Goal Setting

Goal setting is a powerful psychological health tool. I write this article now because the New Year and associated holidays provide a natural break in life and, for most people, provide a time that is ideal for reflection and resetting. I personally set goals around the turn of the calendar year every year.

Setting goals can help a person find purpose in their lives, and purpose might be the most important thing in a person's life for their psychological health and maybe even physical health. This is my opinion, but it is backed by research. For example, here, here, and here. This is not a new idea, and it's been in popular culture for some time. Psychologist Viktor Frankl suggested the same concept in his excellent book, Man's Search for Meaning, as did Pastor Rick Warren in his bestselling book, The Purpose Driven Life. In this article, I will talk about my process for setting goals, some things that are helpful, and some pitfalls to avoid.

Where to begin

If you're new to goal setting, a great place to start is with the widely-used SMART framework. Developed by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham in their seminal work A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance (1990), SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This simple structure ensures your goals are clear and actionable, making it easier to stay on track. 

A common example might be - rather than saying, "I want to get into shape," you would say, "Before January 1st, 2025, I want to have changed my body composition from 30% body fat to 20% body fat." You can see how that goal is much more specific, measurable, and time-bound. Whether or not it is achievable or relevant is very much up to you. 

In the context of SMART goals, relevancy means that the goal is not random. It is part of some larger purpose that you might have, such as living a healthier life or being able to play with your kids more. A non-relevant goal might be learning to play the piano, for example. If it is way out of context with your life, and it's just something you want to take up randomly, it might not really be relevant enough for you to pursue with enough passion to accomplish your goal. 

On the other hand, I will give you a personal example where this type of goal is linked to a bigger vision, adding to relevancy. In college, I had a professor who invited us to his house for a holiday dinner party. At some point during the evening, he sat down and started playing background music for the party. I was wildly impressed, and since then, I have envisioned myself someday playing a piano just like him. So, this goal of learning the piano has a greater relevancy than just taking it up on a whim because it relates to a vision I have of myself in the future. 

An achievable goal is self-explanatory. A quote often attributed to Bill Gates says: "Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten years." To that end, I've found that most of my annual goals go unachieved. It's very hard to write a book or learn an instrument, and while a year seems like a long time, it goes by quick. It's important to not be too self-critical about your achievements over the course of a year (or lack thereof). At the same time, it's best to have challenging goals. Locke's research consistently showed that challenging goals resulted in higher performance than setting easy goals, so I would encourage you to set challenging goals and give yourself some grace rather than setting easy goals to ensure you can "check the box."

I have found the writing of Michael Hyatt both relevant and helpful when setting up my goals. He recommends associating goals to specific areas of your life, such as physical, vocational, avocational, etc. You can read his recommendations on his site. He also has created his own "SMARTER" framework, which you can read about there. In the past, I've used his Full Focus Planner to organize myself and keep track of progress, which brings us to...

Achieving Your Goals

If you're anything like me, you have a lot going on every day. It is easy to lose visibility of the big picture when you get into the details of each day. It's important to remind yourself often of your goals and re-orient your daily actions to make sure you're doing the right things. 

What does this look like in practice? For me, it means writing down my goals in a place where I can revisit them often. As mentioned, in the past, I've used Full Focus Planners and various other notebooks and planning tools. The Full Focus Planners specifically have a weekly review built into them, which gives you constant reminders to look at your goals again. That's the second part of keeping yourself on track. Once you have them written down, you must look at them regularly. Often, it's helpful to just give yourself a reminder or build it into your weekly or monthly routine. I review my goals weekly.

It's helpful to think about a couple of things during the review. First, what have you done in the past week to help you move closer to success? Second, what is the very next action you can take to make progress? Write down in whatever task organizer you have what you need to do next to accomplish your goal. It's useful to break it into the smallest chunks possible so you can continue to see progress and keep yourself motivated week after week.

I have been looking for a digital solution for my task list for a long time. I call it a task list, but it's much more complicated. Tiago Forte wrote a book called Building a Second Brain, which is much closer to what I'm trying to achieve with my organizational system. I've recently switched from the Full Focus Planner to Obsidian. In a future post, I will discuss the techniques I use to keep myself organized on that platform. I pair Obsidian with the principles of Getting Things Done (GTD) to, well... get things done. The concepts from GTD are super important, and if you meet consistently productive people, they are probably using many of them without even realizing it. I reread that book every few years and can't recommend it highly enough. No matter how good you are at reflecting and creating new goals for yourself, it's hard to achieve results if you can't keep everything in front of you.

Some Advice in Creating Goals

Creating goals should be done carefully. Don't rush into them. The problem can be that - if you choose goals that aren't going to be achieved, your goals could add more stress to your life and decrease your psychological health rather than adding to it. The most important factor to consider here is relevance. If your goals are sufficiently hard to challenge you, they should take a lot of work. Consider carefully whether or not you are personally prepared to take on the amount of work required to accomplish your end state. 

Most years, I have not been able to introduce something new into my life. Instead, I need to refine my focus on the things I currently have going on and look for new wins in my efforts that are already underway. 

A decade ago, when I was early in my annual goal-setting habit, I would create novel goals. I would say to myself that I was going to do a triathlon, do yoga regularly, and score highly on the Army Physical Fitness Test. While these goals aren't incompatible, they each require specialized training. Still, these things are possible, and many people do all these things every year. However, these goals weren't my priority. I was not mentally prepared to achieve them. Instead, I prioritized getting a second bachelor's degree, working full-time, and commanding a Company in the National Guard on the weekends.

Simply put, I didn't consider my priorities thoroughly enough before creating my goals. The result was that I felt like a failure for the year because I didn't accomplish my goals. But the reality was, although my goals were specific, measurable, achievable, and time-bound, they weren't relevant enough to me at the time to take priority. 

The bottom line is - carefully consider whether you will be motivated enough to accomplish your goals. Are they relevant enough to you right now to get them done? Because if they aren't relevant enough to you now, you are shorting yourself some time to accomplish them. What I mean is: if you're making challenging annual goals, and you aren't motivated to start today, then you have less than a year to accomplish them. And they are already challenging enough. Make sure you're committed.

Conclusion

Create goals. It's good for you. Take time to think about where you want to be in five, ten, or fifty years and start taking action to get there now. Reflect often to give yourself credit for what you've accomplished and keep yourself on track and working on the right things to achieve your goals. If you decide to add a novel goal - one that's brand new to you - make sure that you are mentally prepared to get after it. Otherwise, you risk adding stress and ensuring failure in your pursuits.