3 Goal-Setting Paradigms (to get you into action)

It wasn’t that long ago when I would avoid setting goals at all costs. I felt like I would be restricting or disappointing myself. What if my direction changed? Would I be a failure, then, if I didn’t complete my original goal? What about the details? I felt like I was just making it all up...I didn’t really know how to make this goal a reality. What if I was wrong about how I would get there?

Any of this sound familiar?

I knew goals could give me direction. I knew that having a plan of action would help me find the success I wanted. It just felt like I was facing a mountain that I didn’t know how to climb. I had the equipment, but I didn’t know how to use it.

It turns out that goal setting wasn’t the problem. My view of it and the way I approached it was. That’s why I’ve put together 3 paradigms of goal setting. These may be a way of looking at goals that you haven’t considered before. Hopefully, this new perspective helps shift your idea of what goal could look like for you.

1.) Goals are flexible and changeable.

I had always thought that once you set a goal, you were stuck with it...exactly as it was. Any deviation was a failure and proof that you don’t know what you’re doing. Ugh. How terrible is that?

What if instead, we choose to see goals more like a stream. We have our starting place at the top of the mountain. Our goal could be to end up in the ocean. We start out heading down over rocks and established stream beds, then a tree falls across our path. We weren’t planning for it. Does that mean we stop and call ourselves a failure?

No. Water finds another way.

So, we reassess. How can we still get down the mountain? Is the ocean still our best goal for where we want to go? We find a way around or over the tree and keep going. Maybe we keep our goal set on that ocean. Maybe there’s a lake that is actually a better option for us now.

Change is okay. In fact, we can pretty much count on something happening along the way that causes us to change course a bit. So, as you set your goal, keep in mind that some things about it will change. We get to embrace it, take a step back, reassess where we want to go and how we want to get there, and keep going.

2.) Start at the end and work backwards.

When I was a kid, I loved those activity books with mazes. You know, help the bee reach the flower or the frog reach his lily pad. I thought I was super sneaky because I had figured out an easier way to complete the maze. Instead of just starting at the beginning, I started at the end and worked backwards. To this day, I don’t know if it was just a mental thing with those maze puzzles, but it always seemed a lot easier and clearer when I started at the end. I’ve found the same to be true with goals.

When you start at the beginning, there’s a lot of question and uncertainty. It’s tough to see the right next step that will take you down the path you want to go. But when you start at the end, you have that certainty—you’re already there. Then, you ask yourself, “what’s the step right before this?” I’ve found this so valuable with creating benchmarks and deadlines within a goal.

Say you want to launch a product or program. What’s the thing you need to do right before you launch? Probably complete the product or program creation process. So, break that down. If it’s a digital course, for instance, the last step is uploading the content to your hosting platform. Right before that? Completing edits on your content. Before that? Maybe recording. Before that? You get the idea.

Start with envisioning the end result. Then, ask yourself, “what’s the step right before this?” or another way of saying it, “what needs to be in place for this to happen?” Keep moving backwards until you reach your starting point.

3.) The how comes with the details.

When you’re creating a big goal for yourself, there’s usually a little voice that pops into your head that says “but how?” It questions how logical and practical your goal is. With big goals, their creation is born from our gut or intuition. It’s a manifestation of our desires for the future. That intuitive/feeling side of our brain can often be questioned by our logical side, which wants concrete details. When we’ve created goals using our intuition, it’s only natural for our logic to kick in to make sure this goal is safe.

Going back to the stream example in the first paradigm, our big goal is to get from the top of the mountain to the ocean. As water, we intuitively know that this is right. But logic wants to make sure that we aren’t jumping off of a cliff and killing ourselves to get there. It’s trying to keep us safe. The same is true with setting our goals.

There will be a lot of unanswered questions in the beginning. We’re looking at our goal from the big picture. The how only comes as we break our big goal down into smaller and smaller goals and steps. You won’t have everything figured out in the beginning, and that’s okay. So, take a deep breath. Use paradigm #2 (start at the end and work backwards), and break your big goal into smaller goals. Then, break those smaller goals down into smaller steps. The more detailed your plan becomes, the more the how will emerge.

Want some help with goal setting? Check out my Goal-Setting Workshop self-paced course here.