The Critical Step Most People Miss When Setting Goals

Overwhelmed by a goal? Not sure where to start? Here is a simple path to making your goals much more actionable and thus, achievable.

Many of us might use the holidays as a quiet time to step back, reflect, and set new goals or resolutions. Setting clear, written goals is a powerful path toward achievement, and perhaps more importantly, a forcing function for creating intention. Setting goals inspires us to answer questions like, “What do I want?” and “What’s most important to me?” 

I want to share a critical step in setting and writing goals that most people miss: creating simple action steps. 

I recently had a call with a student who spent the time reflecting and decided her life-long goal was to start a nonprofit focused on pediatric brain cancer. She works in management consulting and spends her days in a world completely unrelated to nonprofits or pediatric brain cancer.

Writing “start a nonprofit focused on pediatric brain cancer,” while inspiring, is also overwhelming. She is not likely to quit her job for something so uncertain. She has no idea how to start a nonprofit and likely no idea where to begin. And it’s difficult to make much progress while she’s working full time. She has an exciting goal or dream, but she isn’t doing anything to move toward it. Should she quit her job? Should she give up on her goal? This dynamic can be at best confusing and at worst demoralizing.

To avoid the paralysis that often follows that overwhelming feeling, here are two things you can do to make your goals more achievable:

1. Translate that goal into the simplest action you can take right now. 

There is a difference between a big goal like “start a nonprofit,” and an action. You can’t actually take the action “start a nonprofit,” so the first step is to translate your goal into the simplest action possible.

Here are some examples of tangible actions my student could create:

• Send an email to Joe Smith, her former classmate who works at a nonprofit.

• Block off 30 minutes to research nonprofits that serve pediatric brain cancer.

• Donate $25 to five cancer research nonprofits to subscribe to their email or mailing lists.

• Search LinkedIn for connections who work in nonprofits.

• Message three people from the LinkedIn search and ask each one to set up a short call.

 It’s difficult to wrap your head around “start a nonprofit,” but it’s simple to wrap your head around smaller actions, like “send an email,” or “message someone on LinkedIn.”

2. Break a large task into smaller components 

I use this tactic when I write blog posts. Writing a blog post from start to finish feels overwhelming for me. So instead, I break the process down into smaller tasks that feel achievable. Writing a blog post is actually a series of much smaller, concrete tasks: schedule time to write, generate ideas, choose the main points for a given idea, create a draft, conduct research, edit the draft, and post the blog. 

I write my goals every day. Instead of writing “write this week’s blog post about caffeine,” I write one or more of the following tasks:

• Schedule four, 30-minute blocks during the week (5 minutes)

• Brainstorm 10 ideas for blog posts (15 minutes)

• Structure outline for post about caffeine (15 minutes)

• Read five articles about the impacts of caffeine (30 minutes)

• Create first draft (30 minutes)

• Refine draft (30 minutes)

• Final editing (30 minutes)

• Post (10 minutes)

On any single day, I can make progress on my blog post goal without feeling overwhelmed. 

The key is to get started, then move forward

Newton’s first law of motion states: a body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force.

The key to hitting goals is to get yourself in motion. Take the first step. Create actions that are simple, easy to understand, and quick to achieve. And commit to taking those actions within the next several days. After completing your list of actions, make another list, then another, then another. And continue.

I write my top three goals each day and then write the specific activities—like the ones described above—that I plan to take to move toward my goals.  

Think of goals as a direction. And consider it your job  to translate that rough direction into daily action. Most of us miss this intermediate step. When you break goals down into very concrete and achievable actions and give yourself the gift of time, you’ll be able to achieve nearly any goal you can set.

Check out my posts on the key questions to ask and the power of intention that tackle other elements of goal setting.