Goal Setting
Goal setting is an important way to visualize and clarify your goals. Researchers have found goal setting motivates us, gives us a sense of purpose, and helps us feel accomplished. By expressing specifically what you want to do and where you want to go, creating goals can help you plan for the future, navigate unknowns, and figure out what your next step is (in career, academic, and personal life planning).
There are many different ways to plan goals. Here, we’ve out lined two we recommend to get you started.
SMART goals use specific parameters (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) to help create goals that are achievable and can showcase clear progress. The following worksheet outlines specific questions you can ask yourself around each parameter when creating a goal and to reflect on how you know you are meeting that benchmark.
In addition to the worksheet, Forage also offers a work simulation focused around creating SMART goals. To learn more about that experience, visit the Forage SMART goals page.
NICE goals use certain parameters similar to SMART goals, but focus more on the journey. They aim to work on immediate steps one can take to avoid being overwhelmed by larger goals. For example, “graduating in four years with a bachelor’s degree” as a goal may make it hard to figure out what’s needed to complete that and may not be flexible around things outside of a student’s control. NICE goals (Near-term, Input-based, Controllable, and Energizing) come from Ali Abdaal’s book Feel-Good Productivity and can turn something long term (“graduate in four years”) into something bite-sized and achievable (“study every day for 30 minutes”).
I’m struggling to achieve my goals – what do I do?
1. Connect every goal to a “why”
If you understand why you want to achieve a goal or what makes it important to you, you can better avoid distraction and overcome obstacles. Focusing on the why can help you:
- Gain awareness of your vision
- Better express your ideas to yourself and others
- Clarify what you shouldn’t be doing
- Prioritize what you should be doing
You can use this simple prompt to discover your why: “I want to ____ so that I can ____.” You can also repeat this exercise several times to each response to whittle down further to your core why if needed.
2. Break down your goals
If you’re working on a larger goal, breaking down your goals into smaller pieces you can work on each day will help you make clear progress and provide a pathway through achieving it.
3. Schedule “buffer time” around your goals.
One reason we struggle to meet goals is that we overestimate how much we might be able to accomplish within a certain time and underestimate external factors that might affect us.
Author Kristi DePaul recommends increasing your goal deadline by 25%. For example, if you think something will take 4 weeks, plan 5 weeks to give yourself a buffer. This can allow you to work around things that might come up in your personal life, illness, technological issues, etc. And, if your goal does only take you 4 weeks to complete, you can enjoy the feeling of finishing early.
4. Focus on continuation, not improvement
Often goals might form around self-improvement, but that’s not the only (or even most beneficial) model. Focusing too much on self-improvement can increase self-judgment, anxiety, and other emotions that might lead to procrastination rather than action.
Rather than focusing on what we want to change, it can be more helpful to focus on what we’ve started and like to continue/build upon. Use goal setting to continue something you’re already working on to make the goal process feel safer, more comfortable, and easier to achieve.
5. Don’t dwell on past failures.
The difficulty with goal setting is that failure is possible and likely. However, failure is a natural learning experience that everyone has from time to time. If your past failures are affecting your confidence and ability to pursue new goals, there are ways to move past those feelings and self-motivate. These strategies look like:
- Celebrating small wins: Any progress shows you’re capable of achieving your goal – you took steps forward, so celebrate that.
- Think about “accidental” or related benefits: Often goal-setting is not about the destination but about the journey. Focus on what you learned from working on your goal.
- Ask for feedback: While you don’t want to linger over your failures, understanding why you failed and what you can learn from them is very important. One way to do this is to ask a friend or family member: “Why do you think I failed?” This might give you a reality check and help you better understand yourself.
Sources
Harvard Business Review: 5 Ways to Set More Achievable Goals