Outcome Goals:
1. _________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
2. ________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
3. _________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
4. ________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
Personal Development/Growth/Spiritual Goals
Outcome Goals:
1. _________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
2. ________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
3. _________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
4. ________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
Financial Goals
Outcome Goals:
1. _________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
2. ________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
3. _________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
4. ________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
Other Goals
Outcome Goals:
1. _________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
2. ________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
3. _________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
4. ________________
Process Goals:
________________
________________
Establishing Mileposts
Now you are to look at your long-term goals and ask yourself what you need to do in the medium-term all the way to-daily term to reach your long-term goals. You may also have other goals that are still in line with your values and mission, but are not reflected in your long-term goals. Feel free to add them.
You can download the worksheets for this section at FriesenPerformance.com/Achieve-Bonus-Materials.
Please do the same as above for each section. Try to write in the first person and use the present tense when possible. You will notice they become more and more SMART as you get down to your monthly, weekly, and daily goals. But you may still have goals that are expressions of how you want to be, or your values, which are harder to quantify.
Do your best to make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, you may have an outcome goal to have a positive relationship with your family. When it comes to setting your monthly process goals, you may set the following process goals:
I call my parents once per week.
When my partner tells me about his/her problems, I stop what I’m doing and focus my attention on them for as long as they need.
When I pick my son up from school, I play with him for at least 1 hour with my phone off.
Now it’s your turn. Try to stick to the guidelines set out above and write in your outcome and process goals for each time period below on the online worksheets FriesenPerformance.com/Achieve-Bonus-Materials:
MEDIUM TERM OR 10-YEAR GOALS
5-YEAR GOALS
1-YEAR GOALS
6-MONTH GOALS
1-MONTH GOALS
1-WEEK GOALS
DAILY GOALS
Don’t just file these away! Whenever a new opportunity arises, a request comes in from others, or anything else crops up that may take your time and energy, ask yourself if it fits into your values, goals, and mission. If so, then all is good. If not, ask yourself if your current goals need updating, or if this new activity is taking time and energy away from what it truly important to you.
How to Stay Focused on Your Goals
Imagine Reaching Your Goal
This is where a lot of self-help books get things wrong. Many of these books urge you to visualize yourself achieving your goals with all their associated glory. I see this a lot with coaches, athletes, and entrepreneurs.
Many athletes tell me they’ve used visualization before. When I ask what they visualize, they almost invariably tell me they see themselves winning and maybe imagine how great it will feel. This strategy is only partially wrong. Sure, it probably makes you feel good and boosts your confidence for a few moments. It’s a great first step. But this is not enough. To fully take advantage of the power of imagery you need to be a little more realistic and strategic.
One of the first things to understand is that when you imagine yourself in a scenario vividly enough, your brain has a hard time distinguishing reality from fantasy. In fact, amazing MRI research has found that just by repeatedly imagining carrying out an action there is measurable increases in thickness in the part of the brain responsible for that action.41
The trick is to make it as real as possible by using most of your senses. There is a reason why psychologists don’t refer to it as “visualization” anymore. It is referred to as imagery, as this has a broader meaning in terms of your senses. You should not only imagine what you see with your eyes, but also what you will hear, feel emotionally, sense with your body, and even what you may smell or taste! The more senses you engage, the more your brain thinks it really happened.
Imagining yourself effortlessly launching your product or winning in your sport doesn’t really help you achieve the goal. Instead, you need to vividly imagine facing the many probable and even improbable challenges, obstacles, and pain you could possibly face. The trick is to vividly imagine yourself successfully navigating these.
If you simply imagine yourself easily achieving your goal, you may become overconfident. This overconfidence can lull you into under-preparation and lead you to underestimate your competition or how hard something is going to be. This can make you complacent. Your motivation drops. Then, when you show up at the event, you get blindsided when you suddenly realize you underestimated your competition or what you had to do, and thus you’re under-prepared.
Remember, self-doubt can be your friend. Why? Because it motivates you to avoid danger and improve.
So there is a difference between imagining the end result of achieving your goal or that it will be easy, and imagining and believing that you will achieve your goal, despite any obstacles that get in your way. The former hinders you and the latter helps you achieve the goal.
So when I was defending my Ph.D., I didn’t imagine myself walking in there, charming the committee, feeling pure confidence, answering all the questions with ease, and them stopping the defense early to congratulate me on obtaining my degree. No. I imagined going through a war. I imagined tough questions, my PowerPoint slides not working, being nervous as hell, being crossed-examined for five hours straight and despite this, successfully dealing with it and coming out on top in the end.
If I convinced myself that my Ph.D. defense was going to be a breeze, I would have become overconfident and then under-prepared. I would then have been blindsided by what actually happened during the defense. The reality was that I was nervous as heck and there was one committee member who seemed to be doing their best to trip me up and set me up for failure.
Imagining worst-case scenarios and coming up with plans for how you might overcome them is the key. This is where using “if X, then Y” solutions can be helpful. This will be described in mo
re detail in the next chapter. But briefly, it involves setting goals and preparing for different challenges by coming up with a plan of action, “If X happens, then I will do Y.”
So before my defense, I told myself “if I feel really anxious during the defense, then I’ll remind myself that this is totally normal, reflects my passion, and that it can improve my performance.” I also prepared by telling myself that “if committee members are giving me a hard time or asking challenging questions, then I’ll remind myself that I know more about my dissertation than they do, and that the harder my defense is, the bigger the sense of accomplishment I’ll feel once I pass.”
So you vividly imagine yourself implementing your plans successfully and how great it will feel when you come out on top. It’s at this point where you should bask in the glory and imagine all the great things that can happen when you achieve your goal. To maximize your success, you should use this imagery strategy for both your longer-term and shorter-term outcome and process goals.
Write it Down; Visit it Often
You’re going to run into obstacles when trying to achieve your goals. These may be external, like unsupportive friends or family, or internal like self-doubts and self-sabotage from fear of failure. And the higher your standing on the Basic Personality Tendency of Negative Emotions, the more you will be prone to the latter.
Without specific goals that are recorded in some way, your chances of getting the outcomes you desire are much lower. You should write out your goals and have them in a place that is visible or easily accessible like on your phone as a daily alarm, on your fridge, on your wall or computer monitor, as wallpaper on your computer, on your bathroom mirror, or on your car’s dashboard.
You may also want to look into having a physical journal where you record your goals and progress. One great example of this comes from entrepreneur guru, John Lee Dumas’ product, The Freedom Journal (http://thefreedomjournal.com/). This is more than a journal, as it guides you through many of the things described in this chapter, including how to establish SMART goals, setting short- and long-term goals, reviewing your goals at regular intervals, and keeping yourself accountable.
Having clear goals that are written down will do a number of things. For one, it will force you to track how much progress you’ve made toward a goal. It also motivates you to take consistent action. It will keep you focused on what you need to be doing, and prevent you from getting sidetracked by something else.
Have you ever had the experience where something becomes important to you and then suddenly you start seeing instances of it everywhere? Maybe a friend bought a nice blue Jeep that you thought was awesome. You think they are pretty rare, until you start to see Jeeps everywhere over the next few days, with a number of them being blue.
Our brains are constantly deciding what information to focus on and what information to ignore. This applies to internal information like our thoughts, and to external information like what we notice in our environment. Having your goals written out where you can review them regularly will help keep your brain primed to pay attention to the things that will bring you closer to your goals, and ignore things that will not help you reach your goals.
Share Your Goals with Others
Goals are contagious and making public statements about your goals can be motivating. For example, I wanted to write this book for a number of years, but it really wasn’t until I put my money where my mouth was and finally made a public declaration and commitment that I would write this book, that I made it happen.
A great example of this is Ted Ryce’s Legendary Life Movement. Ryce developed a simple process that involves writing your goal on a card and then making a public declaration. The process is simple:
1. Write your goal down on the “What I’ll do to live a legendary life” card.
2. Take a picture of yourself holding the card with your goal clearly written out.
3. Post your picture on your social media accounts and on Facebook.com/LegendaryLifePod
4. Carry the card with you until you reach your goal, or put it in a place where you will see it daily (e.g., on your wall, as your smartphone’s wallpaper, on your bathroom mirror, or on your steering wheel).
5. Once you’ve achieved your goal, post a picture on your social media accounts with you holding your original card with a giant check-mark over it.
You can get these cards here: https://goo.gl/YDFuuP
Keep Score and Collect Trophies
Without noting and celebrating your progress, including daily advances, you’ll easily be discouraged. You need to take it one day, one week, one month, and one year at a time. You need to focus on what you want in the end and then work your way backwards. Otherwise, you’ll simply look at the end goal and where you are at today and feel discouraged.
When I was completing my Ph.D. dissertation, I met and heard about many fellow graduate students who had been working on their dissertations for a decade or more! A decade!! The idea that I might still be in school for another decade scared the tar out of me. I told myself there was no way I was going to take more than seven years to do both my clinical psychology master’s degree and Ph.D. Seven years was generally the minimum time needed to complete all the requirements.
So when I first started graduate school and had to pick a username for my email address, I purposely chose the number 7 to serve as a constant reminder of the maximum number of years I was going to spend to complete the program.
Knowing how easily I could forget how much progress I had made, I also made a point to rename my master’s thesis and dissertation documents with the date each time I worked on them. So in the drafts folder on my computer, I had over one hundred versions that were constant reminders of how far I had come.
So you need to know where you’re going, and then take note of your progress along the way. This prevents discouragement and overwhelm, and helps you feel a sense of progress and accomplishment. It also helps you figure out where you’re going wrong. There is a famous quote that appears to be falsely attributed to Albert Einstein that is relevant here: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Tracking progress will help you determine whether you are on the right track or not.
There are many ways to track progress. You can have a document where you list all your completed goals. This can be done on your calendar with big checkmarks or highlights denoting the goals that have been completed. You may even have a coach or accountability buddy who helps you review everything you’ve accomplished and guard against the tendency to focus only on what you haven’t accomplished.
Ideally, try to track your progress at regular intervals — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly — depending on the goal. But make sure you also think about what needs to be done next. In fact, Heidi Halvorson summarizes research showing that focusing too much on how much you’ve progressed, while not also focusing on what remains to be done, actually reduces your motivation to keep working toward the goal.42 It can lead to too much of a sense of accomplishment and cause you to take your foot off the gas. So definitely acknowledge your progress, but don’t forget to review what you still have to do to accomplish the goal.
Keep in mind, you’re never going to be able to perfectly articulate how you are going to reach your long-term goals. You’ll never see the full path and that’s ok. Your path will be unpredictably indirect and bumpy. You must take one day at a time. Although persistence is key to achieving goals, you have to regularly and realistically appraise your goals to make sure they are leading you down the right path. You need to ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing bringing me closer to my long-term goals? My mission? My purpose?”
If your answer is ‘no,’ then either tweak what you’re doing, change your strategy, or change your goal. Sometimes you have to know when to quit. Sometimes, continuing to pursue a goal ends up being incompatible with a bigger goal you have. I’ll give you a personal example.
At o
ne point recently, I had to make a hard decision about whether to keep playing hockey as a goalie. Playing competitively was important to me for several reasons. It was fun and another way of staying fit that didn’t seem like exercise. It also helped keep fresh in my mind what it’s like to battle the ups and downs that come with performing in sport and use the skills I was teaching high achieving athletes I worked with.
I loved playing, but over the years I developed back pain that worsened and worsened. An MRI of my back revealed a number of herniated discs, some worse than others. Technically, I could keep playing through the pain and it may or may not get much worse. It’s a gamble.
But I had to think long and hard about how doing so might conflict with a longer-term goal I have of living a long, healthy, and happy life. In my work as a psychologist, I’ve assessed and treated hundreds of people with chronic pain, mostly lower back pain. I’ve seen how such pain can destroy a patient’s quality of life. I had many reasons why I wanted to keep playing hockey, but I had to focus on my long-term goals, and drop the short-term goal of playing hockey. Life is all about choices.
Knowing When to Reassess Goals and Plans
I’m a firm believer in seriously taking time to review your mission, purpose, and goals at the turn of the year. This is an absolute must. Ideally, you should take a vacation from your daily grind to do this. The next step is to review all of your goals once a month. It’s usually easiest to do this at the end of the month.
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