Everyone has goals, but not everyone consistently accomplishes their goals in a timely manner or even not at all.
There are many avenues to approaching goals, below are a few of them.
1. WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan)
- Wish: Define your wish or goal.
- Outcome: Visualize the best possible outcome of achieving your goal.
- Obstacle: Identify the obstacles that might prevent you from reaching your goal.
- Plan: Create a plan to overcome these obstacles.
- Encourages proactive problem-solving by anticipating challenges and planning.
2. HARD Goals
- Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult.
- Heartfelt: Ensure the goal is deeply meaningful to you.
- Animated: Visualize your success and feel motivated by the process.
- Required: Make the goal a necessity, not just a desire.
- Difficult: Challenge yourself with goals that require effort and dedication.
- Aims to push you beyond your comfort zone by focusing on passion-driven, challenging goals.
3. CLEAR Goals
- Collaborative, Limited, Emotional, Appreciable, Refinable.
- Collaborative: Encourage working with others to achieve your goal.
- Limited: Keep goals small and manageable.
- Emotional: Connect with your goals on an emotional level to stay motivated.
- Appreciable: Break down larger goals into smaller, more achievable tasks.
- Refineable: Be flexible and open to refining your goals as circumstances change.
- Focuses on adaptability and collaboration, making it suitable for team environments.
4. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
- Objectives: What you want to achieve.
- Key Results: How you will measure progress toward the objective.
- Often used in organizational settings, OKRs are about setting ambitious goals and tracking measurable outcomes.
5. BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)
- A BHAG is a long-term, highly ambitious goal that can take a decade or more to achieve.
- It’s about thinking big and aiming for something that inspires and motivates over the long term.
6. Backward Goal Setting
- Start with the end goal in mind and work backward to determine the steps needed to achieve it.
- This method helps in understanding the process and timeline required for complex goals.
7. GROW Model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will)
- Goal: Define what you want to achieve.
- Reality: Assess your current situation and resources.
- Options: Explore various strategies to achieve the goal.
- Will: Decide on a course of action and commit to it.
- Commonly used in coaching, the GROW model encourages a structured approach to goal achievement.
8. Four Disciplines of Execution (4DX)
- Focus on the Wildly Important: Identify your most critical goals.
- Act on Lead Measures: Focus on actions that lead to achieving the goal.
- Keep a Compelling Scoreboard: Track progress and stay motivated.
- Create a Cadence of Accountability: Regularly review and adjust actions to stay on track.
- Designed for teams, 4DX emphasizes execution and accountability.
9. P.A.C.E. Goals (Prioritize, Assess, Commit, Execute)
- Prioritize: Determine which goals are most important.
- Assess: Evaluate the feasibility and impact of each goal.
- Commit: Fully commit to the chosen goals.
- Execute: Take consistent action to achieve them.
- Focuses on prioritization and committed action to ensure that the most important goals are achieved.
10. SWOT Analysis
- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.
- Analyze these four factors concerning your goal to develop a strategy that leverages strengths and opportunities while addressing weaknesses and threats.
- This method is often used in business settings but can be applied to personal goal setting as well.
11. Locke’s Goal-Setting Theory
- Based on the idea that clear, challenging goals, accompanied by appropriate feedback, lead to higher performance.
- Emphasizes the importance of setting specific and difficult goals and getting feedback to stay on track.
All these approaches are great. And combining many different pieces of these approaches that resonate with you and allow you to stay consistent during your pursuit is important to finding what works best with you.
But today I want to touch on SMART Goals. An approach to outlining a goal, giving your goals some meat on the bones.
SMART Goal planning can be a prelude to the above goal exercises.
Smart Goals have always seemed so cheesy to me, it’s an exercise I’ve had to do in school before.
But after countless failed attempts writing down big picture goals I thought up in my head, usually jot them down as a checklist style on a piece of paper, and after accomplishing half of them at best, I think it’s time to take another look how to write them down.
There is a range of complexity and effectiveness in goal planning which can be quite personal to how you operate. But I have concluded that simple and foundational always beats intricate and niche methods across the board, and needs to be a first step to getting better at achieving your goals.
Smart Goals are very straight forward. Smart is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound.
Now in my personal previous method, a written goal may seem obvious like save 5k, net 100k from sales, or lose 5 pounds. But these goals aren’t as simple as they sound, there convoluted and filled with mystery.
I’ve seen it in myself and others, before you know it, you are deterred from trying to reach them because you gave yourself a cardinal direction, but you lacked the map to get you there.
If I just go north, not knowing where I am starting from or what turns I am going to take, I likely won’t end up at my destination.
You need to take the little extra time upfront to build the foundation around your goals. And that is the benefit of smart goals!
Answering the smart goal prompts gives you actionable steps and builds a greater picture in your mind on what done looks like.
Goal: Save 5K
Specific: I want to save 5k to put into my long-term investments.
Measurable: I will auto deduct $500 a month from my paycheck into my investment account.
Achievable: I can save $5k. At the comfortable $500 a month, I will have $5k in ten months.
Realistic: I am comfortable with putting away $500 a month. I have enough dedicated to bills, fun, clothing, etc.
Time-Bound: I want to have the full $5k in my investment account by the end of the year so I miss as little growth opportunity as possible.
Now those goals before which sounded simple, really are simpler. They may have greater detail but your cleared many of the obstacles you would inevitebly approached and made the path simpler.
You know what your completed goal looks like because you built your map. Now it is just as simple as plugging away until those smaller inputs add up to the whole.
Today is a great day to check in on your goals and see where you are at!
Maybe you can try out the SMART Goal method or just see where you can add more detail. In your goals, how can you break them down into smaller, more chewable pieces?
These are your goals and you want to achieve them, so make it easy on yourself and build them a foundation and support system that makes them easy.