Goal Setting: How to Craft Powerful Goals

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Goal Setting: How to Craft Powerful Goals

Goal setting can be a powerful process for focusing and accelerating your personal growth efforts.

Clear goals will help you prioritize, focus your resources and time, and feel a sense of accomplishment once you meet them.

Additionally, goal setting seems to mobilize the universe to help you out. Call it the "Secret" or "Law of Attraction." Or, chalk it up to simply noticing more things that can help you. Whatever it is, when you're clear about what you want, things just start to happen.

In short, goals are so important because the clearer the intention the clearer the result.

Without clear goal setting, you may drift. Drifting may take you somewhere wonderful. It may take you somewhere awful. And it may take you nowhere.

As Lewis Caroll writes, in Alice in Wonderland:

One day Alice came to a fork in the road
and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree.
"Which road do I take?" she asked.
His response was a question:
"Where do you want to go?"
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."

(Click here for personal growth quotes to motivate you in your goal setting.)

If you have spent some time in Step 1 assessing internally (your priorities, strengths, weaknesses) and assessing externally (opportunities, trends, resources,) you will have a much clearer picture of the direction you'd like to go.

When you move from the results from your assessment to goal setting, I recommend using an iterative process. Start with broad directional goals and then refine them incrementally from there.

As you move through this goal setting process, use powerful questions to guide you. Here are some powerful questions to start with your high level goals:

In general, what would success look like?
What it would success feel like?
What will success bring?
What's important about this success to you?
How will you know you're successful?

Now, move down to the next level of refinement and add more detail to the picture

In my picture of success, what details can I provide?
What specific behaviors am I displaying?
What specific situations are present?

Now, move down one more level to understand what you need to do:

What specific skills, competencies, or behaviors do I need to learn to achieve success?

After asking yourself these questions, take a crack at crafting your goals. For actually crafting your specific goals, I recommend trying to make goals SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timebound

You can turn most goals into a SMART goal. For example, if you wanted to improve your public speaking skills, you could drill down and set a SMART goal such as: "Give 5 presentations to audiences of at least 10 people in the next 6 months".

Notice how this goal is much more clear and concrete than "Become a better public speaker." That makes it much easier to design concrete actions steps and measure success later.

Once you can identify a goal, you'll also want to identify some supporting information. This includes:

Measure of Success: How will you know you're successful? Be as specific as you can.

Milestones: What are your "checkpoints" and accomplishments along the way?

Action Steps: What major actions will you need to take? List as many as you can. And, what's the very first action you'll need to take? Be clear about this so you can get going quickly. Lack of clarity about action steps leads to procrastination.

Resources: What resources will you need to help you? Time, people, money, experiences, knowledge. . .

Completion Date: By when do you want to achieve this goal?

Celebration Plan: How will you celebrate success? Choose something that reinforces your goal. For example, if your goal is about losing weight, celebrate by running a race or competing in an athletic event. (Eating ice cream to celebrate would not reinforce that goal.)

Now, here is the most important piece of the entire goal setting process:

Write your goals down.

Written goals are many times more powerful motivators of behavior than goals that loosely float around in your head.

Write them down and put them somewhere you will see often. Use these goals to guide you.

If you have trouble refining your goals to be SMART, do your best. Make them as concrete as you can.

That said, not all goals lend themselves to being SMART. Some simply are not that concrete and to implement specific measures on them is more trouble than it's worth.

As Albert Einstein said:

Not everything that can be counted counts,
And not everything that counts can be counted.

So, do your best. In your goal setting make them as focused as you can.

Most importantly, however, write them down and use them to guide you.

I hope these goal setting tips have been helpful. Goal setting really is a powerful process for directing and accelerating your personal growth and development.

Make your goals as specific as you can, and use the acronym SMART to guide you.

And be sure to write your goals down. I know I've said that multiple times, but it's important.

Good luck with your goal setting.

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