Our goals are blunt tools of creation.
Which, if used without direction, have effects that verge on the meaningless. But, if sharpened, can deliver the fatal blow towards a life we intend to experience for ourselves.
For like all hammers, spanners and screwdrivers, the key to their usefulness is the outcome to which they’re applied and the skill to which they are used.
A lawnmower is great at cutting grass, but is useless at cleaning the floor.
Knowing how best to apply our goals will enable us to realise their potential and use them as tools in shaping who we are.
Here’s how you do exactly that…
Goals and Intentions
“I want to get fitter” is not a goal. It’s an intention.
Which is broadly unspecific, difficult to measure, challenging to achieve, unknowingly realistic and lacking any element of time.
The obvious next step would be to make it SMART. To turn the intention into a goal that sounds something like “I will lose 10kg of body weight by the end of 2023”. And then to add example activities like “follow a Paleo diet” and “walk 10,000 steps a day” to help get you there.
Which ends up looking something like this…
Defining our goals and activities is usually sound advice. But, it come with some hidden assumptions that we must be aware of…
That we actually want the intention we define.
That we know which goal is the best for our intentions.
That the activities we choose will move us closer to our goals.
In a world full of short-cuts and solutions, it can be all too easy to outsource our thinking to others. For even when we have the right intentions, we can still lose their meaning in the goals we set and activities required to get there.
When we’re starting out applying these off-the-shelf next steps can be the best thing for us. As they move us into action quickly. Which is great.
But, a lot of momentum in the wrong direction is still won’t get you where you want to be. So, once you’ve found your feet, get course correcting. Evaluate each of your intentions, goals and activities and decide if they’re the right ones for you.
Shoot for the Stars, Land on the Moon
We’re all guilty of setting our sights too high.
We choose unrealistic stretch goals that are beyond our limitations, without truly knowing the trade-offs that are required for them to be achieved.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone. Which means that when I come to reflect on my progress every week, quarter or year I often find myself far off the mark.
But, that’s actually not a bad thing.
For even though we might mistakenly convince ourselves that we can “earn £1 million before 30”, while “travelling 100 countries” and “competing for Team GB”, our impossible intentions can actually push us further than ever before.
Because while we might shoot for the stars, we can find ourselves on the moon instead. A place we’d forever be looking up to from planet Earth had we not had the dream to launch in the first place.
Which means that the goal of our goals is not to create a tick-list that defines our success in life. But, is instead a way of taking aim at our intentions and directing our energy towards them.
Success is the Person you Become
The achievement of the goal is the crowning jewel in the daily activities that you must submit yourself to for weeks, months and years on end.
It’s not the one day where everything changes. It’s the last 1% of the journey you’ve already almost finished. Which if you prepare properly for will often feel drastically underwhelming to finally achieve.
Which isn’t because the experience wasn’t meaningful.
But, because the goal wasn’t what mattered.
It was the person you had to become that truly appealed to your intentions in the beginning. And come the day you can finally cross off the big tick box on the whiteboard in your room this new you is now your normal.
You’ve evolved as a person.
And that was really the goal of your goals.
Summary
The goal of goals is not for you to achieve them.
But, is instead to direct your energy towards bringing your closer to your intentions, acting as a measurable barometer of progress and shaping you into the person you must become.
So, the next time you sit down to reflect on the goals you wrote for yourself a year ago, take a step back from the all-or-nothing thinking. Because you are not a failure for not achieving your goals. For as long as you invested time into the activities required to get you there and took steps towards your intentions that’s what the goals from your previous self were all about.