Stop Giving Up! How to Set Goals that Stick!
My name is Adam Melnick. I’m a leadership coach and owner of Seeding the Lead, and today we’re going to be talking about goals and how to set them.
When we look at goals, one of the biggest mistakes that individuals make is they don’t know why they need a goal. What is the point of a goal? The point of a goal is to create focus for yourself, your team, or your organization so you stop spreading resources around almost like a blanket over so many problems, and really start narrowing in on: What do you want to accomplish? Where do you want to go with your life?
What Is Your Goal?
When a client comes to me and they’re asking, “Hey Adam, can you help me out with this problem?” the first question I always ask is: What is your goal? Where are we going? What is the destination? For many individuals, they have no idea what that destination is, and this is why it’s critical that we work on figuring out where we’re going first.
Once we figure that out, the second most important thing to answer is why. Why is this important? What value does this have in our life? Who is impacted by us achieving this goal? Really focusing on that why is critical to building up motivation. A lot of individuals say, “You know, I just started at the gym and I started lifting weights, and I flaked out after a week or two weeks.” Why did that happen? Well, there wasn’t that internal motivation because they didn’t understand why they were doing it—and that is super important.
Avoiding Pitfalls
Some of the pitfalls that we look at when it comes to goal setting: First, there are too many goals. “I have a goal for eating healthy, I have a goal for talking to my team, I have a goal for my romantic life, I have a goal for getting out there and meeting people,” and there’s just too much. When we look at goal setting, we focus on one goal. What is the one goal that you want to create? What is the one goal that you want to achieve in the next ten years? We’re not looking at short‑term goals—we’re looking at a long‑term goal.
Outcome Oriented Goals
From there, we build out that outcome‑oriented goal: How are we going to measure when you get there in ten years? What exactly do we want to achieve? Specifically, what do you want out of your goal? From there, we bring in that why—figure out why this is important—and then we break it down even further into easily manageable steps.
What many people don’t understand about goals is that we use outcome‑oriented goals for a long‑term vision, and we use what’s called process‑oriented goals for short‑term vision. The process‑oriented goal is really building up the habits and the things that you need to start moving yourself in the direction required to accomplish that long‑term goal. By building up that process‑oriented goal, we take these little steps every single day.
For example, one of my clients when they first came to coaching said, “Hey, I need to be more interesting. I need to be memorable. I’m going to these conferences, but nobody’s remembering me.” They felt like a “gray man”—someone people see, but then just forget. When I sat down with them, the thing that really came across was they weren’t listening; they were instead preaching about themselves and what they wanted.
Long Term Goals
So what we did was create a long‑term goal of understanding how to listen—how to see the other person and hear what excites them, what interests them first and foremost. By engaging them, they will then engage us, and we will become more memorable. The weird thing about humans is we don’t actually care about what the other person says; we care about how they made us feel. By making them feel amazing, they were more likely to remember us.
We created that long‑term goal, and then we broke that goal down into easily manageable steps. The first step was to go out and start having small talk with the understanding that we’re no longer focusing on ourselves; we’re focusing on the other party. We listened to them; we heard where they were coming from. The next week, we started using open‑ended questions—asking who, what, when, where, why, and how—to really build out that conversation so other people were engaged.
Over the course of many months and a year, they became an incredibly proficient listener. When they went to a conference people remembered them; when they spoke on stage people said, “Yeah, that man was amazing.” It was honestly pretty spectacular.
When it came to his goals, we built out the long‑term goal of listening to the other person. This goal was set over the course of a year. We broke it down into easily manageable steps and started doing process‑oriented goals every seven days. Every seven days he had a new goal—something as simple and mundane as starting a conversation or smiling at an individual—forming the habits needed to become that listener he desired to be, so individuals wouldn’t forget him.
Contact Seeding the Lead for Help Navigating Goals
If you’re struggling with creating long‑term goals and those short‑term process‑oriented goals to create the success you desire, go to www.seedingthelead.com and book your free consultation today. If you found value in this video, please hit the like button, subscribe, and share it with friends so we can reach as many people as possible.