Does goal setting overwhelm you? Try this
Cover photo credit: Emma Fraser Art
It’s getting towards the end of the year, and if you’re anything like me, you’re obsessively analyzing how your real life stacks up to the goals you set at the beginning of this year. And you’re racking your brain for the huge goals you want to tackle as we head into the year ahead.
And again, if you’re anything like me, there’s some amount of disappointment.
When I set a goal, I’m aggressive. I want to push myself to do what seems hard. While I definitely try to maintain a realistic mindset — it always stresses me out when people treat goal setting like a vision board with these objectives they know they can’t reasonably achieve in a year — there are some places that I just won’t deliver on.
And while that’s okay, since I typically check off more things that not, it can be demoralizing. Especially with things you worked so hard for.
For example, one of my goals for this year was to get X consistent clients. And while I worked my ass off, making connections, writing content, creating my website, and fine-tuning my services offering, I fell slightly flat.
Sure, I could’ve worked harder, but at what cost to my mental health and free time? And who’s to say that that goal was even achievable in the first place, due to factors outside of my control?
So all of this is a little background to the mindset I was in when last week, I heard something on a video that turned a massive light bulb on in my head.
Input goals
While watching a Flourish Planner video where she was talking about her goal-setting process as she wraps up the year, she mentioned the idea of an input-based goal.
Most goals — Get X clients, make $X in revenue, lose X pounds — are output-centered. And while I’m not making the case to totally do away with these kinds of goals, they do inherently ignore the steps it takes to get there. And they’re so black and white. Either you did it or you didn’t, no matter how hard you worked.
For me, that’s why I realized some of my goals fall flat. Not only is it demoralizing to not check these off despite working so hard, but they don’t give me an action plan as to how I’m going to go about achieving them.
Input goals, on the other hand, focus on the behaviors you need to have to achieve those goals. And it’s completely in your control whether you do them or not.
So let’s change up goal setting to focus on things we can actually do
Let’s take the examples I gave before.
Instead of getting X clients or making X revenue, we could break this down into several steps that I know I can check off if I put in the work:
Post with X consistency on LinkedIn
Redesign website
Go to X networking events/quarter
Submit X proposals on Upwork per week
Instead of losing X pounds, you could instead aim to:
Exercise X times/week
Limit alcohol consumption to X times/month
Limit eating out to X times/month
Hire a nutritionist
Of course, you can still include that overarching output goal as a guide for where you want these steps to get you. But I think that these input goals are much more helpful to keep you motivated and on track to achieve your goals.
We all know that things are more achievable when you break them down into smaller chunks. So you’ll be much more likely to take consistent and intentional action, and to pursue your goals past when that beginning-of-the-year motivation wears off.
This puts the power back in your hands, too. The psychological goodness of knowing that literally every one of these steps is up to you to achieve, no matter what outside forces may occur, is unbeatable.
Instead of checking in halfway through the year and feeling so far away from the big, output-based goal you set because it was too intimidating in the first place, you can constantly see the progress that you’re actively making.
I, for one, am taking this advice to heart as I set my goals for the next year. This will make me more excited to set more aspirational goals without worrying about whether I can achieve them. It’s completely up to me if I do or don’t.
