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 Seven Mistakes to Avoid
When Creating Goals
 When I was a freshman in high school, it was the first time I ever created a goal. Not that I didn’t have any goals at some point before then, but I’m talking about more serious goals. I remember going to a mini-workshop at our school, where I wrote down that I wanted to have a 4.2 GPA when I graduated high school.
We were on a weighted scale, but a 4.2 would’ve probably ended up being top 5% of the class. So that was an aggressive goal, especially since I went to an awesome high school with a lot of intelligent, hard-working students. I kind of put the goal aside after creating it and didn’t really look at it for a while, although in some ways it was always there in the back of my mind. And every semester, I had smaller goals in terms of what I wanted to achieve in order to reach the 4.2 final GPA. Long story short, crazy enough, even though I hadn’t really looked at the goal a lot, I ended up with a 4.196 GPA or something like that by the end of senior year. That rounded up to 4.2, so basically I did achieve my high school goal.
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I know goal setting is a topic that has been beaten to death. However, I want to look at it in a different way today. Namely, the topic is seven mistakes people make when setting personal goals.
Here at EntreResults, we use a goal setting process known as the Success Planner. It’s a tool you can check out here that’s included as part of our Success Planner e-course. It was created through my experience with setting goals as well as learning from shortcomings in other similar programs. It works really, really well for helping people overcome the potential downfalls we’ll be discussing today. So let’s move on and talk about the seven goal-setting mistakes to look at:
 There’s no purpose or why behind the goal. You can set a goal, but if there’s not a big enough purpose for why you want to achieve it, you’ll probably end up being unmotivated.
- There’s no bite-sized activities lined up to achieve the desired result. A lot of times, people put out a grand goal, but they don’t bother figuring out the steps needed to get there. The result? They don’t.
- The goals are too one-dimensional. Maybe you’re focusing too hard on just one area. For example, only business or health. While those are two powerful areas of life, you need to really look holistically when you set personal goals because all the different areas of life intertwine with each other.
- Once set, goals are never looked at again. They’re never revisited. I’ll make the case that it’s still powerful to go through the process of creating goals even if you don’t look at them ever again. However, it’s obviously much more powerful when we loop back to them consistently and keep them at the forefront of our minds.
- There’s no support team for achieving the said goals. Many of you who grew up in America know that USA as a collective subscribes to this sort of “do-it-yourself; go at it” kind of mentality. Listen, that’s really not the best way to go about it. You can see that immediately when you study great people who have achieved a lot of great things. We each need to have a support team around us who can help us achieve our goals.
 Not enough celebration for wins or achievements. People hit their goals and blast right onto the next big thing. Listen, life’s tough. Sometimes we need to slow down and celebrate wins.
- Not taking into account which types of goals fit your needs the best. For example, some people need to write massive goals or a ton of different goals. Then if they end up only achieving 20-30% of them, they’re actually farther along than they would be if they set smaller, more attainable goals.
For others, putting those huge goals in place would in fact demotivate and frustrate them, because they’re always so far behind. That type of person should make fewer goals that are more realistic, because if you don’t believe you can achieve the goal, maybe you simply won’t try at all.
This is where coaching becomes really helpful. A coach will spend the time to figure out your unique circumstances and help you set goals that work best for you.
So those are the seven mistakes to avoid when making goals. Have fun, go out and take action. Have a better than amazing day.
Thanks and have a fantastic week,
Jared Polak |
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