‘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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Filed under life skills | Comments (2)2 Responses to “‘Specific Goals’ Suck”
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Hi, I agree with most of it and especially resonate with the idea that putting everything into goals and trying to control the life completely is a dead-end road. And yes, also for me everything I do needs to be firmly grounded in my deepest values and needs, or visions and feelings, as you put it. If this is not the case, than life is empty for me, no matter what kind of fancy goals I keep attaining.
However, I still see goals as a tool for grounding, incarnating my values and visions into the day to day life. For example, I do use very SMART-like goals in order to get enough sleep, in order to have time on a weekly basis to do nothing but to think about my visions and values. And me and my wife do set our goals about how to ensure we go somewhere every now and then and talk and share for couple of days in a row about what do we want to do in our lives, where do we feel like making next steps, which aspects to research. Just in order to not let the frantic tempo of day-to-day life consume the last bits of creative selves.
In short, I would say that what works for me is to work on clarifying my foundations, meaning visions, needs, values, meanings, but so that it does not stay up in the air, goals help me to get those down to Earth and to my life, step by step, one breath after another.
And, as you say, shoulds and shouldn’ts really really really suck!
Hi Robert
Yes, good points you make and I think what’s important is how much time you obviously spend on the foundation stones for your goals – meaning, values etc – which I think is so often missing in our goal-setting society…
Victoria