How to set an achievable goal for a new skill
The most difficult time to know whether your goal is achievable is when you are setting out to do something that you’ve never done before. Yes, most goals push you to do something you haven’t done, but, in this case, I’m talking about a completely new skill. Let’s take push ups (insert your own skill here.) You’ve never done a push up before and now you want to do X push ups in Y amount of time. What should that X be? What should the Y be? There are so many variables involved, there’s no possible way that you can set a number without doing some testing. How many can you do now? What is your level of fitness? How often do you work out? Do you need coaching on how to do a push up safely? And so on. So what’s the solution? My approach is to make an initial guess and set a re-evaluation point; a time to reassess if the original goal was actually achievable. This is not an opportunity for me to wimp out of my goal, it’s an opportunity to objectively reassess my goal. So a the beginning of the year, I set a goal to be publishing 4 YouTube videos a month by the end of the year. I’ve never published the sort of videos I want to publish before, so I set an interim goal of publishing two by the end of June. I assume there is a learning curve to publish the first and the second one should be more indicative of the time it will take to produce the videos.
 
Setting big goals
Another school of thought says to set BIG goals – shoot for the stars, you’ll at least end up at the moon! This is okay if you don’t mind settling for less. If you’re hard on yourself, like I am, this advice can be the kiss of death. For several years I followed this advice in my business and I ended up so discouraged, I nearly quit my business. This clearly does not work for me!
 
PATH goals
After setting BIG goals and going nowhere, I started to pay more attention to the process rather than the destination. I started my work with habits; those things we do every day that impact the quality of our lives and our work every day and into the future. I started to shift my attention and attachment away from the final end goal, to the every day/week habit that would take me in the direction I wanted to go. Now I do SMART PATH goals.
  • Process oriented (focused on the process of making the goal happen)
  • Action based (what specific actions would I need to take to make the goal happen?)
  • Template (which actions will I need to repeat and gain mastery over in order to achieve the goal?)
  • Habit cultivating (how can I make this part of my routine? How often do the actions need to take place for the result to be realized?)
I can measure my success based on the process as well as the final result. This gives me access to two ways of addressing a similar goal in the future. Now I can change the final outcome based on the process or I can change the process, based on the the final outcome.
 
Now my success is measured by the day to day actions rather than the final outcome and the final outcome is celebrated as a result of the daily or weekly actions. So now my video project becomes: I want to be producing 4 YouTube videos a month by the end of the year (SMART part of the goal) by investing 2 hours per week writing, shooting, editing and publishing the videos (PATH part of the goal).