“A goal is just a measuring stick for my future failure,” she says. So she never makes goals. I don’t blame her at all. Who wants to fail?
What if you knew you’d make progress taking the next step toward you dreams? What if you could almost guarantee you’d lose yourself in concentration? And what if your fundamental feeling as you started down your path was this?
“Yup, I can do this!”
I’ve written dozens of articles and given talks and workshops about how to make goals that actually get you there. Now, I’ve wrapped the key concepts into a tidy little tool called the SMART & SEXY Goal Checklist (TM?).
It’s based on the ol’ S.M.A.R.T. goal mnemonic created by George T. Doran in the early 80’s for company project and performance managers. Sure, it may seem dorky, but it caught on for a reason: It works— to a point. Creating a S.M.A.R.T. goal helps you define a clear target, the point of a goal (which literally means “finish line”), but it’s missing some of the key qualities of goals that motivate us and make the process of going there even better than getting there.
The reason we make goals is not because having achieved them will make us happier. (We are terrible at predicting how we will feel in the future.) We make goals so we can focus. Focusing on something we believe in almost always makes us feel great, right now.
So, make your goals SMART so you can feel you are making progress. Make them SEXY so you love doing them.