Four Goal Setting Mistakes

Goal setting is an interesting process. There are several specific features that make goals attainable. Goals become “well formed outcomes” when they are stated in positives, individually driven, sensory based, and ecological. This article will help you identify where your goals may not be well formed.

Here are four big mistakes that may be keeping you from reaching your goals. How many of these are you making at the moment?

Mistake 1. Focusing on what you don’t want instead of what you do.

Beyond the idea that you get more of what you focus on (and who wants more of what they’re trying to get rid of?) this is a matter of training yourself to see things differently. What are you looking for now and in the future?

Mistake 2. Relying on the actions of others to reach your goals.

Any thing that is not driven by your actions is out of your control. There is no way to *make* other people do things. The only tools you have are your own behavior. Besides which, most of the times what we really want is to respond in a more positive way and we try to take the easy way out by removing the action rather than changing our reaction.

Mistake 3. Ignoring the positives of the current situation and losing them when we create a new situation by reaching our goals.

There’s a story of a man totally focused on giving your family the big house, the new car, the vacations. He was working 18 hour days and barely seeing the family he was working to support. When he described the wonderful life he was creating there was one thing missing: him. He had set a goal that killed him from the stress of reaching it. I don’t know about you but breathing is one of those positives I’d like to keep in my life no matter what the goal. By maintaining the good things in our life we are more likely to reach our goals and a lot more likely to actually enjoy life once we’re there!

Mistake 4. Having no way of telling when the goal has been reached.

If you aren’t seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling something there is no way for you to “measure” it. I agree that everything measurable is not worth having and not everything work having is measurable. However, there is always some way to tell through our senses when we’ve reach our goals or they are just guesses at things we might never attain.

By avoiding these four mistakes you can create “well formed outcomes” in your goal setting process.