Why I loved this course on goal setting, with notes.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Some realizations are deeply meaningful. Meaningful because they change you as a person by changing your perspective on something important.

One such realization happened to me while reading this book, ‘The one thing’. For those who haven’t read it, the authors give us a single approach to figure out short term and long term priorities. The approach is this question:

‘What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?’

This question stayed with me. It led me to reflect deeply on the importance of goal setting. So much so, that I kept reading about the topic for a year and ended up reading more books and watching courses on goal setting.

Books like ‘the one thing’ stress the importance of staying focussed on the goal and saying no to distractions. However,.a related question arose, how do I know if I’m setting the right goal for myself? This concern is most beautifully captured in the following quote:

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”. ~ Peter Drucker

This was the confusing part, but increasingly I felt that this was also the most important part. If I had any doubt, another book “The highest goal”, by legendary Stanford Professor Michael Ray, cleared it for me.

See, when your goal is deeply important, personally to you, you won’t require someone else to make you serious about staying focussed on it. This is where I stayed stuck for a lot of time and again turned to books and courses.

Among all the approaches that I studied, a 1-hour course on goal setting on skillshare stood out for me. This course is taught by Jill Mcabe, a Toronto based business coach and author.

Jill’s course is simple and deep. It covers all the important points in the easiest way to understand:

• Staying focussed on your goal,
• Building momentum towards your goal, and
• Making sure that your goal is personally important to you

I’m sharing my notes from the course. If you do see value in them, please check out her course on skillshare.

Notes:

1. Everything that you do is goal-driven: Start by accepting that what you are not able to work towards is not an important goal for you. If you prioritize watching Netflix over reading, being entertained is a more important goal for you in reality. This is why our current life is a good indicator of our past goals. This point is so simple and profound yet so overlooked.
2. Set outcome-focused and not plan focused goals: Don’t be too focused on how it’ll happen. Instead, focus on the outcome. For example, focus on becoming healthy instead of focusing on going to the gym. Even if you are unable to go to the gym you can do bodyweight workouts at your home. Focusing on the plan will limit your options (you’ll only think about ideas related to the gym). And then, if your plan fails, your coping mechanism will kick in creating a narrative about why this goal is not important for you. Hard to believe how many times have I seen people (and teams) making this mistake, in a professional context.
3. Use excitement to motivate your subconscious: Jill talked about motivating the subconscious through emotions. I first studied about the power of emotions on changing behaviour as a student of marketing. In terms of goals and emotions, I’ve read multiple authors talk about it and Jill is equally lucid. Her point is about impact: that if we think in terms of excitement on achieving our goals, or fear of consequences if we don’t, we are far more likely to subconsciously register the goal.
4. Use more ways to achieve a goal: Don’t rely on only one plan, create more paths. As mentioned in the course, using 4 or more ways to work on our goal can increase our likelihood of achieving that goal by up to 10 times. This was a fascinating thing to read about, something that I’m excited to test out in my life.
5. Stay in the driver’s seat: If the definition of your goal is such that it depends on things outside your control, it’s not a goal but a wish. You have to be in control to keep moving towards your goal. Jill recommended taking tiny actions towards the goal to get unstuck.
6. Motivating outcomes that are Measurable by appointment (MoMa): this is a quick and helpful goal setting exercise taught in the course. I’ve been following it regularly since doing the course. Let me sustain it for a year before submitting a review.

Hope you’ll find this helpful. In case you want to recommend a resource on goal setting, or in case you have a question, please leave a comment.

Let me conclude this post by extending a quote from Jill’s course:

“The biggest risk for a society and an individual is to work towards outcomes which are less than what we want.”

Cheers!