Achieving Your Goals Part I – Goal Identification

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“The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.” – Ben Stein.

In order to achieve your goals you must first identify them.

This may seem like a silly obvious statement. After all, how can you hit a target you do not have? How will you even know if you have hit it if you don’t know what it is? But can you tell me right now what your goals are? Can you just rattle off your top three goals without any deliberation? And I don’t mean the trivial everyday survival goals…such as your goal to get to work each morning, or to survive the next meeting. I mean your real life-long goals. If you are living your life just going blindly from day to day just following the flow and letting life happen to you, then you may not have goals. You may not even know what you want from life.

What do you want out of life? Do you want to have a big house? A satisfying career? A fulfilling relationship? A happy well-adjusted family? Do you want to make a positive difference? These are hard questions. Some of you will already know what you want and some will have to think about it. But it is essential that you go through this process. It is absolutely essential that you identify your goals. Get a pen and paper and start writing. Your objective is to identify the three most important items you want out of life.

Be specific

Maybe you have a general idea of what you want. Maybe you know that you want a satisfying career. Great. Now you need to define what you mean by a satisfying career. You need to think about exactly where you want to be working, what you want to be doing, how much money you will be making. If a satisfying career means that you will be VP of Sales for ABC corp. then you need to write it down.

For example, my goal was to create this website where I could provide people with personal development information through the articles I write. I sat and I wrote down exactly what sort of service I wanted to provide, who my audience would be, what the website would look like, how often I would post articles. I had in my mind a full vision of my goal before I wrote one single article.

But lets say your goal is to get healthy. Define what you mean by that. How many pounds do you want to lose? Or maybe you want to define it in terms of physical ability – such as how many miles you can safely run without becoming exhausted. Define the specifics of your goal. An easy way to do this is to ask yourself the question “How will I know when I have achieved my goal?” The answer to this question will specify your goal. So our example goal is “To lose 15 pounds”.

Set a deadline

I heard someone once say: “I love deadlines; I love to hear the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”

But seriously, you must have a deadline. Without a deadline you do not have a goal, you have a wish. And you will be like all those other people who constantly spend their whole lives wishing they had a bigger house, or a better car or wishing they had a job they loved or wishing they had a great relationship or wishing they could lose some weight.

A deadline turns your wish into a goal.

So once I could describe exactly the website I wanted to create, I had to set a date for when I wanted to have it up and running by. This date may not be the date you actually achieve your goal by. But it is the date that you will be aiming for. It will act as your impetus to get moving on this goal. Sometimes your date might be long term, such as if you want to be VP of sales and you are currently a junior sales clerk, then your deadline for achieving this goal might be 5 years. (Don’t worry, you will be breaking this down into shorter, more manageable timeframes later).

So our example goal becomes “To lose fifteen pounds in 3 months by December 1st 2006”.

Goal generation

If you are having difficulty identifying your goals, it helps to look at the various different areas of your life such as Health, Work, Family, Relationships, Recreation, Charity and Personal Development. Look at what you wish you had in each of these areas…give it very careful thought. Imagine that you had a magic wand and could make these areas of your life exactly as you wish it. What would they look like? Your goals are what it would take you to get from where you are now to your ideal self.

If this is the first time you are trying to quantify your goals, then take your time and think up as many as you like. A holistic picture helps you to really hone in on what you want. You may notice a trend among several of the goals you list. This may indicate and help you to identify your overall goals more specifically.

Write it down

It is very very important that you write your goals down. If you try to keep them in your head you will soon forget them and they will become nothing but forgotten dreams. Concretize your goals. Make them real. Commit them to paper. To black and white, where you can see them and point to them. Where you cannot escape them.

I know that in this digital age, most people type things in a document on the computer and that is all well and good. But at least once, I suggest that you make the effort to write it down with pen and paper, the good old-fashioned way. The reason for this is that the act of writing out your goals in your own handwriting starts the process of committing your goals to your memory. Psychological research on memory shows that deep elaborative processing of an item increases the memory for that item. The neuronal circuits in your brain will start to learn this goal, to learn that it is an essential part of you. The more effort you put into deliberating on your goal along with the actual act of writing it out helps to commit it to your memory and therefore to keep it in mind (literally) and this is essentially important for goal achievement. Many of us form a goal one day, (“I’m not going to eat fattening desserts anymore”), only to forget about it two days later when the office Christmas party comes up.

So make the effort, and write it out in pen and paper. If you like you can also type it up on the computer. The more often you review your goals the more likely you will be to achieve them, as your subconscious will recognize the importance of this item to you and constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to help make it happen. More on this later.

Phrase Goals positively

This brings me to another point which plays a critical role in goal achievement. The simple fact is that the human mind understands and complies with positive instructions better than negative ones. Consider a simple example: which of these two sentences do you understand more quickly? ‘Put the ice cream in the fridge’ or ‘Don’t not put the ice cream in the fridge’. The positive one is instantly understood by the brain – no mental convolutions required. (No, its not important what flavor of ice cream – stay focus now )

It is so with every aspect of the human mind. A goal such as “I’m am not going to eat cake anymore”, will be more difficult to achieve than “I am only going to eat desserts that are healthy for me.” The first implies a deprivation of yourself – a taking away of something you once had (cake) while the other implies that you are giving yourself something that is good for you (healthy desserts). Which would you rather? To have something taken away or to have something given to you? Phrase all your goals positively.

Another important point to remember when formulating your goals, is to write them in the present tense. This may seem a little odd to write about something you have not yet achieved as if you have already achieved it but it is also one of the keys to goal achievement. The mind understands the present tense best. The phrase “I am going to lose 15 pounds”, is an action that is always in the future. It is always something that you are going to do, and never converts to something that you are doing now. And the mind controls all of our actions, so we need to convince it that this is what we are doing now.

So the goal becomes “I lose 15 pounds”. Same goal, but it is now something that we are actively doing now and not something that we are going to get around to doing at some future point. It is important to remember that we never actually arrive at the future. Tomorrow is always tomorrow. When we get to it, it becomes the present, it becomes today. So any task that we are always going to do in the future is a task that we never actually get around to doing.

Prioritise your goals

Once you have lots of goals, you need to prioritise them. In order to do this, ask yourself the question: “Which of these goals if achieved will have the most positive impact on my life?” Whatever goal you choose is your most important goal. Then ask the same question again of the remaining goals; again and again until you have your goals sorted in order of priority.

Choose the top 3

Once you have a list of your most important goals, look at the top three items on this list. I suggest that these are the three you try to focus on initially. In fact, if this is your first experience with goal setting, I would suggest you focus only on the most important goal. The reason for this is that goal setting and achieving is a learned habit. The more you do it, the better you get at it. So focusing on, identifying and achieving one goal fully will help you to become familiar with the process.

If it is your first attempt at clearly defined goals, I would also suggest that you try to focus on a relatively short-term goal. The reason for this is that it is easy to lose hope and stop making the effort when the achievement of the goal is far off in the future. I am sure you can imagine what you will be doing 3 months from now at Christmas but it’s a little more difficult to imagine what you will be doing 1 year from now at next September. And even more difficult to imagine what you will be doing 5 years from now. In the next article we will be talking about maintaining a vision of the big picture and breaking down long term goals into more manageable goals. But for your first attempt at deliberate goal achievement I suggest you pick a goal that has a deadline not too far in the future.

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Next article in the Achieving Your Goals Series: Form a Goal Plan

Related Articles:

• Achieving Your Goals Part II – Form a Plan
• Achieving Your Goals Part III – Make a Commitment
• Achieving Your Goals Part IV – Staying Motivated
• Achieving Your Goals Part V – Change Your Environment
• Achieving Your Goals Part VI – Change Your Thinking
• Achieving Your Goals Part VII - Discipline and Vocabulary 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 1:40 pm and is filed under A New Start, Goals . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.