Goal Setting Done Right

Here’s How We Do Goal Setting

As we move into the new year, you’re probably going to be bombarded with “Goal Setting” posts.  


Well, here’s one more!  


Over the years, I’ve had a lot of experience helping people set and achieve their goals, both in business and in fitness.  


The last several have seen a serious refinement of that goal setting process, honing down to a set of steps I predominantly use now:

  • Envision who you want to be in the future.  This future you can be comprised of a handful of different time settings.
    • One should be 3-5 years from now.  
    • Another should be a decade or so from now.
    • Finally, it should be who you want to be when you’re in your final decade or so.
    • (I actually do these in reverse, so I can walk myself backward from the furthest out)
    • For me, I’m staging it in a few phases as it pertains to some of the things in my life.  In 3-5 years, Garrison will be a teenager, which will look quite different than now.  In 10 years, he’ll be in college.  In a handful of decades, he’ll likely have grandchildren.  Those are the benchmarks I’m using to envision the future, you should come up with your own.  

  • Then, you should start with a blank canvas (or whiteboard in my case) and start writing things down about these stages.  What you want to achieve in your career (or a new career), what you want your relationships to be, what you want to be able to do physically, where you want to travel to, what your days should look like, where you live, etc.  You’re basically brainstorming a vision board.  
  • Then walk yourself back to this upcoming year and chart out the plots on the map that should happen on a realistic trajectory if you want to hit the points you want to see in the future.  If you want to have a Mexican beach house, and that will cost $500,000 in 5 years, how much should you have saved a year from now.  If you want to speak fluent Spanish so you can get around real well when you own that Mexican beach house, how much spanish should you know a year from now?  If you want to quit your job and be successfully self employed in 3-5 years, how close can you get a year?

After you’ve gotten crazily clear on the future and you’ve walked it back to a year, you’ve got one set of goals for the upcoming year.  

Unfortunately, a year is just way too far out for people.  A year is enough time that you can get really distracted and unfocused, then assume that you’ll cram your way to success in the home stretch (pretty sure that’s all I learned in college)

To help nurture yourself along through the year, you need to break it out in chunks and pick 3 things to focus on for each 90 day “Sprint”.  This allows you to get crazy focused on a small set of goals that you can accomplish in the short term, knowing that you’ll be able to stay focused for that amount of time before you switch and move on to something else.  

Then, figure out how you can work your way to those goals on a daily or weekly basis.  Those actions become part of a checklist that has to happen before you conclude your day or week. 

That’s it!  

By following those steps, I really believe you can accomplish damn near anything.  I have my 3 Sprint goals on my whiteboard next to my office, as well as my bigger annual and life goals on another whiteboard.  This keeps them present of mind and makes me maintain focus on them as daily habits.  

Let me know how I can help!

If you want to schedule a meeting to talk to one of our coaches about your goals, book a No Sweat Intro here.