s important to categorize all of those and to come up with a finite list of those things that, looking back on the year, will make you happy with the outcomes. Take your post-it notes from the first step and put them into categories. I use two categories, professional and personal. At this point it is also important that your goals conform to the M in smart and that is that they must be measurable. You want to look back on the year and have an objective answer as to whether it was accomplished or not. So, any goals from Step 1 that do not have a measurable outcome put into a category that is simply nice to do or “I would like to be like this.” Then begin to put a hierarchy together within your goals from the most important to the least important. I then put a finite number of things that I “must” accomplish. I use the number 5 because that allows me to use one finger for each one as I recount them to keep them top of mind. As mentioned before, I have professional goals and personal goals that I have a top five in each one of those that I must accomplish in the year.
Step three is one that is commonly overlooked and that is the step to start the journey. For each one of your goals within each one of your categories, figure out what the first smallest step is in order to begin accomplishment of that goal. It can be to join a gym, set a date, do some research, or contact someone. It is important that each one of your goals has a starting step as the wise man said the longest journey begins with a simple first step. This breaks your big goals into smaller steps that are not as daunting as trying to accomplish them all without a road map. Then, you set to work on accomplishing that small step. Importantly each small step that you accomplish requires that you put some thought into what the next step is. So, for each one of your goals throughout the year you will have the next small step towards accomplishing that goal. Simply work towards accomplishing the small steps and all of a sudden the big goal will be accomplished.
In goal setting it is important to take this three-step approach. First, brainstorm all the crazy things that you want to accomplish, then break them down into those things that you must accomplish in some finite number. Five is a good number. For each one of these goals that you much accomplish, be sure that you always keep the next small step written on your things to do. By taking this approach of starting large with brainstorming and breaking it down to the smallest little step that you can take in the long journey will make accomplishing your goals as easy as walking down a garden path.