How to Approach Goal Setting: [The Simple Guide 2023]

"Goal Setting can help you catapult your personal and professional development. Take the Top-down approach and work backwards."

These are the questions in your mind: What’s Goal setting, or how to approach Goal setting? – You may have many more questions related to this strenuous topic. Are you aware that at least 85 per cent population in this world do not set any goals for themselves, and the balance 90% do not follow them through? Almost 95 per cent of adults think of the term goal just around the new year (momentarily).

The mind-numbing facts speak for themselves, and Goal setting has been and will always be an intriguing topic. If procrastination had a face, it would be called Goal Setting (Since most people tend to postpone working on their goals).

However, it is one of the most important aspects to work on- both for personal and professional growth. Without goals, you could be driving aimlessly on the roads sans destination.

What's Goal Setting

First, let me tell you what goal-setting it is not. It is not a to-do to show off to your friends and family and nor an intangible bragging trophy. Unfortunately, most people think of goals as exactly that on 31st December or 1st January. The truth is goals are not a fad but a commitment.

Think of goals as what you wish to achieve – the outcome. Now go back and list things you need to do to reach that outcome (could be more than one). In short, we are talking about activities and results. Goals are intentional, with a clear path to follow. They help you to stay on course and not get distracted. Goal setting is a skill, personally or otherwise.

Importance of Goal Setting

Let’s say you have no goals. As you wake up each morning, you have no clue what to do with your time. You deal with your days as they come. You react to life and nothing more and have no purpose in life. Such a lifestyle may seem cool to someone for a few days, but they would tear their hair eventually. Goals help you set a mission for yourself in life. It answers the Why and What of your life questions.

Goals Wade Away Distractions

Goals are a broader vision that helps you stay on course and focused. Let’s take you back to your childhood. When your parents took you to Disneyland, the original plan was to get you to experience some rides, get you your favourite candies and chocolates and probably meet Micky mouse, among others.

Once inside Disneyland, you practically ran towards everything that caught your fancy – Your father held you by your arm and swiftly guided you back to the course of action, anchoring you to the goal path – the rides, et cetera. Goals help you to wade away distractions in your everyday life.

Goals Help Live a Fulfilling Life

We all have strong core values, and we care for them. Consciously or otherwise, our values help us make decisions every day. What we consider right and wrong, meaningful and wasteful, has a lot to do with our core values. Our values dictate what we aspire to become in life.

Henceforth, our goal-setting tends to auto-align with our innermost desires and beliefs. Breaking those goals down into bite-sized activities helps us get closure to success, and in the process, we feel more content as human beings.

A Goal For Life

Do not confuse goals for only the needy, the destitute or the lost. Goals are as crucial to the rich and famous as they are for you and me since they got rich and popular with the help of goal setting in the first place. A personal goal (or more) is for life, it may update as you accomplish them, but it is a life-long endeavor.

Reworking Goals

Revisit your goals regularly, and should you think your priorities have changed or a Goal no longer serves a purpose or is no more realistic, bin it and start fresh.

Example: to lose weight, you start intermittent fasting and write down your Goal – “I will fast for 16 hours each day from 9 pm to 1 pm the next day, for the next 365 days.” Four months pass by, and you successfully follow your path but one day, the doctor informs you that you can no longer continue this diet regime due to reasons best known to the doctor and you.

Reworking goals is fine as long as one has a legitimate reason but abandoning them because one is too tired to pursue them is not the right reason to rework them.

SMART Goals

Anyone who has read anything about goals knows about SMART goals, but the problem arises when one cannot implement SMART during their goal-setting exercise. I will show you methodically how you should approach goal setting in 2023, but before I do that, here is what SMART is for the sake of those readers living in igloos.

• Specific – You should be able to pinpoint something you wish to do.
• Measurable – What gets measured gets done, and you should be able to quantify your results at the end of the day.
• Attainable – Are we being realistic with our goal setting?
• Relevant – is it relevant to me or my larger vision in life/work?
• Time-bound – Have we said by when we will achieve what we set out to achieve?

How to Approach Goal Setting in 2023

Goal setting is no mean feat, it is a skilled task in itself, and many senior managers have stressed over it. On a personal front, you could be a juggernaut of personal development, but goal setting might scare you too. If you carefully see the job description of many skilled managerial positions – the “ability to set and monitor team goals” is one of the selection criteria.

So, here is what I do each year, and I am sharing my way of handling personal or professional goals with you.

The 3F Rule

An ambitious person like me enjoys creating personal goals. I look forward to the excitement when I am nearing the completion of any given goal, but here is the catch, I always follow what I call the 3F Rule – Five Fingers Formula.

Simply put, do not assign more than five goals for yourself or your team at any given point – One goal for each finger of your dominating hand and creating more than five goals means setting yourself or others up for failure. Achieve these five goals and start fresh with another batch but do not get too ambitious.

Brain dump

The second step to goal setting is to take a piece of paper and sit down in a quiet place for at least 30 minutes. Randomly write down whatever comes to your mind – make sure that these scribbles are one-worded each, for example – Books, Family and Hair. Do not restrict yourself, and let your pencil wander as your mind does.

Select & Circle

Now that you have a healthy list of words that may or may or make sense right away, you are ready for the next step. Review the list and circle ten words that you think are critical for you in 2023. Out of the ten words, put an asterisk against five that are super duper important. These words will be the basis of your goal-setting in 2023.

Five Stories

Write the five shortlisted words down on a fresh piece of paper, and against each word, write down a vision statement. The sentence should resonate like a use-case story, for example – I wish to run a marathon successfully and with ease. Or, I want to be able to build my website without any help to save costs. Each story should reflect what you wish to get done and what will be the benefit.

Once you have jotted down the five stories, you have your vision statement. Now, note down each vision statement on a new page, and underneath – write down S.M.A.R.T in bullet points for each alphabet separately. You will have to find a way to achieve your vision using the SMART criteria.?

For example, going back to the website story – “I want to be able to build my website without any help to save costs.”?

• Specific – I have identified that I am talking about my website. I can throw in things like I want to build the following webpages – About Us, Contact, Home, Courses and Resources.
• Measurable – My story doesn’t allow me to measure anything, and it is subjective. Let us change that – “I want to be able to my five webpages of my basic website.”
• Attainable – My story is attainable, as I have not gone overboard with my goal. As a person who does not know how to build websites, I want to learn and make only five pages of a website.
• Relevant – My story is relevant to my larger vision and values. It resonates with what I wish to do and is in harmony. What I mean is – for example – being a vegan, I cannot have the following as a goal “I will eat 1 kg chicken every day for the next 365 days”, it doesn’t make sense, and is against what I stand for.
• Time-bound – My story has no timeline mentioned, so let us change that. “I want to be able to build five basic web pages of my website no later than 31st March 2023. You have given yourself 90 days to learn how to make basic web pages.

Activities

If you have a bigger goal that exceeds more than a year and goes on for 2-3 years, you will want to take the help of activities. For example – bodybuilders all the time have such goals. “I want to be physically and mentally prepared for the bodybuilding championship in 2025.” Mind you, this is also a short-term goal since the time frame is only 3 years.

For such overlapping goals, attainable criteria from SMART become crucial. Hence, you want to break down your larger goal into bite-sized pieces so that you can achieve them. This is where activities come in. Going back to our website example – you could break down the goal into activities like – “learn to code every day for 30 minutes”, or “take lessons on SEO ?every Saturday for 1 hour”.

Whether you wish to keep your vision stories as your goals or break them down into smaller chunks as activities, is purely your call. Whatever you choose to do is perfectly fine as there is no right and wrong here.

Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)

There are many ways one can implement goal-setting in their personal or professional life. One of these methods is called?OKRs ?or Objectives and Key Results. Organizations like Google use and implement OKRs in their goal-setting. OKRs are clear, easy to create and follow and most importantly highly accountable.

You could also implement OKRs in your goal-setting exercise for 2023. For example, the following could be your OKR:-

Objective (O) – To make my website from scratch in 2023.

Key Results (KR) – “Make five pages – about, contact, home, courses and resources by April 2023.?

Key results focus on how you will measure your success against your goals. There is some difference between the SMART and OKR models of goal-setting. SMART focuses on setting the right goal and setting the goal right (effectiveness and efficiency of the goals themselves). Whereas OKRs go a step further “ok, I see your goals, but how will you achieve them?”

Plot Daily Tasks

By now, you have your goals and activities sorted. The next step is to plot all the relevant tasks onto your mobile phone. Add a date and time to it voila, you are all set! Do not be too harsh on yourself with the timelines of your tasks. After all these tasks are meant for your betterment and not to make you insufferable.

If you think that some of the tasks are pushing you or giving you stress, revisit your activities and realign. Remember the realistic criteria of SMART. Unrealistic goals and deadlines will cause you more harm.

Conclusion

Having goals are crucial for success, otherwise, you can drift away without knowing it. Creating too many goals and being too ambitious can also do you no good. Approach goal-setting to being happy first and then achieving something. You can also achieve satisfaction if your values and vision in life match up with your goals, each year. At the end of the day, make sure you have fun.