How to Set Goals: 5-Step Approach to Setting Goals

Goal-setting is the practice of establishing actionable objectives for yourself or your organization. When you set goals—whether they’re personal goals or team goals—you identify markers of success or growth. These successes and moments of growth can occur in the immediate future or the distant future.

Successful goal-setting involves creating measurable action plans. These ensure you are setting both measurable goals (where success can be codified) and time-bound goals (where you follow goal-specific schedules). Your chances of goal achievement increase once you’ve clearly defined desired outcomes and mapped out the steps to attain them.

There are various types of goals you might encounter in goal-setting theory:

1. 1. Short-term goals: Short-term goals are smaller goals that are achievable in a short time frame. These are meant to motivate a person or group towards more challenging goals. Examples of short-term goals include running a certain distance in a day, clearing out your inbox, or getting a training certification.
2. 2. Long-term goals: These are big goals that require more time and hard work to achieve. These are important goals to set and define, as long-term future goals tend to be more ambitious. Long-term goals include getting a teaching position, building a house, or becoming fluent in another language.
3. 3. Life goals: These are typically some ultimate goal toward which the other goals serve as milestones. Life goals are very big picture and can include the goal of being a professional artist, running an independent farm or business, or creating an alternative education system. Life goals are not limited to work-related performance goals. They can also involve your personal life and emotional well-being.

The methods for effective goal-setting will vary from person to person or team to team, but here are some steps to get you started:

• Brainstorm actionable objectives. Begin your goal-setting process with a brainstorming session. Typically, goal-setting starts with the brainstorm process to assess and identify realistic goals that aid self-improvement.
• Identify realistic and specific goals. Keep your goals grounded in realism and specificity. Instead of setting a vague goal like “become my own boss,” you can add realistic specificity with a statement like: “By year’s end, save or fundraise enough money to launch my own graphic design business.” If successful, you will transform vague goals into specific goals.
• Break down goals into smaller steps. By breaking down large goals into smaller steps, you use clear planning to affect behavior change. Each step of the way, you create a time-bound goal to help you reach multiple targets along the path toward a larger goal. You can keep track of these smaller goals in a workbook or journal. Refer back to these journals to be motivated by your own progress. To put this into practice, try breaking down a goal like getting hired at a specific workplace into smaller steps like “revise resume” and “send in application,” and remember to include dates or deadlines when relevant.
• Identify possible obstacles. Use visualization not just to imagine new goals but also potential obstacles. For example, if a small goal is mailing out documents by a certain deadline, identify obstacles like rush-hour traffic and lines at the post office. If a large goal is getting promoted within your company, an obstacle might be the need to learn a new set of skills; to overcome this obstacle, you could seek out a mentor or training program.
• Schedule a timeframe. Building a schedule, and dutifully following it, will help you accomplish goals and actionable steps on a daily basis. It’s better to know that not only do you have to complete a work proposal, but that you have to complete it by next Friday. Setting realistic deadlines makes it much more likely that you’ll actually plan out each step to achieve your goals in a reasonable amount of time.

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