A Laid Back Approach to Goal Setting

I used to be an avid goal setter but I had many problems with the method I was using and after I discovered Law of Attraction I stopped setting goals because I didn’t want the deadline to keep me focused on the fact that I hadn’t yet reached the goal. However, yesterday I read something that sparked my thoughts in this area again and I have now set some new goals, but in a different way to before.

Are Your Goals Working For You?

It is said in many popular success literature that something like 99% of the population do not have any form of written goals and those 1% that do are far more likely to succeed simply because they have set the goal. Well I set goals for many years and a lot of the time they didn’t work out all that well for me. Here are some of the problems I encountered, see if they resonate with you…

The Big Goals Always Changed

Another message we are taught is to think big and so I remember doing goal setting exercises where I would furiously brainstorm the biggest, wildest goals I could imagine. My problem was that I could never seem to stay focused on these goals for very long, they always seemed to change and I couldn’t understand why.

Now I know that it is probably because I was trying to set some massive life long goals that were supposedly tied in to my life purpose but because I couldn’t find a life purpose that would satisfy me for that long, the goals didn’t fit either. I was setting a goal that was so big that it didn’t really resonate with who I was at that time.

I Found It Hard To Work On Some Goals

There were some goals that just seemed like a lot of effort, they were hard. I groaned when I thought about them, they whole thing just seemed like a constant struggle. I now know that these goals were not really aligned with what I deeply wanted for myself, but what I thought I ought to set as a goal. For example, I used to set goals such as “learn to speed read” and “read x number of personal development books”. Why? I don’t know! Because it just seemed like a good thing to work towards. Interestingly, I read a great post last week by Scott Young that teaches us to know when to stop reading a book. I could have done with that advice a few years ago!

I used to think about the person I wanted to be and I made up all kind of assumptions in my head about what sort of achievements that person would have. So I would set arbitrary goals that fit in with that ideal but it was all externally driven and didn’t come from inside me. I think a lot of people do this. If you are constantly struggling with a goal ask yourself if it is something you really want to do, or just something you think you should do?

Stopping smoking is a great example. There are many people who smoke and feel like they shouldn’t so year after year they set themselves the New Year’s resolution to quit and they fail year after year. If you really and truly want to quit smoking you will. My mother smoked for over 50 years and she had all sorts of health problems as a result. When she had a heart attack the doctors told her she had to quit smoking but she didn’t.

She has stopped now and do you want to know why? Because she was fed up of cleaning up the yellow stains on the walls of her house caused by the cigarette smoke! The health warnings weren’t enough for her - it wasn’t until she found a reason that truly came from within her (she’s extremely house-proud!) that she quit and when she decided to do it, it only took a few months.

I Had To Constantly Re-Plan After Setbacks

The goal achievement process usually goes something like this - you set your goal and set yourself a deadline for its achievement and then you start to break it down time-wise. So let’s say its a year long goal - you might start breaking it down into 3-month blocks and then for the current block you’d break it down into monthly goals and then each month you’d take your monthly goal and break it down into weekly ones.

This problem with this is that it is completely linear - one thing follows on from the next and when something along the way doesn’t work, everything that follows it had to be tweaked in some way. A great example of this is a weight loss goal as that is so easy to break down. You set your target weight, and calculate how much weight to lose per month or week or whatever and you’re set. But as soon as you have a slip (and believe me, you will!) your whole schedule has to shift.

Law of Attraction & Goal Setting

The idea behind the Law of Attraction is that you will attract into your life experiences that match what you are focusing on most of the time. The problem for most people is that they focus on the opposite - on what they have right now, on the problems they have, on the stuff they want to get rid of, on stuff they don’t want.

For example, people who want to lose weight look in the mirror and focus on the excess weight that they don’t want and attract more of that excess weight. People who want more money look at their bills and their debt and attract more bills and more debt.

The idea of a goal is that it should motivate you and keep you focused and that seems to fit in with with LoA. But what I found is that most material about goal setting encourages you to set ambitious goals, to be daring, to push yourself beyond your comfort zones. I remember when I was losing weight at one point I decided to change my goal and try to lose weight at twice the rate I had done so before. I failed.

The problem with this thinking (this doesn’t apply to everybody of course) is that when you push yourself in this way you are constantly having to check on your progress, in your head you are asking “have I done it yet?” and when the goal is too ambitious it makes you stressed and it causes your focus to actually be on the fact that you haven’t acheieved it yet, rather than on the desired outcome of the goal itself.

A Laid Back Approach to Goal Setting

With these issues in mind I decided to set some goals in a different way to how I had done so before.

I Only Set Short-Medium Term Goals

I only set goals that I could really see myself achieving as the person I am right now. I have dreams in the back of my mind that I would like to achieve but I know that I would need to be a different person to achieve them and that those dreams are not something I want to work on right now, today. For example, I’ve always had a vague dream that I’d like to write a book one day and I used to have goals like this written down but I know it’s not something I want to do right now. The desire is not there, it’s only a wish and if I tried to push myself to start now I would just get frustrated, give up and possibly destroy a dream that still has possibility in the future.

I Only Set Goals I Really WANT

All the ’shoulds’ are out! I thought about it for a long time and I could only come up with a few because most of them either fell into the category above or they were just ’should goals’ which I know didn’t really inspire me. All the goals I have set I things that I really, really, REALLY want to achieve!

I Only Set Goals I have Control Over

Byron Katie has a saying that there are three types of business in the world - your business, everybody else’s business and God’s business. I don’t use the word God but I think of this as the Universe, or consciousness or whatever. The point is, all we can really do is concentrate on our own business yet so many of us spend far too much time in everybody else’s business and get stressed over stuff which is just God’s business.

For example, I’m not in a relationship right now and I would like to be but that is not my business. There is nothing I can do to work on that, I can’t break that down into weekly tasks! Even if I met somebody I liked, I can’t control how that other person feels towards me - that’s their business. So I haven’t set a goal like that.

Another example is that I’d like to buy a house and on the surface that seems like a reasonable goal but when I thought about it some more I realised that there are simply too many factors out of my control. The housing market, the other people in the buying and selling chain and so on. I’ll get a house when a get a house and there’s not a lot I can do to hurry it up so I didn’t bother setting a goal. If I wanted to, I could set a goal to put myself in a position to be able to buy as that would be totally in my control.

I Picked Worse-Case-Scenario Deadlines

This one goes against conventional wisdom but I had already figured out that deadlines that put me under pressure did not work for me and did not fit in with the way that Law of Attraction works. Now I didn’t just pick some arbitrary date out of the air to get myself off the hook either. Remember that every one of the goals are something that I absolutely want, they are extremely important to me, they are my ‘musts’. So for each one, I asked myself when is the latest possible time by which I really must achieve this?

For example, probably my most important goal is to earn a full-time income from my Internet business. Without that I will eventually run out of savings. So I did some calculations and figured out exactly when I would run out of savings given the worse-case-scenario and that’s my end date for the goal. Now obviously I want to achieve the goal much, much sooner than the date I have set.

Setting the date in this way gives me several advantages. Firstly, because it’s quite far out, I’m not constantly asking myself “have i done it yet?” so I can keep my focus on the goal and not on the lack of it. Secondly, it allows for those times when life gets in the way - you know, always. Stuff happens, things go wrong but if its a goal we really want then we keep going but if the deadline is too tight then everything gets messed up.

Of course there is a downside too - there is always a chance that with a deadline that is a long way off (I have given myself more than two years for one of them) that I’ll lose focus along the way but I found a nice post by Jonathan Mead from Pick the Brain about how to stay committed to long term goals.

I’m Using GTD-Style Action

GTD stands for Getting Things Done, and was created by David Allen. It is essentially a time management system. Now I don’t particularly follow the system but there is one aspect of it that I really like and that is, David says that in order to keep things moving with our goals we should constantly be asking the question, “What’s the next action?” If we do that all time, we’re always making progress.

To me, that is far superior than the goal yearly / quarterly / monthly / weekly breakdown that I described earlier. This also allows flexibility because if something important comes along that can move you towards your goal that you hadn’t thought of before, you can get on with it without it screwing up your plan.

I have decided to use a compromise. For each of my goals I want to make sure that I made progress every month so I set one mini-goal for the current month for each one of them and I have all those written down so I can see at a glance the stuff I want to get done in the current month. Then each week, I have a look at the monthly list and see what I can do in that week to get the monthly goal done. I don’t break it all down into weeks, I just take each week at a time to keep it flexible.

This way I can be constantly moving towards my goals without worrying about something happening along the way to mess it up, because I can just deal with that when it happens and keep going.

Your Thoughts?

A lot has been written about goal setting so I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Do you set goals? Do you have a system for doing so? How has that worked out for you so far?

Stumble it!