Successful Goal Setting

It’s that time of year.

Whether its work, health, career, fitness, or something purely personal, we’re thinking about setting goals for 2022 and beyond.

Typically, when we set a goal, it’s the end point we think of. Which is the right way of doing it.

By envisaging our end point success, the goal becomes more real and the pay off is something we can buy into. Picturing the result helps give us a purpose.

Questions like:

• What specific thing will I have achieved?

• Where will I be?

• What will have changed?

• What will people notice about me?

So far so good but what we can overlook is the extent to which we have or don’t have full control over the goal. And the question of control means that some goals, regardless of our efforts, may remain elusive.

Take a goal to run this year’s marathon:

Things you can control include, get running shoes, do up training plan, get out and run, eat and drink to support training, sign up for race and finally turn up on the day to race.

There are some things that you can’t control, like all the things that make training harder to complete (weather, illness, time, injury) and other factors outside your control like the race being cancelled or not getting a race number due to restrictions on numbers.

What this shows is that we rarely fully control the goal as an outcome.

If the race is cancelled, then regardless of the training we’ve done and how race ready we were, we won’t have run the marathon this year. We didn’t get the outcome we set ourselves.

But, if we completed our training plan and did the things we need to stay well and avoid injury, regardless of the race not being run, we achieved much of what we set out to do.

We achieved all the things we could control even if the race got cancelled, which we couldn’t control.

The goals we can control make the achievement of the outcome goal more or less probable - depending on how many of them we achieve.

These are like process goals. The steps we take which we have control over which, if we keep doing them, make it more likely that we’ll reach the outcome goal, which we don’t have full control over.

So, in setting an outcome goal, when you know you don’t have full control over it, think about the factors you don’t control and work out the process goals or steps you can take which make it more likely you’ll reach the outcome goal.

Take a common outcome goal like winning a promotion or getting a new role.

First, set out what you know you can control.

Then look at the factors that you can’t control and ask questions like:

• Who are the decision makers?

• How can I demonstrate my strengths/potential to them?

• Who are my competitors?

• What steps can I take to differentiate myself from them?

• What are the likely criteria for getting the role/promotion?

• What can I do to meet more of them/meet them more completely?

The more of these process goals you set for yourself and then take steps to achieve, the more likely you will achieve the outcome goal.