069: Set goals in a way that's actually helpful
Are you setting goals – or making wishes?
That's what I'll dive into in today's podcast episode. You'll learn 3 reasons why traditional goal setting can set us up for disappointment, and a different way to set goals that you have more control over.
Productivity Ecosystem summary
Check out current free resources
Grab a screenshot of the episode and share/say Hei on Instagram
Want to leave me a note? You can do that here.
Show notes
Anyone else tired of setting goals that don't quite seem to stick? It can be defeating -- but I want you to know that the reason you didn't reach them probably isn't that you didn't work hard enough. It’s just that the traditional way of setting goals sets us up for disappointment.
/
Many of us are getting to that time of year when we’re getting back from vacations, and realizing there’s only so many months left before the end of the year. Which often prompts us to sorta evaluate and refresh our goals.
And I have nothing against this practice – if you’ve been around for a while, you know that I think it’s important to take time to review where you are and to take a look at my goals and what’s going on with that.
But I want to talk about three ways that the common goal setting practices in the business space often aren’t helpful – and then I’ll dive into what you could do instead.
You see – we often define goals as some kind of measurable outcome that we want at the tail end of a period of time.
For example, we want to make 5k per month, we want to grow our email list by 300 people in the next quarter, or we want to be a guest on 10 podcasts.
The problem with these kinds of goals is that we don’t have full control over the final number (because there’s always someone else at the other end who has to take action – who has to type in their credit card info, sign up for our freebie, or say YES, be on my podcast).
So we hinge our feeling of success on whether or not we reach this goal that is very much impacted by our circumstances, our capacity, and by other people. So these aren’t actually goals – they’re wishes. They’re things we wish will happen.
Another problem with these types of goals, is that just saying “I want X somethings” might lead us to just be unsure of how even to reach that goal, so we kinda just do little things here and there. And then when we’re getting close to the end of the year we frantically try to do *all the things* to get to that goal. We get into that hustle panic mode – hustle is really just a prolonged state of the fight reaction. So these kinds of goals can make us just kinda spin our wheels sometimes.
And even if we do reach the number, the high of it lasts only for so long because we quickly realize that a) there’s always a next thing to work towards and b) maybe the way we went about reaching that goal didn’t feel that great to us. Or we’re not even sure which one of the 17 things we did brought us those results.
If we don’t know what brought us the results, we don’t know how to replicate the results we got apart from doing that hustle-mode *all the things* thing again, or we might feel like we just got lucky and now have to come up with new ways to get those results next time.
The third problem with this kind of goal setting is that we often don’t celebrate until we’ve reached it – so if we’re focused on making a certain amount of money in a year, we might just be holding our breaths until December to see whether or not we “did good”. And if we didn’t do good, well – we might either feel like we gotta start the year strong, or we feel so deflated because of all the effort we put in that didn’t bring us the results we wanted, that we don’t feel like doing the business thing for a while.
What if instead of traditional goal setting, you made your goals actions that you are more in control over? I’m gonna share a simple process to help you do this.
Step 1. Start out like you might with regular goalsetting, aka pinpoint some kind of outcome or result you want.
Step 2. Make a brainstorming list of possible actions or projects you could do, that could lead to that outcome. Try to not edit yourself at this point – just list all the things.
Step 3. Pick a couple of actions or projects to experiment with, things that you think are likely to bring you the result *and* that are things you’re willing to, or even excited to do.
For example, if you want to get more email subscribers, decide on how often and where you’ll share your freebies. If you want to be a guest on other people’s platforms, decide how many times per month you pitch yourself to appropriate peoples. If you want to grow your revenue, there are obviously many things that you could do for that – but one of the things you could try would be how often you email your list. Or maybe you’re planning to update the copy on your website.
Now you’ve got goals that you can plan, measure, and evaluate – and they’re all in your control. (Now obviously, I don’t mean that things won’t come up and sometimes we don’t follow through on the things. But we’ll get to that in a bit)
Step 4. Make a plan for when you’ll do those things, and how often. Are they routines or actions you’d like to do consistently, or are they more one-off tasks or projects that you can schedule out? This is also a good time to evaluate whether or not you’ll actually have the capacity for these particular tasks. You can of course always adjust the frequency of these later if you need to, so try to not overthink this step.
Now, following through on these plans is your new goal! Or each plan is their own goal, essentially.
Step 5. Take a bit of time to check in on your goals. Depending on what the frequency is of the activities you picked, you might want to evaluate how you did every two weeks, or once a month.
Did you do the things you set out to do? Congratulations, you reached your goals! Did you not do those things? Try to think of the reason why. If it didn’t feel good to do something, maybe it’s not for you. If you just forgot to do it, what could you do to remember them better? And sometimes when you’re doing your check-in, you’ll realize OH it makes sense that this month I didn’t do that thing as many times as I would’ve liked to, because I was sick for two weeks. BTW it can be very hard to do this kind of analysis of “what went wrong” with those traditional goals, like revenue numbers.
Now that you’ve made your actions your goals, you get to cultivate good feelings more often: feeling proud of what you’ve accomplished (instead of waiting for far-off outcomes to potentially happen).
Then we’ve got
Step 6. Every once in a while, measure your progress against that outcome you had in mind as a goal originally. For example, check if your subscriber count or revenue is growing at the rate you need to, to reach that outcome. It helps you see if you’re making progress in the right direction, or if maybe you want to tweak something, double down on something, or stop doing something. Or, you might even notice that the actions you’re taking might have taken you in a new direction that you feel much better about than the original outcome.
So that original outcome, the traditional goal, can still ne a great thing to measure progress against, but it’s not good to use it as your only measure of success, as the ultimate goal that tells you whether or not you did good.
Speaking of success, research shows that people who feel well are more likely to be successful. This is one of the reasons why I encourage taking good care of yourself and would like to suggest that at least one of the goals you track is a personal one. Taking good care of yourself is part of making sustainable progress in your business. For me this is very simple – I have a checkbox for a self-care activity on every single day in my weekly planning sheet. This makes sure that every day I remember to do something to move my body OR take care of myself in some other way. (If you’d like that weekly planning template, just hop on over to jennahellberg.com/plan to get it)
Before I wrap this episode up, I do want to encourage you to see this whole process as an experiment. No decision you make has to be for forever, and the more you treat this as an experiment vs having to get everything right right away, the easier, and honestly more fun, it’ll be to move through your work weeks and achieve those goals you’ve set for yourself.
So now you’ve got this goal-setting process that you can 100% do on your own.
A couple of things that you might run into as you’re experimenting with this are that
You’ve got the outcomes you want in mind, but you’re not exactly sure which activities to focus on so you end up maybe not trying this out
You do decide on activities or projects to do, but for some reason you don’t stick with your plans
So if you’d like to get some advice and ideas to decide which activities to focus on, I’m here. And if you’d like support as you experiment with and follow through on your plans, I’m here for that too.
You can DM me on instagram @thejennahellberg or send me an email to let me know that this is something you’d like support with, we can chat about it to see what it would look like, and if it feels like you’d like to team up with me, we can go from there.
Thank you & bye!