6 Months of Goal Setting

6 min readJul 15, 2013

On January 1st 2013 I did something which a lot of my friends couldn’t understand. I paid a stranger, on the internet, five hundred dollars to be my “goal setting coach”. They couldn’t understand why I had done that because I couldn’t really explain why I had. I think I can now.

Come January, I, along with the majority of the blogosphere, was thinking about the year ahead. I looked back at previous journal entries and saw a pattern. If you ever read blogs around New Year you may recognise some of these sentiments. One year I would proclaim a new procrastination-free existence, to change the world. The next would eschew productivity to boldly seek excitement at every turn, going with the flow and finding my true self in the process. The following year, relaxation and contemplation was the new panacea. The next, amusingly, yielded this biting paragraph. Obviously I was doing something wrong in 2011.

I’ll probably get up around 7am every day, go to work, eat lunch at my desk, talk to a limited group of peers about self reinforcing ideas, wait until my boss leaves before thinking about going to the gym, decide against it, curse everyone using a phone loudly on the bus, get home and waste my evening on I-don’t-even-fucking-know-what. Then I’ll spend the whole weekend recovering from a hangover, making up for the fact that I didn’t eat a hot meal all week, cleaning the mess I left each night because “I don’t have time to sort it now”, and trying to remember what the actual point of any of the last 7 days had been… [that] was my anti-resolution, and I think that maybe this year focusing on things I don’t want to do may be better [than focusing on things I do, or] than writing “stop thinking, start doing” on tiny scraps of paper and sending them to myself.

Anyway, it seemed obvious to me at the beginning of this year that I just don’t know what exactly I want from life. Probably a mixture of things; certainly not something I can capture in a sentence. It seemed reasonable to try something new to see what would happen.

So what is goal setting?

It’s fairly self explanatory, but to give a quick summary of the system Nicole uses (further information and links at the end of the post):

Divide your life into “Life Buckets” (each one an emotion or “way of feeling”)
Think of a bunch of possible goals for each bucket (things that if achieved would make you feel connected to the associated emotion)
Choose the top couple of goals from each bucket and break them down into a 6 month target and a rough set of actionable steps to get you there. Repeat quarterly.
Each Month, pick an “Obsessional Goal” and one or two others from the priority list.For the four weeks in the month, lay out which three or four small action steps you are going to achieve.

It’s not a revolutionary system that professes to hold the secrets of motivation or time management. It’s just a simple way to lay out your priorities, and choose your daily actions based upon them. It sounds simple, because it is. Changing your life is simple- you just have to do it.

So what happened?

I exercised on 118 occasions in 25 weeks (4.72/week average)

I completed my first Triathlon.

I competed in two grappling tournaments and won a gold medal.

I went from being a beginner at Muay Thai to being general level.

I completed a 10 week yoga course.

I completed my first cycle event, of 65 miles.

I completed my first half marathon.

I set two PB’s for the 5k run of 20:00 and 19:42.

I started climbing, up to V3 grade level.

I attended one developer event per month.

I developed a playable demo for an iOS game.

I strengthed my relationships with long distance friends.

I went from 16% to under 10% body fat composition

Nicole calls this the “Fuck Yeah” list. The things you look back at and feel proud and excited about. The things that you look at that cause you to immediately start making new plans. It helps you see what things you really enjoyed, what you might want to do more of, and lets you forget the things that don’t really matter, your obligations and the things that didn’t work out so well. You can do this now if you want, you don’t need to be at the end of a period to try it. I did it for the whole of 2012 at the beginning of the program, and it wasn’t a bad list, but frankly, it wasn’t long enough. There were not enough items on it that I felt proud about.

So why do I need a coach to set goals?

The Existential Gaze

We act differently when people are watching us.

I am far more motivated to do things which make me appear successful when I know someone is watching. It’s not a case of someone externally motivating me (like a personal trainer- encouraging, warning, shouting etc), it’s literally just the effect of viewing myself from a third person perspective rather than from a first person perspective.

Existentialism may not have a lot of real world implications, but understanding this psychological phenomenon could be one of them.

External Motivation

OK, every now and again I did need a tiny push, or a bit of encouragement, or reassurance that missing a target wasn’t the end of the world. Being told the important thing is to keep making progress is helpful sometimes.

Independent Viewpoint

My friends, family, and colleagues, despite being slightly bemused by my course of action, were, on the whole, very supportive of all of the actions and goals I chose. Quite a few people actually suprised me with their continual interest in my progress. I have no doubt that there were plenty of people I could have turned to for support whenever I started veering off track, which is a great feeling.

But it’s also really nice to have someone entirely independent of your life to consult. You can be entirely honest with them and they can be more honest and helpful to you. There is no expectation in the relationship of anything other than to-the-point communication about your progress. If you were to try and do this for a friend, I think it would be really hard, and a real strain on the relationship, if you needed to give them a reality check.

Expert Guidance

As I said before, I don’t think Nicole is, or professes to be, preaching a system which is amazingly revolutionary. It doesn’t need to be- it just needs to work! But she did give a lot of very useful insight, from her own experiences and from the wider field, in areas which I had unresolved thoughts or questions.

As an example, Nicole helped me understand how scheduling what would seem to be ‘non-productive’ tasks or events (like going to a music festival) which fit your goals (such as ‘be sociable’) can allow you to really relax and enjoy them, without guilt or that nagging feeling that you should be doing something else.

But how did you choose what goals to pursue?

The biggest issue I have always had is not actually doing things, but choosing what to do. If you think about this too hard, you realise there is no rational or observable bottom to your desires, and that you don’t know why you want to do anything, and thus what you want to do at all. You want to do stuff, but it’s not possible to rationally decide between conflicting or competing goals.

This is discussed at length in ‘Free Will’ by Sam Harris in which he argues we really don’t have free will at all, and will never be able to determine the reasons behind our desires. I won’t go deeper into this, or I will write another thousand words or ten, but it does haunt me somewhat.

Something major I learned from the six month program, was that it is better to just pick some goals and go full bore at them, than it is to chose none. I still had some time to ponder the bigger questions and I’m still no closer to answering them. But I can climb better.