Definition
It is time to refine the goal definition referenced in the previous message. A goal is a desired result beyond your current position requiring meaningful growth. “Habits” are the activities undertaken to reach the goal.
Continuing practices that have allowed you to enjoy excellent wellness over the past five years is worthwhile but not a goal for this discussion.
Strengthening family relationships (goal) by visiting your grandchildren four times yearly (habit), expressing gratitude and generosity by actively serving on a non-profit board, or advancing your career by obtaining a professional certification are goals backed by habits.
The stated goals are principles that do not meet the helpful definition of SMART goals, but formulating your principle is the act of conception for SMART plans.
How Many
Your intelligence and capabilities likely create an ambition and a belief that you can accomplish innumerable goals. Similarly, feelings of guilt aroused by the presence of many unfulfilled objectives may cause you to overcompensate and select too many.
Since goals are significant new endeavors, our finite time and energy limit the number we can effectively add. This reasoning leads most companies to implement only a few new initiatives yearly while maintaining the high performance obtained from previously accomplished goals.
Therefore, we most likely need to reduce or eliminate a current initiative or activity to create space for a new one. This process goes far beyond replacing donut shop runs with gym workouts. Proper selection frequently requires (i) discarding or pursuing (mal)lingering goals or (ii) eliminating or deemphasizing the good in favor of the better.
Clean-out the Clutter
For years, you have promised you would learn Spanish but never have. Being plagued by unmet goals does not necessarily justify elevating them to must-do status. In fact, it may be evidence to the contrary.
Do you want to learn Spanish to fit in with the intellectual crowd at the cafe or to better connect with your adopted daughter from Ecuador?
If only to satisfy your need for belonging, the goal’s value is limited and should be released to escape haunting thoughts of repeated failure. If speaking Spanish would bring you closer to your child, study the language together, and enhance the experience of your family’s upcoming journey to her native country.
Likewise, if several years have passed and you have not pursued the education or professional certification needed to advance your career and meet your objective of better financial provision for your family, now is the time to act on a plan that accomplishes this ambition.
The Uncertain Better
Does your desire for a more fulfilling career compel you to end a successful tenure at a company that has treated you well for a position of greater responsibility and compensation at another company with better opportunities for advancement?
After graduating with an accounting degree, passing the CPA exam, and landing a plum position at a national accounting firm, can you abandon this investment to follow your passion for flying airplanes?
The only (and still not easy) way to give up a good activity is by being convinced you will do something better. For this reason, people leave lucrative corporate jobs to work at non-profits.
Growth often requires breaking free from the chains of comfort provided by our current endeavors and taking a path with an uncertain outcome (the reality of every path, including our present one).
An impediment to making growth decisions is attaching too much importance to the likelihood of success rather than the quality of the choice. Without being foolhardy, the “better thing to do” should be more influential than whether it will work.
Despite the momentous planning behind history’s largest amphibious invasion, General Eisenhower, while uncertain of the outcome, expressed faith in the decision to invade in his “in case of defeat” letter penned on the eve of D-Day.
Knowing the pursuit served a higher calling, a telecom engineer with school-age children left a cushy corporate job to start a church in his house despite tremendous uncertainty over the route and destination.
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With value-based principles, we can choose and follow our most impactful path without certainty but with confidence.
