What do you take into consideration when you give yourself a goal? How do you decide what you want to accomplish? What about goals makes you feel successful and fulfilled?
Having goals can be highly valuable to your wellbeing and sense of purpose because they give you something meaningful to work towards. They encourage you to spend your time in ways that feel productive, teach you valuable skills, help you leave your comfort zone, and develop your internal resources and self-confidence. But goals can also be stressful and discouraging. Not succeeding is frustrating and can keep you from attempting ambitious goals in the future.
Much of the most popular and readily available advice on goal-setting emphasises how to plan your goal in a way that gives you the best chance of success. But this approach makes the assumption that you’ll choose a goal that has meaning and you’ll pursue it in a way that doesn’t compromise your values or objective. It teaches you how to be successful but doesn’t ask you to think critically about what you consider to be success.
There is much more to gain from goals than being successful in the objective you set yourself, and you can gain a great deal even in you don’t finish your goal. Self-improvement through accomplishment isn’t just giving yourself a task to complete – it involves finding out what will make you feel like a better version of yourself and pursuing these outcomes in healthy ways you can be proud of. Without taking this into consideration, you can complete your goal, but without enjoying many of the benefits goals can provide.
When you approach goals with the mindset that the most important outcome is accomplishing something personally meaningful and you’re eager to learn from the experience, they can provide value to your life far beyond the potential rewards of completing the goal.
Choosing a goal that will add value to your life
Working on a goal begins with determining what you want to accomplish and why this has meaning for you.
If you don’t think about why you want to accomplish something, you can lack clarity on what you’re really trying to achieve. For almost every goal, the why is believing that accomplishing your goal will make you happier and more fulfilled.
But if you don’t think carefully about what you want and why, you can choose a goal that doesn’t reflect your values, priorities, and aspirations. Your goal may seem like a good idea that should make you happy, but not all goals will be beneficial to everyone, even if they seem like universally good ideas. You could also pick a goal based on what you think others expect of you or what you believe others are doing to be happier and assume it will work for you.
When setting goals, it’s important to think about the two main components goals have: what you want to do and how you want it to make you feel – the external action and the internal reward. Understanding both of these gives you a more complete vision of what you want to accomplish and why.
You could want a promotion at work – the what – but there are very different reasons why you could want this: financial security, to advance in a career you’re passionate about, to improve your self-esteem, and more. You have the potential to meet all of these goals by getting a promotion, but none of these can only be achieved through a promotion.
When you understand how you want accomplishing your goal to make you feel, you can ask yourself if the method you’ve chosen is working or not. If you aimed to get a promotion because you’re passionate about the work you do but a leadership role would mean less involvement in the areas you love, then succeeding in your goal of being promoted likely wouldn’t give you your desired outcome.
Asking yourself what you want to gain from your goal beyond the rewards of feeling successful helps you choose a goal that has the greatest potential to be a valuable experience that improves your life long-term.
Understanding the different types of goals: finite and ongoing
While there are a limitless number of goals you can choose to work on, they can be divided into two types: those with a final outcome you accomplish and then they’re finished – finite goals, and those that can always be a part of your life because by their nature they can’t be finished – ongoing goals.
Finite goals are typically more specific and aimed at external achievements – running a marathon, going on a trip you always dreamed of, and saving money for a major purchase are all finite goals.
Ongoing goals are more likely to be related to personal development and self-improvement, which is likely to be a life-long commitment. This could be living a healthy lifestyle, nurturing your sense of adventure, or having financial security.
Most people get the greatest enjoyment and fulfilment from goals when they give themselves a combination of the finite and ongoing goals. The finite goals have the potential to be more rewarding in the short-term because you can have the satisfaction of finishing them, while the ongoing goals have the potential to make a bigger difference in your life and have greater long-term rewards.
Fortunately, most ongoing goals can be advanced through a series of finite goals. You could give yourself the ongoing goal of being healthy. To improve your health habits, you also give yourself the finite goals of learning to cook five new healthy meals, taking a spin class, and spending a weekend backpacking. Once you finish these finite goals, you’ll likely think of more so you can have new objectives that contribute to your ongoing goal.
It’s important to know if your goals are finite or ongoing and to understand the differences between these types of goals because they require different approaches and expectations.
If you’ve chosen an ongoing goal without understanding that you’ll never be finished, you can get frustrated at your apparent lack of progress, even if you’re doing well at your goal by staying committed and being consistent. And if you think you’re working on an ongoing goal when your goal is actually finite, you can have a vague approach with a less strategic plan than what’s possible.
When you know whether your goals are finite or ongoing and have incorporated the differences into your approach and expectations, they have the greatest potential of being enjoyable while adding value to your life.
Choosing a healthy approach for your goals
Once you know what you want and why, you then need to consider how you’ll achieve this. The method with which you approach your goal matters because it’s possible to achieve what you committed to but in a way that prevents you from getting the benefits you wanted, so it won’t be meaningful or rewarding.
It’s important to consider your values when deciding how you’ll approach your goal. Values are your fundamental beliefs about the types of behaviours that are necessary to living a life you can be proud of. They guide your choices, actions, and what you’re proud of or regret.
A goal you accomplish by compromising your values can be a negative experience that makes you feel disappointed with yourself. Getting promoted by sabotaging your colleagues and taking credit for other peoples’ work can lead to guilt, shame, and regret. Saving money by living off cheap unhealthy food could be good for your bank account but not an enriching experience because of the cost to your health.
You can also accomplish a goal in a harmful way by making too many sacrifices. Some people will pour all of their time and attention into advancing a goal while neglecting other responsibilities and relationships. This could be someone dedicating all their time to finishing a degree, which puts a great strain on their relationship with their family. Or someone pursuing their goal to travel but spending more than they can comfortably afford and putting themselves in a stressful financial situation. They may have accomplished their goal, but their goals didn’t improve their lives and possibly made them worse.
Completing a goal isn’t a guarantee that you’ll be happier and fulfilled if you don’t approach it with methods that reflect what’s important to you. Adopting a healthy method that aligns with your values and doesn’t ask you to sacrifice too much is also necessary to making your goal a positive and valuable experience.
Measuring your goals
Staying motivated and making progress while working on a goal requires having ways to measure your progress. But not all goals can – or should – be measured in the same ways.
Without determining how you’ll measure progress, it’s difficult to know if you’re advancing. This is true of both finite and ongoing goals, but because ongoing goals are often subjective, they can especially benefit more from a plan to monitor progress and a clear definition of success.
Finite goals typically have clear and obvious ways of being measured – if you want to save enough to buy a house you can deposit $100 each month into a savings account, and if you want to complete a marathon you can run each week to improve your stamina.
Ongoing goals can also be measured, but what you’ll measure and how isn’t as precise, and what should be considered progress is less apparent. If you give yourself the ongoing goal of being a good parent and decide that success means your child is always happy, you could feel successful by spoiling your child. But if you measure good parenting as teaching your child important lessons for the future, then giving in to all of your child’s demands and always putting their wants first wouldn’t fit your definition of success.
Another advantage of measuring your progress is being able to recognise and celebrate your milestones. Congratulating yourself for your progress makes goals more fun so you’re more likely to stay motivated and committed. Ongoing goals can especially benefit from this since progress isn’t as evident and can easily be missed. And because they don’t have the satisfying conclusion of finite goals, you only have progress to celebrate.
Measuring goals is important, not only to know if you’re making progress but also to determine if how your progressing is consistent with the outcomes you want, as well as giving you opportunities to celebrate your achievements.
Believing the true reward is only in finishing them limits the benefits to a small moment that the more meaningful goals often lack.
Be flexible in your approach
A flexible approach to how you accomplish goals can make them a more positive experience, as well as more capable of meeting your needs.
Being flexible can mean changing your expectations for yourself. Sometimes you’ll have the energy and internal resources to push yourself to work on your goal, but at other times it may be necessary to readjust your expectations.
There will almost certainly be periods in your life when you don’t have the time, strength, or resources that you normally would. Navigating major changes, experiencing challenges, or coping with stress can take a great deal of your energy and attention, leaving you with very little left for more than what’s essential. Pushing yourself in these circumstances could lead to becoming disillusioned with your goal, and even experiencing burnout, so it can be necessary to give yourself permission to work less on your goal to preserve your mental health.
Insisting that you stay committed to your goal during exciting times such as holidays can also make your goal unpleasant and too demanding, so allowing yourself to take a break with the promise that you’ll return to your goal can keep your goal from becoming a burden.
It’s also possible that you need more than a break or to demand less from yourself. If you’re consistently feeling pessimistic, uninterested, and frustrated towards your goal, it’s possible that the goal you chose isn’t right for you.
When you begin a goal, you should believe that the outcome will improve your life and the methods by which you achieve it will be rewarding. But as you progress, it’s possible you’ll discover this isn’t the case because the approach you chose – the external action – isn’t getting you closer to what you want – the internal reward – so you may decide to quit.
Quitting a goal could make you feel like a failure, but you’re not giving up on the goal, just on how you thought you should achieve it. And if you strongly believe that working on this goal isn’t going to give you what you hoped to achieve, then why would you continue? Is ending your efforts actually failing? Would staying committed to a goal that isn’t making you happy or getting you what you want somehow be better than giving up?
Rather than thinking of quitting as abandoning your goal, you can think of it as changing course. When you realise you’ve taken a wrong turn while driving, do you continue in that direction or do turn around so you can find the right direction? Goals can be the same. You’re still committed to achieving to what you thought the goal would give you – the why – but you accept that you were wrong about how to achieve this outcome.
Goals that you give up on are never a waste of time because of how much they can teach you. You gain new skills and learn about yourself – what you like and dislike, what gives you meaning, what you find frustrating, discover new interests, ignite ambitions, and much more. You could decide that you don’t want to run a marathon, but greatly value having learned the physical and psychological rewards of fitness and change your goal to running at least three times per week. You gave up on the goal to run a marathon, but kept the goal of running to stay active.
You can’t always know the best decision to make or how working on something will make you feel until you experience it. If you only act when there’s a clear benefit and you know you’ll get the desired outcome, you’ll likely take action very rarely.
If you believe that giving up on a goal is unacceptable, you can easily invest a great deal of time and energy on goals that won’t make you feel rewarded or give you the outcomes you want.
Goals have the potential to bring the most value to your life when you consider not only what you want to accomplish but also why, because the why is what makes goals meaningful.
Working on a goal is meant to be a positive and valuable experience, but it’s possible to choose a goal and/or approach that doesn’t give you the benefits you hoped for.
It’s often difficult to learn about yourself – what you enjoy, what gives you a sense of purpose, skills you want to develop, and more – without taking action. And working on a goal is often the most accessible and effective way to take action in an intentional way.
Personal development through goals has great potential to be a rewarding, informative, and valuable experience. If you understand what you want to gain from your goals, how to manage your expectations, and honour your values and priorities when your approach while being open to learning from the process, then you can enjoy huge benefits from goals.
