Stop Guessing: Turn Vague Aspirations into Measurable Success

One of the obstacles to achieving goals in business, career, or any area of life is vagueness. Poorly defined goals set people up for failure because when a goal is vague, it’s difficult to  plan action steps and know when it has been achieved. “Make more money” and “become a better leader” are examples of vague and poorly defined goals. They are more like intentions and directions rather than goals. A goal should be measurable so that you and anyone else can easily determine whether the goal has been achieved or not. 

There are three main difficulties that vague goals create. The first is success is determined by feelings because the goal can’t be measured. “Make more money” is achieved with any amount of additional money but how much more money will feel like a successful achievement? When a goal can’t be measured then progress can’t be measured and it’s hard to know if the project is on track, ahead of schedule, behind schedule, etc. The second difficulty is that it’s harder to determine the actions, timeline, resources, and manpower that’s required to achieve the goal. It’s difficult to plan as well as more challenging to anticipate potential obstacles in advance. The third difficulty is that people become more susceptible to feeling lost, like not enough progress is being made, or that the work to achieve the goal is never-ending because a vague goal doesn’t have a definite end.

What people need is a clear and measurable goal. The should be measured in numbers such as an amount of money to make or it is binary such as yes/no. Finishing a race in first place is easy to measure. The person either finished first or not.

To define what success looks like for a goal, start with looking at what you are committed to achieving and why it’s important to you. These are not wishes or hopes. Knowing what you are committed to and why grounds you in the purpose for the goal. Use your imagination to envision what successfully achieving the goal looks like. Once you can see what successful achievement looks like, create ways to measure that success. This creates measurable goals. For more details on creating goals, read Smart Goals vs Goal Coding Technology™. We also have a free guide with a video at https://www.lifetrainingpro.com/goal-coding to take you through the steps.

Defining what success looks like for a goal beyond being able to check off that it’s done is being able to connect the goal with why it’s important to you and your life. You determine what success looks like on your own terms.