Goal Setting

Another week has just passed by, and while I didn’t get a chance to post any articles, it certainly doesn’t mean I stopped reading what others had to say! :)

Here are the posts I found interesting in the past week. Enjoy!

Phillip J. Eby from DirtSimple has an excellent article about Five Ways NOT to Create Motivating Goals, which summarizes some of his wisdom on goal setting:

A goal that merely seems like something you “should” do is not only unmotivating, it can be actively de-motivating, slowly draining the life from you as you beat yourself up about not achieving it.

And although a lot has certainly been written out there about so-called “SMART” goals, the truth is that you can have a goal that is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Tangible), but still doesn’t do jack to motivate you.

Steven Aitchison from Change Your Thoughts did a terrific job starting a series of post on goal-setting and defining your ultimate outcomes. In the first post of the series, he explains why it is so important to write your intentions down, and provides a downloadable set of ultimate outcomes templates for you to print out and fill in:

Only 3% of the population write down their goals and did you know that the top 3% of the richest people in the world control half of the money going around the world, is this a coincidence?

Try the ultimate outcomes sheets for 3 months and see if it makes a difference in your life.

If you fail to achieve a goal; if you fail to master a particular habit; if you simply fail to recall a birthday of someone you know – there is the same question you should ask yourself: are you interested?

Are you interested at all?

Every day we manage to accomplish certain goals and complete various tasks, and we also, quite naturally, fail to get some things done. There are various reasons we attribute our successes and failures to, but I think I know a basic foundation for most of such reasoning.You see, it is my personal belief that all such reasons and excuses can eventually be narrowed down to only one: your interest in the outcome.

The more interested you are in the success, the more easier it is going to accomplish the task. The less interested you are, the harder your struggle with the task is going to be. And what I’ve noticed from my personal experience is that we don’t always stop and realise that the outcome we end up with is the direct result of us being interested or not interested in the task.

Quite often, we’re being rushed by surrounding circumstances so much that we never have a chance to stop and admit that there’s no interest left anymore in something for us to do.

I believe you should always be clear about your interest in a particular outcome, because being genuinely interesting in something is the only way to actually become successful at anything.

If you think about it, any other way of getting things done starts with your interest, and stay very dependant on your level of interest until the task is successfully completed.

Here are just a few of the sure ways to get something done, and how I think they are related to you being interested in a certain outcome:

• Goal setting
  Why do we set goals? Because we want to have a list of outcomes we want to achieve. How do we set goals? By listing the desired outcomes along with the best reasons why we desire such outcomes. No goal is good enough until you’ve decided why it is your goal and why is it that you absolutely have to achieve it. Setting goals and finding the right reasons for desiring them is a process of defining your interests for a certain outcome.You’re interested in a certain goal, and you’re also interested in achieving it within a timeframe and other limitations your situation has. Justifying some outcome as one of your major goals implies learning the exact points of your interest in this outcome.
• Motivation
  What keeps us motivated? There are many sources of motivation available, but among the most obvious ones are your interests. Keep the list of your goals visible, maintain your constant interest in the best outcome possible, and you’ll have plenty of motivation.If something had’t worked out just as good as you expected, review your interests. Why did something go wrong? Was there anything else you could do to prevent this from happening? Why didn’t you? Your interest will have all the explanations: either you were not interested in a particular outcome anymore, or you simply got overwhelmed with an even greater interest in something else.
• Problem solving
  Identifying your exact interests is a crucial part of the problem solving. Until you know for sure what is it that you’re trying to achieve by solving the problem, you cannot effectively proceed with the solution itself. You need to clearly see why and what you want to accomplish by solving the problem, and predict the desired outcomes for doing so. Sometimes it will take you just a few minutes to realise that the problem doesn’t interest you, because it’s neither a challenge nor a desired outcome for you.

Are you interested enough?

Once you learn to stay interest-conscious about any task or plan you have, it will become quite easy for you to manage the priorities and order for things to be done.I know what you’re thinking now. Yes, it would be perfect if we could only do things we really like and we’re genuinely interested in, and simply forget about all the other things which we’re required to do as part of our social or functional roles. But the reality is this: we need to learn how to become interested in things which we’ll have to do anyway, because then it will be much easier to get them done.

When you look at your typical plan of actions for one of your goals for example, you will see right away some (hopefully many) items on the list which interest and excite you, and others which really don’t. But if you know that a certain part of your plan is really important and therefore has to be done, this means you need to look for the interest even if there isn’t anything apparently appealing in the task.

With project plans it’s fairly easy to find your interest in about anything – simply because every single step serves the bigger interest of one of the higher level tasks. But it’s always possible to find other ways of some task to interest you.

Here is a simple yet effective approach you can use when going through a list of tasks, be it a project plan or a simple to-do list for the next half-an-hour:

1. Glance through the list, quickly identifying items of interest. Mark them – they will be the relatively easy ones to accomplish.
2. Look at the rest of the list, and quickly identify the most obvious dependencies of actions which don’t seem to interest you to the ones of your interest from step 1.
3. Look at the list of uninteresting items and decide which tasks are most important (simply because you know they’re important or because you can see a lot of interesting tasks depend on one of the uninteresting tasks)
4. Prioritize – uninteresting tasks with lots of dependencies should be a higher priority
5. Grow your interest – emphasize the advantages of getting the highest priority things done, and pay some attention to details – like “this has to be done because without it I can’t go on with the really interesting stuff”, or “this is the only uninteresting task in the whole first stage of the project – it will be great to do get it done first and then quickly roll up the whole stage of a project”.

Be genuinely interested!It is a rather popular belief: if you’re passionate about something, you’re going to be successful at it. While generally I agree with this statement, I’ve changed it to the following one a long time ago: if you’re interested in something, you’re going to be successful at it.

I’ve made such a change to the magic formula because I believe that passion usually growth from interest. You can’t really be passionate about something unless you get interested in it first.

In a context of getting things done, being passionate really means being interested in the most successful outcome of every task you have. When your interest is so strong that you’re willing to sacrifice your time, money and other valuable resources to achieve your goal, you will know that you’re passionate about something.

Being interested suggests that you’re focused and serious about your goals, you’re alert and ready to face the challenges. Being interested implies having many more qualities of your character activated and aimed at the maximum productivity.

In contrast to it, being passionate suggests something irrational – like being impulsive and creative, but not necessarily efficient. Being passionate implies strong feeling about a certain goal or subject, but does not necessarily suggest maintaining awareness of other factors which could affect your accomplishments.

That’s why I’ve been using the following formula for a while, and it’s been most useful in everything I’ve accomplished so far: if you’re really interested in something, you’re going to be successful.

More and more I realise that this simple rule is absolutely true: what you focus on will improve.Over the past few months I’ve been trying to improve so many things in my life that it would take a while even to write them down. Not everything was a complete success, but I’m more than happy with the results I’ve achieved so far. And now that I gradually become more and more conscious about the need to maintain my focus on the right things, I notice that some experiences of mine were an absolute success, and that it wasn’t just a coincidence.

I’ve realised that only the things I’ve paid most attention to got greatly improved.

Know what your goals are

I’ve said it before, and I’m going to repeat it: know what your goals are! Because if you’re going to focus on something to make it happen and to improve it, you have to be absolutely sure where you’re going with your goals.

Wrongly chosen focus could mean that you’re going to improve things which don’t really matter to you. Improving them will take time and efforts, but will not bring you closer to your goals. And this, done repeatedly to yourself, brings a certain frustration.

Let your focus do the work for you Too often people let great ideas go simply because they fear they’re not going to have enough time, money, skill or some other resource to make the idea work. And while it’s generally a good approach to be conscious about your abilities and resources, you should never worry about things without first taking time to analyze them.

What I’m trying to say is that if you pick an idea, and immediately start worrying about everything that comes to your mind, it’s not going to get you anywhere. This isn’t what we call a productive thinking.

What you need to do instead is to write an idea down, in as much detail as possible. That’s the first step towards a proper analysis and planning. Then, start writing down what it’s going to take you to make the idea work. DON’T worry about HOW you’re going to make it all work. Just write it down as if there’s going to be someone else who will magically do all the work for you. Remember: you’re trying to build a plan which works, not the plan which will simply scare everyone (including yourself) away from a brilliant idea.

After you’ve written everything down, pick a few of the most important areas of the project. They are the ones you want to keep your focus on. And for each of these, come up with at least 2 next steps to bring you closer to your goal. Don’t worry about how big or small these few steps are – but make sure they are real to you, they are some things you can go and do yourself, right now or a little bit later.

After this, let your focus do the work for you. Print the goals out in a large font and put them on your desk or your whiteboard. Make sure you review them daily, and get into a habit of coming up with at just one step which will bring you closer to your goal, every day.

What you should aim for is a progress, not a difference it will or will not make. You want to get into a proper state of mind – into a planning mode, when your creative thinking will give you more and more actions you can do to bring you closer to your goal. You want to learn how to get into this state on a constant basis. And after you master this habit, you will be shocked how easy it is to move towards your goal.

Never underestimate the power of focus!

Don’t be surprised with your resultsSometimes maintaining a focus will make a positive difference somewhere you never expected it!

Here’s an example for you: two months ago I’ve realised that I was making quite a number of spelling errors as I wrote my articles. Most of these errors were made because I was in such a creative state while working on an article, that my mind would simply disregard any spelling questions – and so some words would always be spelled incorrectly, mostly the same words with the same spelling errors.

I had realised that bad spelling wasn’t doing me any favours, and so I’d made a decision to spell-check every article of mine before I post it.

It was that simple: there was a problem which needed my attention, and so I maintained my focus on it to ensure the quality of my articles is as high as I’d like it to be. Simple, yet effective!

But what I didn’t expect is that it would actually improve my spelling!

You see, it turned out that I was misspelling only a certain set of words, and I was so consistent making spelling mistakes, that in a matter of weeks I had learned most of the words I would usually misspell. They were not very long words, they were not very hard to spell properly, it’s just that I had a pattern of misspelling them. But over the course of two months, I’ve fixed the spelling of these words so many times that I’ve automatically started typing the same words correctly right at the time of writing!

So with the last few articles of mine, I had literally no spelling mistakes (I know this because I still maintain the focus and do the spell-check), all this just because I’ve paid attention and maintained my focus.

Isn’t it wonderful? I never expected that my focusing on spelling would improve anything but the quality of my articles, and yet – it helped me greatly improve my writing. Just like me, be prepared to see improvements everywhere and not just in the area you’re focusing on! You’ll be surprised how seemingly unrelated things gradually improve because of a minor tweak in your approach.

I recently came back to a wonderful habit of attending our gym during a lunch break at work. Due to personal reasons, I couldn’t use it for about 2 months, and it feels great to be back. What’s even better is that I had no struggle with getting back into the routine – everything happened in a very smooth and natural way.

There are few reasons making this comeback a success, and I just wanted to write them down for you, as they are universal and can be applied to almost any habit you’re trying to work out or get rid of.

Pain and pleasure

According to Tony Robbins, anything we do is motivated by pain and pleasure. No matter what we’re trying to do in our lives, we’re doing this to either avoid pain or to gain pleasure.

As simple and obvious as it sounds to me now, it was quite a revelation when I read his theory on this just a few months ago. And it still surprises me to see how universal this rule of pain and pleasure really is. It applies to everything we do or plan to do, and it’s possible to explain any action of ours by simply pointing to the pain or pleasure which motivated us to act.

What also was noticed by Tony is that we’re somehow much more motivated by pain than by pleasure. In other words, we’ll be willing to do much more in order to escape some pain than we’ll do to gain some pleasure.

So, one of the reasons my gym comeback is so easy, is simply because I got used to a habit of working out so much (I’ve been doing it for pretty much the past 6 month before I had to abandon the habit), that it gives me a great pleasure to work out. And it’s also almost physically painful not to work out, because my muscles are not getting the usual strain and I’m not feeling as fit as I’m used to unless I regularly work out.

My pain and pleasure motivations are clear to me. Here they are:

Pain of not going to gym:

• gaining excessive weight
• losing my usually high energy levels
• not giving my body the much needed work out

Pleasure of attending gym:

These are just a few, the actual list of my pain and pleasure motivations for attending gym is much longer.

Establish associations properly

With habits, it is especially important to stay conscious of your painful and pleasurable aspects associated with them. The key to successfully mastering a particular habit is to place the right pain and pleasure motivation associations around it.

To fully control your habit, it is absolutely crucial to have both pain and pleasure associations related to it, this way you’re doubling the chance of success by gaining the advantage of being motivated by both pain and pleasure.

Take a few minutes of your time and write down all the good reasons for gaining a particular habit, making note of every little association you can come up with. Go wild! Extrapolate the results you’re going to get by following through with the habit, and imagine what you’re going to feel like 5 or 10 years later if your habit is successfully mastered. Make sure you don’t rush your thoughts and very carefully select every motivating reason.

Now, take even more time to write down all the negative impact you’ll see by not following through with this habit. Note the first and most important few things which come up when you’re thinking of the habit, and then gradually work your way down to the tiniest painful details of how not having a habit in your life might turn out. Again, thinking far in the future will greatly help.

It was very easy for me to start my gym sessions this time around, because I have all the proper associations already in place. Here are just a few of them:

Working out:

NOT working out:

Know exactly what you want

Mastering habits isn’t easy, but knowing simple principles I’ve explained above is bound to simplify the process for you. Pain and pleasure can be very motivating, and so it is only natural that you improve your chances of success by employing the appopriate accociations.

Ever been disappointed by your results?

Have you ever found yourself being totally depressed by some results you got doing something?

While most often the frustration comes from the lack of results, it’s not uncommon at all to be frustrated simply because the results you’ve got aren’t exactly what you hoped for. So this is the situation when you actually are getting some good results, only for some reason you still feel frustrated about them. This is when you should know: it’s probably a good time to review your goals and expectations.

Goals and expectations must be set, reviewed and adjusted regularly

I’d like to give you just an example of what I mean. Since I’ve adopted personal development as a lifestyle, I’ve seen such a tremendous boost in my self-growth and general life enjoyment (and I was growing and enjoying my life to start with, trust me on this one!), that I definitely am happy I took this path. Still, there are moments now and then, when I feel frustrated about the lack of progress I make in some aspect of my personal development, and the more I analyze reasons for such frustrations, the more obvious it becomes: most of our frustrations are because of the wrongly chosen goals and incorrectly set expectations!

Another major reason for frustrations is simply not having enough attention paid to align with your goals. Whenever you have set your goals, make sure you get back to them now and then to realise if your actions are all aimed at reaching your goals. You don’t want to spend few hours, days or even months spent working only to realise that half of your efforts (and that’s a very optimistic  estimate) have gone the wrong direction and didn’t bring your goal any closer.

The third really big reason for being frustrated with your results is because of the lack (or total absence) of the time you take to review your goals and appreciate the accomplishments. In other words, not only should you regularly review your goals and make sure you’re working towards and not away from them, but you also need time to appreciate the achievements. Quite often you are in a position when something takes longer than you expected. But that’s a planning issue, not a goal setting one. So it is important to review your achievements to make yourself feel better – if you know you’re moving in a right direction, and if you have a list of accomplishments, and if you see that there are few more things to be done before you can finally reach the goal – that should be motivating, not discouraging.

For instance, back when I was only starting my personal development experiments, I had set a number of immediate goals which were directly based on the most obvious sources of my frustrations back at the time:

• I didn’t like the constant lack of time – and so it was a reason good enough to read more on time management.
• Some of my daily plans were not realised in time – and so I had to make proper planning arrangements and come up with a task-tracking system.
• I wasn’t learning enough in some areas of my interest – and so I had decided to discover new ways to find the time and motivation to learning even more.

All these major and minor frustration sources made my first goal setting an easy task. But what happens now is that, having reached these immediate goals, I have to set and aim the new ones. And it’s very important to always maintain the focus and appreciate the work you’ve already done.

I have many days when there is quite a number of things left unfinished or not even started by the end of a working day. Having just a couple of unfinished things is already enough to be a minor frustration. And that’s the last thing you want to happen at the end of an otherwise successful day, isn’t it?

It took me a bit of a discipline to learn the habit of doing a full-day overview, involving both finished and unfinished tasks, before I could learn to stop my frustrations completely. It’s really this simple: don’t ever let an unfinished task shadow the joy of having all the rest things done on time. Focus on the results you’ve got and appreciate how they bring you closer to your goals!

Knowing your goals is really important

If you’re a beginner, just make sure you have some goals set initially and that you’ve given each goal a thought. As you progress and become more and more comfortable with your self-growth, start keeping track of your goals and appreciating the progress you’re making towards them. And once you feel absolutely comfortable doing this, start reviewing your goals, adjusting them accordingly and even set brand new ones!

So here’s a very simplistic view on my approach to goal setting:

• set and know your goals
• keep track of your goals
• review, adjust and set new goals accordingly

There is no winning formula for timing these three stages. Their importance will grow as you grow personally. But it is always a good idea to know and review your goals, cause doing helps you discover just how much you’re really doing, and how quick you’re growing and where.

I’m not a to-do lists person. Not anymore, anyway. You’ll see what I mean if you read about my recent To-Do Lists Revolution. Still, I have deliberately left quite a room for developing the topic, so there it is – yet another blog entry on to-do lists.

Thoughts described below are just an opinion of mine, and the aim of this entry is to help you make up your own view of to-do lists and decide whether they really are the best tool available for managing your daily tasks.

To-do lists are supposed to be a fairly simple and self-explanatory concept. You make and follow these lists to do stuff. Usually we refer to our daily to-do lists, but it’s not uncommon to have weekly or even monthly to-do lists as well.

To-Do lists are great for getting more things done that you’d normally do without such lists, but at the same time they’re not so great for lots of other aspects of your activities. In other words, simply having to-do lists is just not enough to stay on top of things. And in this entry, I’m going you show you why, and I will give you examples of how to-do lists don’t encourage and sometimes even slow down your progress.

Reaching your goals

If there’s one thing completely left out in traditional to-do lists, that’s the goals we’re trying to achieve. To-do lists are simply not about goals. You’re supposed to have your goals defined somewhere else, and keep them outside of the to-do lists routine.

Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get buried in your to-do lists. Quite often we get so thrilled with the idea of getting all the planned actions into our to-do list, that we forget to stop and ask ourselves, why exactly we’re going to do this thing or that one. This means that we’re still going to have many things done according to our list, but we’re not necessarily going to achieve the original goals which have triggered us working and creating to-do lists in first place.

So it’s important to stay conscious and be focused on the goals, not the tasks in your to-do list. If all you’ve got is your daily to-do list – you’re playing a dangerous game. You really need to take some time and analyze the current state of things in order to come up with your new goals or maybe simply correct the existing ones.

The good thing though is that you can always have a “Review goals” item on your to-do list for the day, and this will attract your attention and make you work more on your goals at the end of the day. And naturally, once you have worked out the habit of reviewing your goals daily or weekly, you can get this item off your lists.

Tracking progress

Again, because to-do lists are not meant to be a sophisticated progress tracking tool, you need something else to help you do this.

Daily to-do lists could be giving you a false impression of having everything completed each day, while in reality you may be nowhere near the completion of a bigger task or a project. You have to track your projects and goals with a separate process. Daily to-do lists are just too small a scale to reflect the overall state of your projects.

Staying motivated

For many people, to-do lists are a constant source of frustration. Whenever they start their day by looking at the list, they find the list to be too long. There are so many tasks and so little time to make them all happen, that it can easily depress people even before they get started. On odd days, it requires some real courage to dive into your to-do list and find a way to get most of the things done in a matter of just few hours. Some people always find this courage, but then some of us never do, so it could be a real problem even though making to-do lists and following them is somewhat the right way to go.

Routine may be another reason for your lack of motivation. When every workday starts with a long list of things to do, and you know that no matter how hard you work, you’re going to get a similarly long list for the following morning, at some stage you lose your interest. You don’t see any challenge in doing better that you already are, because each brand new day will invariably bring a brand new list full of not so exciting things you’re going to just have to work through.

So again, you need something else to keep you motivated. Reviewing your goals daily is a good start because it will help you realise how far you’ve progressed with each of your goals, and see the difference a paricular day has made.

That’s it for now, I don’t want to make this entry too long, so I guess I’ll write more on this topic later. I hope you found this useful, so please let me know if you did.