Goal Setting: 3 Steps Toward a Destination
In the last article, I took you through an abbreviated version of the Wheel of Life where you evaluated the financial, professional, romance, physical, and social domains of your life.
If you did the exercise already, I have a question for you. What area would have the greatest impact on your quality of life if you increased it by one point? Once you’ve determined what area of life you want to improve, the next logical step is to start setting goals, which is the focus for today. I’ll be talking you through how I set my goal from the physical category.
Goal setting can be a tricky thing because there are a few critical components necessary to see the success that gets forgotten or glossed over. I want to talk about three parts today.
The first part is why the goal is important. If you don’t know why you want to achieve the goal, it’s way easier to lose motivation and give up. So, let’s say I want to lose weight. Why do I want to lose weight? There are lots of good reasons, but for me specifically, I have a young son (almost 3 years old) and he’s starting to run pretty fast. However, he still lacks some street safety skills. There have been a couple of times where he’s run out a little too far and thank goodness there were no cars around… otherwise something terrible could have happened. That’s a pretty good reason to lose some weight, right? So, I can run fast enough to protect the loved ones in my life.
The second part of goal setting is specificity. How specific you are will help find success. So instead of saying you want to lose weight, give a specific number. Even better, write about how you feel rather than how many pounds you lose. My physical goal is to feel agile, quick, and flexible, all things that I think would be useful in the example I gave above. If I feel that way, I’ll probably lose some weight in the process, but the weight isn’t as important as how I feel. I can strengthen this aspect by meditating or visualizing what agile, quick, and flexible feel like, but we’ll talk about that another time.
The third part is how this can be accomplished realistically. The stereotype is that you go a little too hard at the gym, become sore, and never go back again until next year. For me, I’m looking at playing tennis twice a week. Why? Because tennis is a sport I love to play, but also there is a focus on speed, agility, and flexibility. Also, playing twice a week will give me enough time to recover the rest of the week. As I get in better shape, I can increase how often and/or how long I play. Also, I’ve scheduled in time on the other days to work on flexibility and recovery.
Let’s say you’re focused on finances, and you want to save more money. Why do you want to save money? Maybe it’s because you grew up poor and you’re tired of living paycheck to paycheck, so you’re determined to be financially stable to actually retire one day. How much money are you going to save? Maybe you talk to a friend who is good with their money, or you meet with a financial planner and figure out your number for retirement. Awesome. So how do you get there? Maybe you’re putting away $50/month for now but look at working some extra hours or picking up a side hustle so that number can go up faster. That sounds much easier to accomplish than thinking you’re going to put away $1,000 a month for the next 30 years and end up with a couple of million dollars in retirement.
Does this make sense? Try writing a couple of goals out with these three pieces in mind and let me know what you come up with. You know how to find me.
Kevin Koo is a professional coach who specializes in personal, business, and leadership development. Contact him at kevinkoocoaching@gmail.com
