Goal Setting

I got a question from a reader about goal setting, so here are some ideas that may help. They are adapted from Franklin Covey, John Maxwell, Andy Stanley, Steven Barnes, and a number of business CDs not available to the general public, plus some of my own thinking on the topic.

One general note: as you are going through the entire goal setting process, you should also try to find someone who can act as a confidante or mentor to help you work through the steps. We frequently find ourselves in mental ruts that we cannot break out of. A fresh perspective can be very helpful to get you to think outside the box and find new options, opportunities, or directions.

Before setting any goals, it is important to identify your core values. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, because we all have things we know in our minds we should value, but they may not be the things that really matter to us in our heart of hearts. I recommend blocking a full hour undisturbed, and sitting down with a pen and paper (NOT a computer!), and start writing down the things you value.

Once you think you’re done, you’ll have gotten through the more superficial layer. Dig deeper: what are the things you are most proud of? Of all the things you’ve done, what gives you the greatest satisfaction? When your mind wanders, where does it habitually go? If you discovered you were going to die tonight, what things would you most regret either doing or leaving undone? Who or what would you be willing to go to the mat over or to risk your life for? If these last questions seem overly dramatic, you don’t understand core values. They are the things that matter the most to you, the things that matter more than you do. Fear of loss is a much greater motivator than hope of gain, so understanding those fears is an important clue to what you truly value.

Once you have that done, think about your long term dreams. If you could design your own life, what would it look like? To help with this, think about it in terms of categories: relationships with God and with important people in your life; career; and personal life, including health, personal growth, experiences, and lifestyle. What would you do if time and money were no object? Where would you go? Who would you help? What would you learn? Where would you live? What charities would you support? If these are really the things you want long term, they should connect directly back to your core values. Understanding this connection can provide powerful motivation for you to develop a plan to turn those dreams into a vision and direction for your life.

If you are a Christian, what we’re really exploring here is your sense of calling and understanding what it is God made you to be and to do to fulfill your part of His plan for the world.

At this point, you might consider drafting mission and vision statements for your life. The vision statement talks about your purpose, values, and direction; it’s the big picture of where you believe your life should be heading. The mission statement is an overview of how you’re going to get there. It addresses the question, “what do I do,” while the vision statement addresses, “why am I here,” or even “who am I.”

These are the steps that look at the big picture. They may seem rather abstract, but if you want to put together goals that will help you long term, you need this big picture to show you where you want to go. It will also pay to revisit these issues annually to determine if they do in fact reflect your values and your growth. You may find your priorities shifting or clarifying, and you want to be able to use that to adjust what you’re doing.

Next, we need to get to some more specific, rubber meets the road issues. List all of the roles you have. For example, I am a husband, a father, a college professor, a free lance writer and teacher, an entrepreneur, …. Once you have the list, ask yourselves which are nonnegotiable, which line up most closely with your values, and which are moving you in the direction of your vision. Hopefully there will be some overlap. These are the roles you need to concentrate on the most. If your current job doesn’t make the list, you need to start thinking about how to transition into something that does.

I would suggest that the most important roles to think about are your relationship with God, your relationship with your family, your relationship with your community, your professional life, and your personal growth. These are key areas for everyone, though the specific details will vary from person to person.

In each of these areas, ask yourself where you would like to be in a year: what will your relationship with God, your family, and your friends look like? Where would you like to be professionally? What do you want to learn or do for your own personal development? (I would also suggest that you think about these same areas five and ten years from now, though for most people that’s too much of a stretch. If you can do it, great; if not, stick with the one year time frame this time around.)

Your image of where you would like to be a year from now is your goal in each of these areas. Find a phrase that encapsulates the idea, and write it down with a date you want to accomplish it. You will be reviewing (and ideally rewriting) this goal daily.

Last step: identify actions that you can take daily that will move you toward your goals. Beware of dramatic changes or silver bullets: they rarely work. Your life is made from your daily habits, so if you want to accomplish your goals, you need to do this through developing new habits. Small, easy steps are best, without trying to do too many things at once. It takes 21 days to develop a habit, so I suggest the following approach:

1. Identify the most important step you can take daily for each of your goals. (In some cases, these might be weekly, such as getting to the gym three times a week if you want to get into shape, but you get the idea.)
2. Put these steps into your routine and stick with them for a month. Write and review your goals and the steps daily to keep you on track.
3. At the end of the month, assess whether each step has become a habit. If it hasn’t, do it for another month. If it has, ask if you’re making satisfactory progress toward your goal, then determine if you simply want to keep with that habit or add a new one for the next month.
4. Ultimately, you’re looking to reach what John Maxwell calls the Rule of 5: no matter how big the goal, if you do 5 key actions toward it every day, you are all but guaranteed to reach it eventually.

And that’s it. It’s a longer process than you may have wanted, but the early steps, which are in many ways the most difficult, are actually the most important and lay the foundation for everything else. I’ve adapted this from lots of other people, and you may decide to modify it for yourself, but the basic approach is solid and will help you clarify, set, and meet meaningful goals for your life.

A few books to help you along the way:

• John C. Maxwell, Put Your Dream to the Test, Today Matters, and others
• Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge
• Andy Stanley, Visioneering

Franklin Covey has some excellent resources as well.

Monthly checkup, and a progress report

It’s been a busy week, so I didn’t get my end of the month checkup on goals written last week. So here it is, a bit late.

We’re far enough into the year that if you haven’t been working consistently on your New Year’s resolutions (if you made any), you’ve probably either given up on them, not made any progress on them, or forgotten them. That’s OK, but if you want things to improve in your life, you need long term goals and some kind of plan to reach them.

For those of you who were reading in December when I wrote up my suggestions for resolutions, this will be familiar ground. For those of you who weren’t, here are three very specific suggestions for dealing with your long term plans.

First, write them down, ideally every day, but at the very least review them daily. More on this at the end of the post

Second, find a small step you can take daily (i.e. a habit you can create) that will help you move toward the fulfillment of each of your goals. It takes three weeks to develop a habit; give yourself a month, then reassess to see if the habit is established, and if so,  if it’s helping you toward your goal and if you want to add a new one this month.

Third, share the goals with someone who can hold you accountable for your progress.

If you’ve been doing this, have you seen any progress? My bet is you have. What additional steps can you take this month to improve?

A personal report: I have been writing down my goals and intermediate steps to reach them daily, pretty consistently since January 1. Some of them have involved breaking habits that have been in place literally for years. Within about two weeks (less than what it normally takes to develop a habit!), the habit was gone, and I haven’t relapsed since.

The only thing I did differently was write my goals out each day, focusing on the positive outcome I wanted and not the negative action I wanted to lose.

I’m a skeptic when it comes to techniques; I’ve tried too many things to believe in magic bullets. And it’s possible that there are other explanations for the change. But this seems to be working well for me, whatever the reason, and I see no good reason to risk stopping.

The takeaway is that if you’re having problems reaching goals or breaking habits, try writing out the positive outcome you are looking for daily. I also included what I saw as a necessary step to achieving the long-term goal. This only takes two or three minutes at most total for all of my four big goals. Try it for a month and see if it doesn’t help you move forward.

First Month Checkup

We’re coming to an end of the first month of 2012. For those of you who set goals for the New Year, how are you doing? It’s time for your first month’s checkup.

• Did you write down your goals and review them daily (ideally rewriting them)? If so, have you discovered anything new about them? Did you modify them in any way, or are you happy with them the way they were? If they need refinement, no would be a good time to think through how you should adjust them.
• Did you put in place a new habit for each of your goals? If so, is the habit well established by now? If not, keep at it for another month. If so, is the habit helping you make reasonable progress toward your goal? Do you want to stick with that habit or add something else to it this month?
• Did you enlist others to help you be accountable for your goals and habits?

 Remember, if nothing changes, nothing changes. If you want this year to be better than the last, you need to get on it now, doing the small things that compound to make big changes over time. If you haven’t read Olson’s The Slight Edge, you really should. And remember the quote from Aristotle: “We are what we do habitually. Excellence, then, is a habit.” Let’s strive for excellence in all areas of our lives.

Priorities for the New Year

As we are looking to the New Year, how should we set our priorities?

Jesus said that the greatest commandment is, “‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Mark 12:29-31)

What does this tell us about priorities? First, the most important thing in our lives from God’s perspective is our relationships with Him and with each other. Everything He expects from us is built on the quality of our relationships.

Second, the kind of love that Jesus is talking about here isn’t primarily emotional. It isn’t even a feeling, it’s an action. Jesus tells us that if we love him, we will obey him (John 14:15, 21): love is demonstrated in the concrete actions we do to please and serve the one we love. Similarly, John tells us that if we do not take practical steps to help others in need we don’t love them (1 Jn. 3:17), and if we don’t love them, we don’t love God (1 Jn. 4:20). Even self-love is defined by Paul in terms of taking care of our own needs (Eph. 5:28-29).

As a starting point, I suggest some self-assessment: how well are we doing in loving God with our whole being as measured by our obedience to Him? How are we doing in loving our neighbors as measured by our service to them, starting with our families and working outward from there?

As I noted in the "New Year's Resolutions" post, if you try to change everything at once, you will fail. What is one specific thing you can do to improve in each of these areas? Maybe there’s a specific sin in your life that you need to overcome. Maybe you need to be more consistent in your Bible reading or prayer life. Maybe you can do something each day to help your spouse around the house. Pick something that you can make a daily habit, write it down, and work on it consistently for one month. At the end of the month reassess yourself and see if you are ready to make another change. Repeat this process each month. If you do this consistently all year, you will find that you’ve grown considerably in obeying these two commandments.

In addition to these areas, however, personal development is also important. If we are going to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we should also seek to grow in all these areas. We’ll look at some ideas about how to do this in the next post.

New Year's Resolutions

Everyone talks about New Year’s resolutions, but few people take them very seriously. They’re things we want to do to improve ourselves or to address our dissatisfaction with our lives, but within a few weeks we normally have fallen off the wagon, and having failed once, we forget about them.

If you look over the past year, how have you done? Have you advanced in your relationships with God, with your family, and with your friends? How about professionally and personally? Did you move forward in the things that are important to you? If you continue on the trajectory you’ve set in the last 12 months, will you be happy about where will you be next year? In five years? In ten years? Be honest with yourself. If you don’t like the answer, you need to be willing to put in the work and to establish new habits that will change the direction you are going.

Personally, I know my life needs work.

The question is, how do we begin?

One place to start is looking at why resolutions fail. A lot of reasons come to mind, but I think three are particularly important. First, our resolutions are too extreme: we try to change too much, too fast. Second, we don’t bring others into our resolutions, so that we lack social support and accountability partners, or even worse, we have people around us who are actively undermining our efforts. Third, we lack staying power; that it is simply easier to fall back into old habits than to expend the energy over time that it takes to develop new habits to replace the old.

So how do we fix these?

Suppose you have a big goal for the year, for example, losing 50 pounds. That sounds like a lot, but it really only amounts to about a pound a week. It doesn’t take dramatic action to reach that target, only consistent, small decisions about what you eat and drink and about your physical activities. In the same way, most other big goals can be reached through small decisions that we make daily.

It takes about three weeks to develop a new habit. I would suggest adjusting one habit in any area of your life that you want to improve and spending a full month on it. Evaluate where you are at the end of the month: if you haven’t been consistent, keep working to develop that habit; if you are solid in the habit and are making satisfactory progress toward your goal, keep at it, or if you think you’re ready to add more, maintain the first habit and add something new.

Dramatic change is the result of the accumulation of small changes over time.

Second, enlist the aid of the people you live with, and find someone who you trust who will hold you accountable. Again, using the example of weight loss, most people who fail in weight loss programs do so because of a lack of social support. If the people closest to you won’t support your goals, find out why. You may need to rethink what you're doing. But if their reasons don’t hold water—for example, they don’t believe you can succeed or don’t want you to because it threatens them—then find someone who will support you and move on.

Third, keep your long term goals in front of you, and keep reminding yourself of the importance of taking small steps toward them. You should write your goals out, ideally in long hand (it activates a different part of the brain than typing), and if possible do this daily. It will remind you of what you’re doing and why.

You will also need to increase your energy level, since it takes energy to build new habits. Diet, exercise, and rest are all part of this, but this post is already too long, so we will explore these in a later post.

(For those of you who want to pursue these ideas further, I highly recommend the book, The Slight Edge, by Jeff Olson. It’s the best book on personal growth I have ever read. And no, I don’t get a commission on the sales.)