Get Clear on Your Long-Term Goals

“The clearer you are when visualizing your dreams, the brighter the spotlight will be to lead you on the right path.” – Gail Lynn Goodwin 

One of the first steps toward realizing a goal is to be able to clearly define it. Often, our life goals take the form of vague wishes. For example, we might desire to be happier, smarter, or more confident, but when we look closely at goals like these, it isn’t clear what we actually mean. What would it look like to be happier? Happier than what? How would we know when we’ve reached our desired amount of happiness? 

Research suggests that the likelihood we will achieve a goal is greatly influenced by how precisely we are able to explicate it (Oettingen & Gollwitzer, 2010). This doesn’t mean that we can’t strive to be happier or more confident, rather, we just need to be more specific about what we mean by that. In the example of happiness, we would first need to identify the areas in which we are unsatisfied with our current level of happiness or the factors that contribute to an experience of generalized unhappiness. For instance, perhaps we are dissatisfied with our job and it’s this stress and dissatisfaction that is impeding our ability to enjoy our life. In this case, we might redefine our happiness goal as finding work that is meaningful and enjoyable (at least most of the time). 

As we are exploring the details of our ambitions and identifying quality goals to set, it is critical to also consider how challenging and personally relevant our specified goal is. It has long been observed that we are much more likely to reach goals that are meaningful and have the right amount of challenge (Hall & Foster, 1977). When the goals we are striving toward aren’t important to us, are too easy, or exceed our current ability too greatly, we can find it nearly impossible to find the energy required to pursue them and we likely would burn out or give up before reaching them. 

Exercise: Defining Your Dreams 

Think of your biggest or most important long-term goals and write them down. Start with at least one but no more than 3. You can always repeat this exercise with different goals later on, but it’s helpful to start simple and then build from there. Once you’ve identified your goals, move through them one at a time and ask yourself the following questions: 

● Can I identify specific steps I would need to take to achieve this goal? 

● Is this goal realistic? 

● Is this goal challenging? 

● Can I measure my progress toward this goal? 

● Will it be possible to know when I’ve reached this goal?

● Does this goal matter to me? 

● Do I feel inspired by this goal? 

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions, take a minute to reflect on the goal and consider how you might reframe your specified goal so that it satisfies all the important criteria. If the goal you’ve selected isn’t meaningful to you or doesn’t make you feel inspired, it might be necessary to select a different one. Accomplishing a challenging goal in which you don’t feel truly invested is nearly impossible and might not be worth the energy it would take to reach it. 

Once you’re able to move through your list of goals and answer ‘yes’ to all of the above questions, write out the revised version of your goals. 

Know Your Whys 

“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” – John F. Kennedy 

Your “whys” are the driving factors behind your goals, the intentions that inspire you to action. Exploration of your intentions is an important step in preparing for growth, even in instances when the ‘why’ feels obvious. For example, let’s say your goal is to be debt free. It might seem silly to examine the why behind an objective like this. Of course, we would want to be rid of our debt. Who wouldn’t? However, there are deeper motivations behind the desire to be debt-free, reasons why it is important to us that we don’t have debt. Maybe our why is to relieve our stress, to be able to save for retirement, or to start preparing to have a family. Recognizing these deeper motivations and intentions is instrumental for the change we hope to make.

Research has shown that intentions help shape our behavior (Webb & Sheeran, 2006). In fact, studies suggest that the stronger the intention, the more likely you will be to successfully change your behavior (Ajzen, 2020). The strengths of your intentions are shaped by your mindset. A fixed mindset in which you feel that you are not capable of achieving your goal will result in weak intentions and a lower probability of success. A growth mindset in which you feel that you are not capable yet, but you will be with sufficient effort, results in stronger intentions and increases the likelihood that you will achieve your goal. 

When defining the motivations behind your goals, there are a few important tips discovered by behavioral scientists that will help you set strong and effective intentions: 

Promotion > Prevention 

Frame your goals in terms of promoting positive behavior instead of preventing negative outcomes. For example, you are more likely to reach your goal if your motivation is “I want to be successful at…” than you are if your motivation is “I don’t want to fail at….” 

Acquisition of Competence > Demonstration of Competence 

Being motivated to demonstrate that you are competent or skilled in some area is less effective than being motivated to acquire competence (e.g., “I want to win a jiu-jitsu competition” is better than “I want my friends to see how good I am at jiu-jitsu”). This is another area where a growth mindset is critical. If you have a fixed mindset in which you believe you’re as good as you’re ever going to be, it is impossible to set a goal focused on improving. 

Internal Reward > External Reward 

Motivations that center on how achieving the goal will make you feel are more powerful than motivations that center on how achieving the goal will make you look or what you will gain. For example, if your goal is to get your degree, you are more likely to succeed if you’re motivated by how good it feels to learn than if you’re motivated by having an impressive diploma or a higher earning potential. 

Exercise: Discovering Why 

Using your list of clearly defined long-term goals you wrote out earlier, complete the following sentence: I want to _______ because_______. 

Try to be as specific as possible about the intentions behind your goals and remember to avoid whys that focus on the prevention of a negative outcome, demonstration of competence, and external rewards