‘Specific Goals’ Suck

I think setting goals is overrated. Everywhere I turn nowadays I hear people talking about the necessity of setting goals – from life coaches to financial planners to car salesmen. What are our short term goals? What are our long term goals? And what about the goals in between?

 

I used to set work goals for both myself and for people in my team. They were perfectly defined SMART goals (specific –measurable – achievable – realistic – timed) and I had a real good-factor when I’d set, and worked on, goals for myself and my team. Being a compliant employee, I would always aim to achieve my goals and I certainly got satisfaction in that respect. But nowadays, when I have given myself the choice of how I work and what I want to focus on, I never set goals.

 

Why?

 

Setting goals is way too easy. But they often have little foundation behind them. Goals often come from a knee-jerk reaction to something we don’t like or don’t want in our life anymore – a goal to lose 5kgs, to go to the gym 3 times a week, to stop drinking for a month, to earn more money. These types of goals can be very temporary and are built on shaky ground.

 

Goals can be yet another ‘should’ in our lives. “I should go to the gym to achieve my goal even though I have a cold/am exhausted”; “I should go for that new job because it’s a pay-rise even though I’m not even in the career I want to be in.” Do we really need any more shoulds?

 

But most importantly, goals shut down our creativity. Having specific, measured, realistic and timed goals limit our potential to see all the opportunities that exist to achieve what we want to achieve.

 

Rather than goals, I think we should expand their scope into a vision that we want for our lives. I think our vision would be better associated to how we want to feel.

 

For example, rather than having a goal of going to the gym 3 times a week, I would instead have a vision of health, because I want to feel healthy and vital. This becomes a lifestyle choice that places less importance on just getting my 3 gym workouts done.

 

If I was still setting my SMART goals as I used to, I would have missed out on many opportunities to choose creative pathways towards my broad vision for myself.

 

What do you think about goals?

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