Five Steps for Setting Goals That Stick

We’re coming up on the New Year, a time at which we reflect on the year past and set goals, or “resolutions,” for the new year. This week I wanted to explore what it means to set goals in our lives, how we choose them, and how we achieve them.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve set many goals or resolutions for yourself over the years, but they’ve amounted to a whole lot of nothing.

In years past I would set goals like, “get healthy,” find a new job, quit smoking, exercise more, live within a budget, drink less, eat out less, make more time for friends, quit worrying about finding a girlfriend, or any number of other well meaning and idealized metrics I would set for myself.

And then when New Years came around, the only plan I had was to PUSH myself to succeed with will power and “stick-to-it-ness.” I would eat healthy and run every day for about three days before I succumbed to my first cinnamon roll and consider the rest of the week a total loss. I lived according to my budget for about three weeks before completely blowing it out of the water on an impulsive online shopping spree for a bunch of junk I didn’t want or need. I’d get super motivated on finding a new job and spend that first Saturday after new years updating my resume and putting together a game plan only to not follow through on any of it. And don’t even get me started on how much I struggled to quit smoking. Waking up on New Year's Day with a hangover certainly didn’t help.

Yet over the years I have achieved many of these goals, but never in the way that I thought goals were supposed to be achieved.

I’ve since learned that goals based on will power have almost no chance of succeeding. It’s just too easy to falter one day, skip a day, or make excuses. When that happens you inevitably get down on yourself for it, which only makes the prospect of getting back to the goal that much harder.

There are lots of books and tricks out there to help us all set better goals, but over the years I came to identify the five main steps, that are the “make or break” aspects of setting successful goals.

1) Identify What You Really Want.

I used to always set goals for myself like “get healthy” but never defined what that actually meant for me. Is that to eat healthier? Run five miles every day? Or just to hope I got healthier on my own?

Without defining an actual goal I wanted to achieve, I was setting myself up for failure. I needed to set a “SMART” goal (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely). A good example would have been to run a 5K by April, stop eating ice cream on weekdays for three months, or go to yoga once a week through June. These are goals that fit all the parameters, and also don’t necessarily require a whole lifestyle makeover to achieve, yet still take me in a positive direction.

Along with a better defined goal, it was also important to define WHY I wanted to achieve it. What would be the tangible benefit of each goal? How would I feel if I achieved it? What vision exercises could I do to imagine my future self after I’ve achieved the goal?

2) Identify What You Need to Learn to Be Effective

I’ve never been an expert on managing a budget, eating healthy, the psychology of addiction, or the steps towards bringing new projects to fruition. In fact, I had little actual knowledge on any of those topics even though I was setting goals for myself to achieve them all.

Luckily I was able to learn, but not without a lot of false starts because I made ambitious goals for myself before I bothered to learn how to achieve them.

The trick I learned was with each goal I needed to also identify–ideally in writing–what it was I DIDN’T know about achieving the goal and doing what I could to learn it.

Usually this involved hitting the books. Luckily there’s books out there on just about anything. If actually sitting down to read isn’t your jam, there’s audiobooks too. Many library systems even have apps that allow you to “check out” ebooks or audiobooks for free. That was a game changer for me!

3) Analyze Current Behavior to Determine Opportunities and Weak Points.

The next step in each of my big life goals was to make an honest assessment of where I was starting from with each goal to identify the biggest roadblocks, but also opportunities for improvement. Oftentimes our goals will have key fulcrum points, or a space where something relatively minor is holding us back in a major way. This could also uncover a goal's impossibility until something else is resolved first.

For past money goals I would analyze a full six months to a year of previous spending to figure out where my money was really going. For health goals, I might keep track of what I’m eating for 1-2 weeks to see what the biggest sources of calories were.

Oftentimes there were a handful or relatively minor changes that could have a major impact. When it came to money, I could see very clearly that all my unnecessary eating out was killing my budget. Getting in the habit of eating at home for half as many meals could have a major impact.

As far as my health, I came to see I was taking in a ridiculous amount of calories in the form of salad dressing and olive oil in my diet. Cutting back on those two items alone eliminated way more calories than depriving myself of my once-a-week burrito splurge would have.

Other tricks I’ve done in the past were keeping a time long to track how I was spending my time each day or a sleep log to see how my sleep patterns affect my overall mood or productivity.

4) Choose One Change That Can Have the Most Impact

Hopefully the work you did to analyze yourself revealed an easy and obvious place to focus your energy that will give you the most bang for your buck. This might be a relatively easy habit to change or low hanging fruit to grab for yourself. For myself it was the aforementioned ditching of the salad dressing and olive oil.

There are other ways you can set yourself up for success in this realm too. Another thing I realized in analysis was that one of the main things holding me back from exercising was just the basic step of changing into exercise clothes. The trick to this was to simply get used to wearing exercise clothes as my regular around the house outfit more often.

Sometimes it’s not just enough to remove the offender though, it’s also necessary to replace it with something better.

One of my favorite go-to rewards is to treat myself to a massage. The massage can loosen up the muscles that I’ve been working on all week by running, or can be a nice way to more consciously spend a small amount of money I saved all week.

5) Go Easy On Yourself

The last step is simply to go easy on yourself. There will be slips. There will be mistakes. There will be setbacks. Ultimately, it’s not whether or not you stick to your goals unflinchingly that will bring you to success, but rather how you handle the inevitable setbacks.

Some of the most important achievements in my life came after the eighteenth or nineteenth attempt. I worked on quitting smoking for YEARS before it actually stuck. Certain changes are just going to take time and continued effort. Get yourself accustomed to that fact now. It might arguably be the most important step.

Obviously there is so much more to setting good goals than what I have above, but hopefully this gives you a good place to start.

I’d love to hear your experiences. What has and hasn’t worked for you. Feel free to leave thoughts in the comments.

I’ll be hosting a mini workshop / discussion on Setting Goals (Big & Small) via Zoom on Thursday, December 30, at 1 p.m. PST. The link to sign up is here.

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