PACT: The Goal Setting Technique You’ve Never Heard Of.

What Is PACT?

PACT is a goal setting technique and stands for Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable.In comparison with other goal setting techniques, PACT goals focus on output while others focus on outcome.

Below are the four elements of PACT and how they can help you achieve your goals.

Purposeful

A “Purposeful” effort represents your goal’s foundation, its meaning, and the passion that drives you toward achieving it. A purposeful intent does not merely satisfy a fast or frivolous gratification, but rather, it speaks more to the values that fuel your ambitions and actions.

Starting a task at the surface level and digging deeper helps us to understand why something is important to us and how it feels when you perform certain activities or pursue different goals.

Actionable

Being “Actionable” is about taking action today to avoid over-planning for the future. This means making efforts to change the things within your reach that you can presently control instead of focusing on distant outcomes. Think of “Actionable” as being similar to the adage, “living in the now.”

PACT goals allow you to experiment because you can measure your effort (more on this below). It can also prove to be a better mental health approach , because it allows people to try new things, fall short, experience miscues, and have trials and errors. This provides a landscape of opportunity for continuous improvement and refinement.

Continuous

With the “Continuous” pursuit of repeatable and straightforward routines, we can avoid “choice paralysis,” when too many options keep you from immediately doing something actionable.

Spending too much time on research as opposed to action can be stifling. It’s easy to overthink, considering all of the things you don’t know yet or of all the possible negative outcomes.

PACT and other similar goal-setting models allow you to avoid those fears through experimentation. It encourages you to get started and experiment through continuous actions and you measure success through your effort and progress.

Trackable

Lastly, there is great value in “Trackable” actions a different take on “Measurable” from SMART goals. This approach can positively impact mental health and wellness as it pertains to a sense of accomplishment based on effort and progress.

For example, instead of reading a book in a day right away, allow yourself time to build up to that by reading few chapters daily. Realize that just reading some chapters routinely as you work toward your goal is commendable in itself.

Using the PACT model, you track the number of chapters you read daily and how long it took you to read the whole chapter.

You can see that PACT goals are designed to get you started right now. What action do you want to take that will help you improve? Once you identify that, you can get started working towards your goal.