Set a goal! - Sure! - but... How?

DUMB goals

We're all familiar with the concept of a "goal". Regardless of where you are on your professional or personal path, somewhere in your journey you were advised that you should set a goal. And that this goal should be in writing. And that it should probably be a SMART goal. Or, if you wanted to be different, you could set a goal with another acronym.

Ever heard of CLEAR goals? Or SMART-R goals? Or even... DUMB goals? Here is a good post about 7 alternatives to SMART goals - worth a read to see just what people can come up with.

Does it matter?

Look, at no point am I going to say that having a system of some sort to help define a goal is a bad thing. Systems are good. But you can easily get stuck in the quagmire of trying to to understand which system to choose - and given that a goal is intended to initiate action, that's a bad thing.

Let's get practical

By all means, get some tips and wisdom from the various goal setting systems out there. Someone spent a lot of time trying to understand how to define an objective in an achievable manner. But fundamentally a great goal has the following 4 elements:

1. A statement of intent: "I/We want that"
2. An understandable definition of what "that" is, so everyone knows what you are referring to,
3. An indication of when you want it
4. An indication of how you'll know you've got it - something to measure

Where should you start?

In our experience people who are new to working with goals make one fundamental mistake. They go to big from the start. Setting great goals is a skill and just like any other skill this is something you need to practice.

Our advice to the teams we work with are as follows:

1. Start with something small. Something with a 1 day timeframe. An item on a to-do list for example. Set that goal, accomplish it, and learn from it,
2. Then do that a couple of times with short term goals. Things to accomplish in no more than a 2-week period. Sometimes you need to get used to working on something in increments, getting small things done that add up to the full goal. For example, make contact with 100 prospective clients, or no pizza for 2 weeks, etc,
3. Important, practice with goals that you do not have heavy emotional investment or deep expectation in. You should be able to fail without it costing too much, and
4. Practice goal setting for a month. Tweak your process, tweak your system, understand how react to the pressures this bring. Fail at some goals - not deliberately of course, but because you either misjudged or something happened outside your control.

What about relevance?

For this first bit of work, it is important that you understand how to set a goal and how to pursue that goal. This is a skill to learn and master.

In our next piece we'll talk about setting goals that matter and aligning it with a deeper objective.

Thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts in the comments.