This Is For You If You Find Goals Hard
“Where did you first come across goal setting?” Pat asked Jason and I on our podcast last week. Truthfully, I don’t know when, but I do know that it was in the shape of new year’s resolutions (NYR).
NYR’s are great for reasons we will discuss below, but they do have a couple of drawbacks:
They are limited to 12 months – “what do you want to do this year?” The most valuable parts of our life often were not created in one year.
Resolutions resolve issues – they are problem focused. Solving problems will help you get back to baseline – lose weight, get fitter, finally get that pay rise – but they won’t help you redefine what greatness in your life looks like.
If you are anything like me and NYR’s are the place that you started, then I want you to do one thing and switch out resolutions for goals. It is a small tweak, but it allows us to start thinking more expansively. From 12 months to 2 years and from problems to opportunities.
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A goal is an achievable target that you are working towards in the medium term. It should have a time constraint and it is clear whether you passed or failed.
It normally sounds like, “I will be… by…”. For example, “I will be 83kg by the end of 2023”, or “I will be Country Manager of India by 2024”.
Goal setting is the middle of the roadmap
That’s right, goals are not the start of the roadmap. I’ve written in the past about how:
Our ancient ancestors started in Africa, battled, ate, fought, walked, forded rivers, climbed mountains, hugged coastlines, and sailed into the unknown, all in the hope of a better life.
Homo sapiens didn’t do all of that because of goals and KPIs. They didn’t sit around chalking PowerPoint slides into cave walls that said “I will be the head of hunting by next winter.” They traversed the world on foot because of something greater, something that connected more to their identity: a vision.
Vision is at the top of the roadmap
A vision is an inspiring picture of your future that you can imagine but can’t yet achieve with the current skills and resources you have.
It is different to a goal in that it doesn’t have to be timebound and it can’t be achievable right now. However, it is inspiring and compelling enough that it makes you want to get going. Ancient super-communicators would have shared the vision for the tribe and they would’ve quite literally died for it.
The goal I shared earlier was indeed mine from 2023: Country Manager of India by 2024. The career vision that the goal fell within was: The ability to inspire 1000s of people. To have a positive impact on them in order to change their and our world.
Now that we have a vision it is clear to see (with hindsight) that the goals can change whilst the vision remains relatively constant. Fast forward to where I am now, I never achieved that goal of being Country Manager. I was offered a different job, I have since left the company and started my own. But the vision? That still works for me. Wildest Dream was created to do exactly that, to inspire and positively impact people across the world.
When we have a vision, we are able to be more flexible with our goals, which in turn takes the pressure off us.
It all ends with what you’re going to do on Monday
In 2023, I created a wonderful vision for my career. I also created visions across Health, Family, Adventure and Giving. Under each of those visions I had goals which I’m sharing below:
Country Manager of India
Create an L&D plan
Marketing masters at INSEAD
Lose weight to reach 83kg
Improve posture
Continue with Muay Thai
Continue with personal training
New fasting routine
Kick off charity project with the team
Active member of company charity board
Visit 2 new countries
Plan an epic trek
I’m not sharing them to show off (I didn’t do them all), I’m sharing them to show you the slight mania in having so many. I was going to do all of this on top of sleeping, eating, managing my team and doing my day job. Did I mention that I would also exercise, meditate, journal and read everyday?
If your list looks anything like this, you don’t have a motivation problem. You have a math problem. We create these goals within a vacuum, without considering that we have 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year.
So, the question is, now that you’ve got all your visions and goals written out. How would you fit it into next week? Could you really schedule everything? I doubt it – I know I can’t when I look at the list above.
That’s why we always go down to the detail of tactical actions:
A tactical action is something specific that takes one step towards your goal, that you have almost 100% control over.
Take a goal like Country Manager of India by 2024. When you break that down into the tactical actions, you will realise there are quite literally 1000 things that need to be done. Whilst it’s impossible to foresee what you need to do in December, you probably have a good idea of exactly what you need to do for the rest of January: talk to my manager; agree the KPIs with them; build a plan for India; present the plan to the leadership team. The list goes on.
What this is going to do for you is scare you. Which is good. We need to set our year up for success. We won’t do it by wishing we could do everything under the sun. We can do it by:
Setting an overarching vision
Creating some measurable goals
Breaking them down into tactical actions
Putting the actions into a calendar
Realising we have too many
Streamlining the above.
Let us know how you get on and check out our events page – we are always running Live sessions on Instagram. For January, our live sessions are focused on our Roadmap which you can find here.
Deepen Your Curiosity:
Download our Wildest Dream roadmap here. This will help you structure your thinking for the year.
This episode with CrossFit trainer Ben Bergeron is amazing. He is a big believer in having a goal, then putting it on the shelf. Instead focusing on the process that supports the goals.
