How to Set Goals You Achieve

GOALS

Setting the goal can be the easiest part of reaching it. The hard part is everything the goal depends on once it is set: some of it put in place before you start, the rest carried right through to the end.

Setting a goal you will actually achieve means choosing one that fits your values and your current capacity, breaking it into the behaviours it needs, and working the process rather than fixing only on the outcome.

Reaching a goal and reaching it at the level you are capable of are two different things. A driven person will reach a version of most things they set out to do; the difference that matters is the standard they reach it at. No approach can promise the outcome, but the right structure gives you the best chance of reaching the goal, and of reaching it at your level. That structure rests on three things: a goal that is genuinely yours, a clear path of stepping stones and standards running toward it, and the way you sustain that level as you go. The reason comes first. When the goal is yours, working to a high standard follows naturally. Whether this is a personal goal or a project at work, the same structure decides the level you reach.

What follows is the full sequence: what a goal you reach at your real level is built from, in the order it has to be built, with the deeper read for each part where you want it. Done this way, reaching the goal is not the only reward. There is also knowing you left nothing spare in how you went about it.

Understand the goal, operate on the process

This idea sits underneath the rest of the sequence, so it is worth being plain about. Every goal has two parts. The goal is the outcome: what you want to be true that is not true yet. The process is what you do toward it, day to day. You need both, and they fail in different directions: a target with no process never gets built, and a process with no target has nothing to aim at. Keep the target in view, then put your working attention on the process, because it is the part you can see, judge, and keep raising the quality of. Fix only on the outcome and the result tends to arrive without you understanding what created it, which leaves you little to build on next time.

So know the goal well enough to understand what it asks of you, then put your attention on the process that produces it. This works on one condition: the goal has to be reachable. A goal beyond what you can do, with the resources at your disposal, leaves the process with nowhere to go. Set it at a level that stretches you and stays within reach, covered in the next section, and the process does its work.

How do you make a goal yours?

A goal is yours when you recognise it as yours: it connects to what you value and to where you are trying to get to, and you would pursue it whether or not anyone was watching. Sheldon and Elliot’s research on self-concordant goals, goals that match a person’s core values, found they draw more sustained effort and are reached more often than goals taken on for outside reward. That recognition is what supplies the standard: when the goal is genuinely yours, you work at it to the level you are capable of.

A goal handed to you at work can become yours too. You make it yours by connecting it to your bigger picture: the reason reaching it well serves what you are building, the part of it that draws on what you value and want to be known for. Find that reason and the goal stops being someone else’s target and becomes yours to reach at your standard.

When a goal is only half-yours, the effort rarely disappears, because a driven person keeps going. What slips is the level. You keep working at the goal, but without making the sacrifices, or pushing to the standard, that reaching it fully would take. Reaching that higher level is what turns a goal into an achievement. It comes from two things. The first is setting the bar above your current reference point, treating the level you have already reached as your starting point rather than the target. The second is making the behaviours that meet it part of how you work. The routine of it you can build; raising the level will always ask you to push, and that effort is the point, not a sign something is wrong.

This is also where you set the target itself. Make it specific enough that you will know when you have reached it, and sized to what you can realistically see through with what you have — your time, your resources, the people and conditions around you. Set the level deliberately as well: decide what reaching it well means to you, whether that is world-class, the best in your market, or the highest quality you can produce, and picture it in enough detail that you would recognise it, not just that it is done. Locke and Latham’s decades of goal-setting research are clear that specific, challenging goals produce more than vague or easy ones, where challenging means it stretches you and stays within reach. Aiming at the level you are capable of, with what you have, is what gives the goal both its worth and its reachability.

Two articles go deeper here: one on telling a goal you want from a goal you only liked the idea of (Is This Goal Really Yours?), and one on where your values come from in the first place (What Drives You).

Build the path that leads to the target

A goal on its own is a point on the horizon. What carries you to it is the path between you and it. The stepping stones toward the goal are the benchmarks and milestones you pass. Together with the tasks or behaviours you complete to reach each one, they are your critical path: the line you follow, and what you use to check and challenge your progress along the way. A path is built from behaviours and actions, not intentions, and it comes together in three steps.

Break the goal into stepping stones. A few reachable points between where you are and the goal. For a person these are benchmarks, things you can do that you could not do before; for a project they are milestones, deliverables, or the targets you are tracking. Each is close enough to see, each is proof you are moving, and each is reached to a standard rather than ticked off: done well, then used to raise the bar for the next. Bandura and Schunk found that people working toward near, reachable sub-goals progressed faster, and built more belief in their own ability, than those fixed on a single distant goal. Stepping stones keep you moving and keep the level rising.

Set out what each stepping stone needs. For every stepping stone, work out what it requires, the specific behaviours for a person or the actions and working practices for a project, and roughly how much time each needs. Then decide them in advance and tie them to a moment. Instead of “I’ll prepare at some point,” it becomes “after Monday’s team meeting, I block an hour to prepare.” Gollwitzer’s research on implementation intentions found that deciding the action ahead of time, fixed to its cue, is what gets you from meaning to do something to actually doing it. You do not need to plan every hour, only enough to know your next actions and where they sit in your week. Then look at how you are working now and see which are already in place and which need building. Mapping the stepping stones, what each needs, and where your time goes is what the Performance Action Planner is built to do.

See the path whole. Drawn together, the stepping stones and what each needs give you the most direct line from where you are now to the goal: your values and identity at one end, the goal at the other, the daily behaviours and actions running between. Keeping the detail and the bigger picture in view at once is what lets you fill what is missing and adapt as you go, because even a well-made plan needs adjusting. Seen whole, the path also shows what to leave out: the effort that feels productive but moves you no nearer the goal.

The article on outcome, performance and process goals shows how to set the target so it pulls in the right direction; the one on the critical path takes the route apart in full.

Stay with it, and adapt

Anything worth achieving is hard. If it were easy, everyone would achieve it, and the reward sits on the far side of the difficulty. So expect the goal to be tested as you go. Some of what tests it pulls your attention away: work, life, the people and circumstances around you, the complexity that appears once you are in it, the limits of your own capacity at the time. Some of it sits inside the goal itself — the problem you did not foresee, the part that turns out harder than it looked. None of this means the goal was wrong. It is the normal ground you cover reaching something at a high level.

Staying with it comes down to a question you keep asking, rather than one you save for a set review: are the things I am doing right now the ones this goal requires? It keeps your attention on the behaviours and actions that move toward the goal, and it shows up the effort that feels busy but takes you nowhere, so you can see what is not moving the goal forward and stop spending time on it. When something inside the goal changes what it needs, the same question gives you a clear decision: adjust the actions or behaviours that are no longer the right ones, or, where what you have learned has changed the goal, adjust the goal. Make the change deliberately and carry on, so that the path matches where you are now rather than where you were when you set it.

A regular review supports this: a set point to step back and look at the goal, the path, and where your time and attention have been going, so you adjust with a clear head rather than on the move. Setting a goal out in full, and coming back to it to review your progress, is what the Performance Workbook is built for.

Where the result is built

Sheeran (2002), reviewing 422 studies, found that intention explains about 28 per cent of the variance in behaviour. The research does not say where the rest comes from; our reading is that the structure around the intention decides most of it. The wanting matters, but it is the smallest part. The level you reach is built in the process, the stepping stones, the standards you set, and the way you stay with it when it gets hard, which is what the critical path holds together.

So take one goal you are working toward now and walk it through. Is it yours, and do you know why reaching it well matters? Is it specific, and set at a level that stretches you and is within reach of what you have? What are the stepping stones between here and there, and what standard does each need to be reached to? What does each one take of you, and where in your week does it sit? No structure can promise you the outcome. What it can do is give you the best chance of reaching the goal, and of reaching it at the level you are capable of, knowing you left nothing spare in how you went about it.