Planning For The Year Ahead (Part 2)

Last Monday we looked at Planning For The Year Ahead (Part 1) which suggested reviewing how you’ve done in various areas of your life over the past year, and selecting three areas to focus on in the coming year.

Today we will look at how you can make a realistic action plan for each of those three areas. Rather than invent my own method, I’m going to use a technique called SMART goal-setting.

Setting Goals the SMART way

A SMART goal is one that is:

S pecific

M easurable

A chievable

R elevant

T ime-bound

You may have heard of this mnemonic before, but I invite you to actually apply it to at least one area of your life that you want to improve next year. Try it along with me right now, or bookmark this page and come back to it when you can sit down for an hour or so without interruption to really think about what you want to achieve next year.

I’ll use health as an example since that is an area most people want to work on, and show how you can develop a vague intention into a SMART goal.

Specific

You have to be very clear what you want. It’s not enough to say “I want to be fit.” Do you want to be fit so that you can:

a) Enjoy participating in sports,

b) Feel and look good, or

c) Live to a ripe old age?

Knowing why you want something is a big part of developing the motivation to work on the goal. So a specific goal may be:

“I feel and look good because I am fit.”

Measurable

How will you know when you have reached your goal? There must be a way to measure your target, as well as how close you are to it. If the goal is to be fit for instance, you can measure it in terms of:

a) your Body Mass Index (BMI)

b) how long you can run for without stopping

c) resting pulse rate

Building on the previous step, you now have a specific, measurable goal:

“I feel and look good because I am fit enough to run a marathon.”

Achievable

It is better to set a small goal and achieve it, than a big one and miss it. You are more likely to give up when you still seem so far from a big goal that it’s pointless to keep trying. Conversely, when you can practically see yourself hitting a smaller goal, the incentive to keep going is tremendous since you can almost taste success.

Based on your track record and current state, see if your goal needs adjusting. If you have never run anything more than 5km and are too busy to train seriously, a full marathon may not be achievable soon. Perhaps you could settle for a half marathon of 21 km instead or even a quarter marathon of 10km.

Your specific, measurable, achievable goal may now be:

“I feel and look good because I am fit enough to run a half marathon.”

Relevant

It’s easy to lose track of the original goal in your excitement to get going on what you think you want to do. Double check to make sure that the goal is relevant to what you really want.

If the purpose of running a half marathon is to look and feel good, you will be sabotaging yourself by having a huge meal after each training run and putting on weight in the process.

Keep the goal relevant by making sure that when you achieve it, you will feel and look good, rather than run a half marathon for the sake of running it and forgetting why you were doing it in the first place.

Your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant goal may now be:

“I feel and look good because I am fit enough to run a half marathon in a size 10 T-shirt.”

Time-Bound

A goal is a dream with a deadline.

- Napolean Hill

For some reason, your brain doesn’t take a goal seriously unless there is a deadline. Have you ever noticed that your most productive week at work is the week before you go for a long vacation?

Give your goal a deadline and you’re halfway there already. The deadline makes the goal some sort of priority status in your subconscious.

Your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound goal is now SMART. It may look like this:

“I feel and look good because I am fit enough to run a half marathon in a size 10 T-shirt by June 2009.”

Now isn’t that much better than just saying “I want to be fit”?

Get SMART now!

Whatever you want to achieve next year, check now to make sure that the goal is SMART. I’ll walk the talk by doing the same. Besides the fitness goal above, I’ll work on my meditation and blog goals:

“I’m patient and accepting because I sit still for at least 10 minutes at night experiencing the oneness of all things, making this a daily habit by Easter 2009.”

“My blog benefits enough people to generate a monthly income of at least $800 by end 2009.”

How about you? Do share your SMART goals in the comments so that we can learn from one another!



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Posted by Daphne | December 15, 2008 | in Work Hard


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13 Responses to “Planning For The Year Ahead (Part 2)”

  1. Middle Way
    December 15th, 2008 @ 11:18 pm

    Very powerful tools here! You have framed your goals in such a positive and motivating light that one gets excited just reading them! Great work Daphne!

  2. Lance
    December 16th, 2008 @ 4:55 am

    What is great about the SMART method is how specific the final statement becomes. And with it being specific, it much more likely that you’ll achieve it. I like how you gave an example and walked all the way through the different steps – it really added meaning to what this does.

  3. Daphne
    December 16th, 2008 @ 7:13 am

    @ Middle Way, thanks for your very positive and motivating comment! I visit your blog regulalrly and am impressed with how specific your financial goals are too. As Lance says, that makes it very likely you’ll achieve them and I can see you’re halfway there already.

    @ Lance, you’re so right. Most new year resolutions don’t get done because they were not specific enough in the first place for us to know what we’re gunning for. I’m a great believer in specificity and I can see you are too. Good to have a fellow believer!

  4. Celes | EmbraceLiving.Net
    December 17th, 2008 @ 3:30 am

    Hi Daphne! :) I found your blog from Yan’s Blogging for Beginners. Great post and I am an advocate for setting specific goals! If goals are fuzzy to begin with, we will end up getting fuzzy output as well – garbage in, garbage out.

    (By the way, are you a Singaporean?)

  5. Daphne
    December 17th, 2008 @ 7:27 am

    Hi Celes, thanks for dropping by! GIGO does apply to much in life, especially our thinking process. You’ve got a good blog going; I enjoyed your last post on imposed and liberated purposes.

    (Yes, I am.)

  6. Stacey / Create a Balance
    December 17th, 2008 @ 11:27 am

    Your SMART goals are inspiring. I’m taking the last two weeks of 2008 to set goals for 2009. I’ll be sure to incorporate your suggestions. Thanks!

  7. Celes | EmbraceLiving.Net
    December 17th, 2008 @ 11:41 am

    Thanks a lot Daphne! I’m a Singaporean as well, so it’s definitely great to see a fellow Singaporean on the block with the same passion! :D Look forward to getting to know you better! :)

  8. Daphne
    December 17th, 2008 @ 6:07 pm

    @ Stacey, glad that my post helped someone! Thanks for your comment, and all the best for 2009!

    @ Celes, sama sama. I’m sure we’ll be in touch!

  9. East Meets West
    December 22nd, 2008 @ 6:05 am

    Daphne,

    My SMART goal will therefore be I want to just burn the calories that I put on at least 3 times a day and that means going to the gym twice a week to run 2km on the threadmill without dying of a heart attack – and give up the idea of losing the 15kgs I’ve put on since the last child’s birth.

    BTW, how do you manage to work, write a demanding blog like this, read alot etc and still participate in forums like the Sgp Exp?

  10. Daphne
    December 22nd, 2008 @ 8:32 am

    Hi EMV,

    That’s a great SMART goal! Years ago I hated running but this year made it a habit to run everyday and actually started to like it, look forward to my daily run, and miss it when for whatever reason I didn’t run. So my encouragement to you is to just get started, because it will get easier after a while.

    One suggestion is to read your goal again and remove any words that refer to things you DON’T want, like ‘heart attack’. Your brain has a funny way of internalising the words you tell it everyday so be careful what words you feed your brain…

    The simple answer to how I do all this is probably because I don’t have children? ;) I’ve also cut a lot of clutter out of my life to focus on what’s really important to me. In fact I started this blog because I have time on my hands now and want to do something meaningful with that time.

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