The GoalTribe Blog

Better! Faster! Smarter! That’s how you want to set goals, right? Oh – and you want it to be easy too. There’s one popular strategy for setting goals that captures all the main keys to goal setting in one easy-to-remember mnemonic: S.M.A.R.T. Much of the advice here is from “Goal Setting Theory” which is recognized by psychologist as one of the most well-proven motivational theories. Here are the 5 parts of setting S.M.A.R.T. goals:

1. Specific: Make sure your goal statement defines a clear, unambiguous result. For example: “Run 3 times a week for a year”, not “Start running”.
2. Measurable: Have a clear way to tell when the goal has been accomplished. For example: “Lose 5 pounds”, not “Lose weight”.
3. Attainable: You have to believe you can achieve the goal. You can both adjust the goal to your self-image, and adjust your self-image to realize your incredible potential.
4. Rewarding: You have to be excited about achieving the goal. There has to be some reason, some emotion, to drive you through the work to succeed. Why do you want to achieve this?
5. Timebound: It doesn’t really become a goal until you set a target date to achieve it. That’s when you ignite the rocket and begin taking action every day to succeed.

There are several variations on what the S.M.A.R.T. mnemonic stands for. These are the ones I find most effective from my experience. You can learn about all of them from the S.M.A.R.T. Goals Wikipedia article.

Reference: Locke, Edwin A. (2001) Motivation by Goal Setting, Handbook of Organization Behavior, 2:43-54

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From our experience with the thousands of goals on GoalTribe.com, and goals in general, we find that there are some categories of goals that are always popular. Here is our take on what the top 10 goals of all time are:

The Top 10 Goals

1. Lose weight
2. Begin a regular exercise habit
3. Eat Healthier
4. Find a job (or a better job)
5. Get out of debt
6. Become financially independent
7. Learning a new skill
8. Learn a new language
9. Go Traveling
10. Quit Smoking

Steps for Achieving Top 10 Goals

1. Write down the goal you want to achieve, be specific.
2. Now write a plan for how to achieve that goal. (Refer to Learn How to Do Absolutely Anything.)
3. Now set a date that you want to achieve that goal by.
4. Now schedule when you will do each of the steps on your plan.
5. Get one or more people to be your ‘support group’ or ‘accountability buddies’. These people can hold you accountable to take action,
6. help you come up with ideas, and celebrate your successes.
7. Take action right away!

To make it extremely easy to achieve your goals, we created GoalTribe.com the most advanced goal achievement social network on the web. GoalTribe takes you step-by-step through planning a goal, building motivation, getting a support group, getting reminder emails, and overcoming obstacles until you succeed.

Get started changing your life now!

Every goal system, including GoalTribe, tells you to sit down and plan out the steps, the actions, to achieving your goal. That’s usually when the goal-planner (that’s you) starts sweating. You start thinking, “I have no idea how to achieve this goal or else I would have done it already!” And yo know what? You’re right! You DON’T know how to achieve the goal. Nobody can predict the future. You don’t know what obstacles you’re going to run into, what resources you’re going to need, how much effort it’s going to take, how much money you’ll need. Any good goal process begins with good quality time writing down a goal plan that totally sucks.

STAY CALM!  That’s exactly how things are supposed to be. Your plan will wrong. It will need revision. You might have to throw it out completely and start again. It might just say “Step one: Go find someone who can help me with step 1.” That’s ok!

What’s important is that you take some time to take your best guesstimation of what you steps you have to take to succeed. It’s important to take some time to think. Don’t get hung up on all the things that you don’t know or could go wrong. Sometimes you don’t even need to plan more than your first few steps. Spend the appropriate amount of time planning, then GET INTO ACTION.

Once you start taking action, you’ll learn a lot more about what’s involved. And then you can feel free to start adjusting your plan based on what you’re learning. And you don’t have to feel bad that your goal plan sucked. It’s serving it’s purpose in all it’s wretched imperfection. It’s forcing you to think ahead and process what you DO know. And it doesn’t take a perfect plan to do that.

Sucky Goal plan’s RULE!