4 Ways to Make Your Goals Achievable!

Well formed goals, or well formed outcomes, are much more likely to be met than those that are not well formed. There are four criteria for a well formed goal. Well formed outcomes are all stated in positives, individually driven, sensory based, and ecological.

In order to make your goals well formed and achievable you need to have all four of these pieces in place.



1. Positive:

In order to be positive a goal needs to talk about what is wanted instead of what is not wanted. Beware statements like "not broke." This only tells what you don't want and that leaves a lot of options that are not really what you want. For instance "being dead" is one alternative to being broke that few people want. Instead it is probably worth talking about having "more than enough income to cover expenses." Who knows, you may go so far as to talk in terms of having "enough income left after taking care of my family to support my favorite charity."

2. Individual:

This does not mean that you can't work with someone else. This means that you need to be the one in control and driving the outcome. If your goal relies on someones behavior besides your own then you have no way to say it is achievable. The best you can do is hope, pray, and influence the other person's behavior. If, instead, your outcome relied only upon actions that you have control over then it is well formed and therefore more achievable.

3. Ecological:

Beyond hugging trees this means making sure that we take all the good stuff that exists now and maintain the important bits after reaching our goals. In the same way as the tree huggers we need to pay attention to the unintended side effects from our actions. This involves looking beyond the narrow focus of a typical outcome to include other aspects of our lives that may seem unrelated but are impacted by our proposed change.

4. Sensory:

The only way to be sure that we've reached our goal is if we know what it will look, sound, feel, taste, and/or smell like. "Being rich" is not sensory based. "Driving car X and living in house Y" is a statement that can be verified with our five senses.

By applying these four aspects to your goal statements you can vastly improve your chances of reaching those goals.

To Our Success!
Lawrence.