Creating Goals that lead to Amazing Results. 

Goal setting has been found to be one of the best ways to increase your motivation and improve your results. Research has shown that setting and working towards good goals will move you closer to whatever you want to achieve in life.

We all know this. We all know that we should set goals. 

But when you read those first couple of sentences, what came to your mind? Could it have been something along the lines of:

I know I should set goals, but I don’t have time. 

I don’t even know what kinds of goals I would set. I’m really not even sure what I want.

Ugh, I know I should set them, but I never stick with the goals I set, and that just makes me feel bad about myself.

I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve thought all of those thoughts and I’ve allowed those and similar thoughts to keep me from setting good goals for myself and from achieving the results I am capable of. 

But I’ve since realized how powerful setting and achieving good goals can be.  Goal setting plays a critical part in allowing me to live the life that I want as well as in supporting me to become the person I want to become.

Setting goals gives your brain structure and supervision. It gives your brain direction and it allows you to design your life the way that you want.

But let’s back up just a little bit. If we want to talk about setting good goals, we need to start from the beginning.

Do you know what you want from your life?

Do you know who you want to be?

Do you know what you want to have?

Do you know what you want to do?

A few of you lucky souls are already very connected to your desires about what you want from your time on this planet. Unfortunately, too many of us are drifting through life, a bit too disconnected from our deeper desires and distracted by the things that need to get done today to even begin to answer those questions. 

Though it might be buried deep down inside of you, the good news is that you actually do know what you want. You just need a way to connect with those deep desires about who you want to be, what you want to have, and what it is that you want to do with this one life that you get to live. 

I want to offer a simple exercise. If you take the time to do it, this exercise will help you reconnect to what you want from life. And if you do the exercise right before setting goals, the goals you set will be more intentional, more aligned with your true self, and more likely to lead you towards getting the amazing results that you deserve.

Free Writing Exercise

You are going to spend 10-15 minutes free writing and answering the question:

What do I want? 

Free writing means writing without thinking too hard, without editing, without worrying about how it sounds. You can do bullet points, make a list, or just write in one long paragraph (or even one long run-on sentence.) That part doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are writing without allowing yourself to be critical of what you write. No judgment and no worries if it sounds completely crazy – just write.

When you do this exercise, you can focus on a specific aspect of life (professional, personal, etc.) or you can just write about your life in general. You could choose to ask yourself any of the following questions:

What do I want?

Who do I want to be? (or who do I want to become?)

What do I want to have?

What do I want to do?

How do I want to feel each day?

Set a timer and write for 10-15 minutes straight, unedited, going on and on and on about what you want from your life. Maybe you have always wanted a purple car. Write it down. Maybe you want more flowers in your yard. Write it down. Maybe you want to be a professional tennis player. Write it down. Write the mundane-seeming things as well. Write how you want to feel, who you want to be, what you aspire to, things you want to have. Any and all of it, let it flow from you. 10 minutes minimum, but if you are on a roll, just keep going. Get it out of your head and onto the paper. 

You can type if you want to, but there is something about pen to paper that opens up the part of our brain we are trying to tap into. 

Once you have written it all down, you will want to take some time to read through what you wrote and start to organize the thoughts into categories. Are there themes that have emerged for you? Are there items you wrote about that go together naturally? For example, maybe the following are a few items you wrote down that you think might go together:

• I want to be healthy.
• I want to feel good.
• I want to feel good about my body. 
• I want to have more energy.
• I want to lose 10 pounds. 
• I want to maintain a healthy weight.
• I want to maintain mobility and fitness as I get older. 

All 7 of these desires could go under the same category, let’s call this category physical health.  You will do this same organization process with all of the desires that you wrote about during free writing. They might not all fit into neat categories, and that’s ok. Just do the best you can, and then pick 2-3 categories that you would like to prioritize for now. If you have more than 3 categories, just save those for later. They still matter, but it helps to focus on no more than 2-3 areas at one time.  

Setting Good Goals

On to goal setting!

Now that you know what you want, you will be able to create goals that align closely with who you want to be and what you want from life. Because of that, you will be more likely to stick to these goals and they will provide more powerful results in your life.

One of the journals that I’ve used and loved is called the Best Self Journal. I want to pass along their framework and some of their terminology for goal setting, as I have found it quite helpful. The authors of the journal advise you to think of goal setting in 3 stages. 

Stage 1 – Specific Result

This is your goal, the specific result that you want to achieve after a certain period of time. 

Using our example from above, let’s write a Specific Result for you to achieve from your Physical Health category. It might be something like:

One year from today, I will have lost 10 pounds and will be fit and healthy enough to run a 5K race at a 11:00 min/mile pace.

Stage 2 – Progress Milestones

Progress Milestones are clear objectives for you to meet as you work towards your specific result. You can use them to track and monitor your progress toward your end goal. The Best Self Journal explains it like this – If climbing to the summit of Mount Everest is your specific result, your progress milestones are the basecamps you hike towards along the way. 

With our Specific Result in mind, here are a few ideas for potential Progress Milestones that could lead you to that specific result:

•  In 3 months I will have lost the first 4 pounds. I will be able to run 2 miles at a 13:00 min/mile pace.
•  In 6 months I will have lost 6 pounds. I will be able to run 3 miles at a 12:15 min/mile pace.
•  In 9 months I will have lost 10 pounds. I will be able to run 3 miles at a 11.30 min/mile pace.
•  In 12 months, I will have lost and have kept off 10 pounds and I will be ready to run the 5K at a 11:00 min/mile pace.

All throughout the year, you will know where you need to be in order to reach the 1-year goal you are working towards. 

Stage 3 – Actions and Tasks

Goals can be meaningless if you don’t have a plan that sets out how you will achieve them.

This is why Stage 3 is so important. Now you must plan out the actions you need to take in order to achieve your goal.

This stage is where the rubber meets the road. These are the actual actions that you need to take each day and each week in order to make it to your progress milestones and eventually to your specific result. 

Back to our example, at the end of 3 months you wanted to have reached the following progress milestone:

I will have lost the first 4 pounds. I will be able to run 2 miles at a 13:00 min/mile pace.

With that in mind, during those first 3 months, your action steps might look like this:

• I will walk 3 times per week. Each walk will be at least 20 minutes.
• 2 times per week I will run 2 miles at a 13:30 -14:00 min/mile pace, slowly increasing my speed by 10 seconds/mile every couple of weeks.
• I will stop snacking at bedtime. I will not eat anything after dinner.
• I will drink 64 oz of water each day.
• I will keep a food journal for the first 30 days and use that journal to decide what food adjustments I should make after 30 days. 

After 90 days, you reassess and adjust your action steps to meet the next milestone. 

And that, my friends, is how you plan and set goals that will create the results you want in your life. 

Now make a plan to hold yourself accountable to doing what you planned. Post your Specific Result, your Progress Milestones, and your Action Steps in a place where you see them every day to remind you to keep taking action. Tell your friends and loved ones what you are doing so that they can support you in keeping yourself accountable. Show up for yourself and take those actions that you planned!

Setting and achieving good goals will move you closer to the results that you want.

What is it that you want to achieve?

And what might change for you if you spend an hour on this process and then dedicate a little bit of time each day to taking action towards getting the results you want from your life?

What could be possible for you?