Your future in focus! Intentional Goal Setting Series (2/3)

Welcome back! If you missed us last week, we were being “unrealistic” about our goals. If you missed that one, go check it out now and get an idea of how your future self will live and how your higher self will be. Once you’ve set your moonshot goals, how will you get there? Today I’ll share with you a simple two part process to bring your biggest dreams into focus and to make their achievement inevitable.

Step 1 – Make your goals SMART!

The simple test to determine how likely you are to achieve your goals is to ask “how will I know when I’ve achieved it?” If the finish line can’t be seen or isn’t clear, how will we know what must be done to cross it? Make sure your goals can check each one of these requirements:

Specific – What specifically are you looking to accomplish. Simply saying you want to, say, “get stronger” violates a few of these rules; the first being it does not state specifically the strength you are looking to achieve. Is it physical? mental? just your legs?

Measurable – At what time can you check the box signifying your accomplishment of your goal? Being “financially independent” is a common goal I hear and it fails the test. With an extremely modest lifestyle and a country with a low cost of living, someone could technically be financially independent on $100,000, if invested properly. Conversely, if you plan to be financially independent, living a lavish life in Southern California, that number will likely have extra zeros.

Attainable – I know, I know! I told you to be unrealistic. I should have known you’d put time travel as your financial goal, so you could go back and bet on sporting events, like in Back to the Future 2. Your goal needs to be within the realm of human capability, which still gives you a lot of latitude, because we are amazing machines!

Relevant – It must support the life you want to live. Fortunately, since we are starting with our highest level of goals, your goals are all relevant to the life you want to live, unless you picked a goal to support someone else’s priorities. Relevancy will come into play in the next step as we go small with our goals. If your goal in your finances is to pay off your debt and your smaller goal includes investing, while this is a great thing to do, it is not directly relevant to your debt elimination goal.

Time Bound – Every time we set a goal, from here on out, we must have clarity on when we will achieve them. If we incorporate the other four elements, we could end up with a goal like: “to save $1 Million in my 401k for retirement.” It is specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant, however it doesn’t state if this is a goals I want to achieve in the next ten years or the next fifty!

Step 2 – Goal setting to the Now!

Remember those big scary Someday Goals you set? Remember how insurmountable and out of reach they may have felt? Now we’ve made them SMART, so they are a little clearer and more in focus, yet they are still big!

Goal setting to the now is where we systematically reverse engineer your goal to build a staircase to lead you to the moon where your goal’s achievement lies! The process is simple and empowering! Using it will help you realize that you can accomplish your biggest goals and dreams.

You start with your Someday goal and set a 5 year milestone using the clarifying question:

“What must I accomplish in the next 5 years to achieve my someday goal?”

If your highest level goal is less than 5 years away, it may be that you did not dream as large as you could have. Nevertheless, we’ll find your next goal container, ahead. Stop at this 5 year mark and write your SMART goal in the first-person present tense and anchor them in relevance. For example:

“It is 12/31/2025 and I have generated $500k of passive income for the 2026 calendar year so I can spend five days each week with my family and on my hobbies and only work on things which excite me.”

Ensure the milestone will support the future goal, which it will, so long as it really is SMART! Then we’ll repeat the process for the next year by asking:

“What must I accomplish in the next 1 year to achieve my 5 year goal?”

Now you will have your 1 year milestone to measure your progress toward your five year goal. It will look something like this:

“It is 12/31/2021 and I have generated $100k of passive income for the 2022 calendar year so I can spend my weekends and every evening with my family and on my hobbies.”

Take Action!

1. Goal set to the now. Take all of your Someday Goals down to 5 and 1 Year Goals.
2. Rewrite your goals so that they are SMART and write them in the first person present format.
3. Anchor your goals with relevance and highlight what accomplishing your goals will do for you.

Congratulations! You now have a one year action plan which will lead you ever closer to living the life of your dreams. If you enjoyed this process, check back next week as we build out a schedule for success for you to live your entire upcoming year by. Win your day, win your life!

Prior post:

<— (1/3) You need to be “unrealistic”

Next post:

(3/3) What you focus on expands! —>