Unleash Your Potential #40 - Short-term Goals

Douglas: Welcome to the Unleash Your Potential Blog, what question can I answer for you today?

FutureFocus: What are some effective ways to set and achieve short-term goals? 

Douglas: This is a great question! Thank you for asking. Short-term goals are where all of the most meaningful action happens. It is important to have big long-term goals, but in my experience, there is a lot of room to get lost in the long-term goals. If we focus only on the long-term goals it can be very easy to get lost in the weeds, lose focus, and give up. Why? Primarily because when we are focused on the long term it is difficult to see progress. If your goal is to have $1,000,000 in your retirement portfolio and you are only focused on the final number, when you only have $100,000 in your portfolio, it can feel very daunting.

Short-term allows us to achieve and celebrate little wins. When I was in my thirties, I had a goal to run a 5k. For a person who had never run a 5k, 1k, or more than from the office to the kitchen, this was a huge goal. It took me months to get to that goal. I started by walking around the block every day. From there I started walking two blocks. After a while, I was jogging those blocks. Without detailing every step, it was the small goals that got me to eventually run a 5k on Thanksgiving Day and then a military-style obstacle course. It was the interim goals where I made progress, not the end goal of running a 5k.

Achieving short-term goals starts by having clear long-term goals. Where do you want to be in 5 years? How much money do you want to save for retirement? Where do you want to take your next big vacation? What would a healthier lifestyle look like? These are goals that can’t be achieved quickly. They require lots of time, energy, and resources. Once you have these large, long-term goals, you need to break them into manageable pieces. These are your short-term goals.

You may be asking, what is a manageable piece? There is no clear-cut answer. Sometimes for me, short-term is daily. Or it can be weekly. My sense is any longer than weekly and you are moving towards long term. The key to short-term goals is they are reachable fairly quickly and with much less effort. If you have broken down a long-term goal, but the smaller goals still take months or weeks, you may want to consider even smaller action steps. Remember that in my 5k story, my first goal was walking around the block. The reason that programs like “Couch to 5k” work is because they start with incredibly small goals. The key is to make the goal small enough that you mostly guarantee success. Once you can celebrate the small win, it becomes easier to move to larger goals.

Setting and achieving short-term goals is all about thinking smaller. Every big goal can be broken down into smaller action steps. When you have a big goal, brainstorm all the pieces that go into that big goal. Then look at the pieces, treat them as goals, and ask the question again, what action steps make up that goal, rinse and repeat until you get down to a level that works for you. It may be that walking around the block is still too big a goal, then you break it down into smaller goals like putting on your jogging shoes…or even purchasing jogging shoes…there is no such thing as “too small” a goal as long as you can achieve it, celebrate it, and build on it.

As I write this, I think about my current goal of writing 100 days of blogs. That is a huge goal. My average entry is 700-800 words and multiplied by 100 that is 70,000 words! My dissertation was only 50,000 words and I spent a year writing that. If I was focused on the end goal of writing 100 days or 70,000 words, it would be easy to give up. Instead, I only think about the next day. When I get up, I don’t think about the whole project, I think about what I am going to write today. Some days that is easy and some days that is hard, but I can manage one day. And when I hit “publish” I celebrate the one day. That is the magic of short-term goals, when created correctly they build to bigger goals.

What is your little win for today? What short-term goal can you set that you can accomplish today? How will it lead to your long-term goals? All of this lies in planning and preparation. Maybe your goal for today could be to figure out what your short-term goals are. Whatever they are get out there and do them!

I hope my answer sheds some light on your question. If you want to dig into this concept further, I encourage you to reach out and set up a conversation. In the meantime, check back tomorrow for the next question in the Unleash Your Potential Series!

Be Well!

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