Being a soccer player and a soccer coach, I really like starting this section with this quote:
“Life is like Soccer. You need goals” – Unknown
I have my friend who gets very excited about New Year. Not for the celebrations, well partly maybe, but mostly for the opportunity to write down his goals for the year, in paper and place in his wallet that he carries around all year. I have another friend who takes it further with an accountability partner, and submits his written goals to his accountability partner so that someone can continue to nudge him and remind him throughout the year.
Whether it is in your personal life or corporate/business life, goals setting is an essential characteristic in leadership. It gives you a sense of direction, purpose, motivation, focus and helps clarify the importance of why you do the things you do. By setting goals, you are giving yourself a target to aim for (SMART/HARD) or setting up yourself for daily continuous action towards the target (PACT). I will distinguish these 3 frameworks below.
Goals like we know are difficult to set and keep going on them. Those who do this, what techniques do they use to stay the course? First is the mindset. The right mindset is essential in working and achieving your goals since we tend to value things with immediate gratification and tend to shy away from things with immediate “steep” cost. When you put the present cost into the future and put the future benefit into the present, you tend to stick to your actions that lead to your goals better.
There are different models that can be used to set goals.
SMART Goals: Specific Measurable Realistic Achievable and Time-bound
HARD Goals: Heartfelt Animated Required Difficult – Mark Murphy
PACT Goals: Purposeful Actionable Consistent/Continuous Trackable
SMART:
Specific: Your goal should be clear and specific, so you can focus your efforts or feel truly motivated to achieve it.
Measurable: Your goal should be measurable so that you can track your progress and stay motivated. Assessing progress helps you to stay focused, meet your deadlines, and feel the excitement of getting closer to achieving your goal.
Achievable: Your goal also needs to be realistic and attainable. It should stretch your abilities but still remain possible.
Relevant: Your goal should matter to you, align to your mission statement other relevant goals.
Time-bound: Your goal should have a target date, so that you have a deadline to focus on and something to work toward.
HARD:
Heartfelt: If you don’t really care about your goals, there’s not going to be much motivation for you to achieve them. To achieve more, make certain you’re going after what you want more than anything else. HARD goals are not just nice-to-have if they’re not too much trouble. A HARD goal has to be something which promises you more value than any other goal imaginable and therefore you’re not going to let anything get in the way of making it happen.
Animated: HARD goals are so vivid and alive in your mind that if you don’t reach them, you’d feel like something’s missing in your life. You can and should use the same visualization and imagination techniques which some of the greatest minds in history have used to make your goals come to life in your imagination. Geniuses use their imaginations to soar and so should you.
Required: Procrastination is the killer when it comes to realizing your dreams. HARD goals overcome this by using cutting-edge techniques from science such as behavioral economics. You have to convince yourself achieving your goals is a necessity, not an option. If you make the future payoff of your HARD goal so much more satisfying that what you’re experiencing today, you automatically make your HARD goals look a lot more attractive – and the more attractive they are, the greater the urgency you will feel to get going on them right away.
Difficult: When it comes to difficulty, there’s a definite sweet spot to aim for. You want to set goals which are so hard they will force you to tap into all the talents you possess so you’ll feel a sense of achievement. On the other hand, you don’t want your goals to be so difficult you give up without even trying. What you have to do is assess your past experiences, figure out where your goal-setting sweet spot is and then set goals within that sweet spot which will propel you forward to the stellar results you want.
Putting everything together: The generally accepted wisdom in business is execution is more important than vision – it’s better to fully implement a half-baked idea than it is to get stuck in analysis paralysis and do nothing. That may be true but if you aspire to accomplish impressive things, set HARD goals which are so powerful implementation won’t be a problem. Get your goals right and implementation will take care of itself. That’s the power of HARD goals to move you from where you are now to where you want to be in the future.
Ref: https://public.summaries.com/files/samples/hard-goals.pdf
Where the SMART goal focuses on the outcomes, the PACT method focuses on the output. PACT goals are about continuous growth rather than an achievement, which makes it a much more powerful alternative to SMART goals.
PACT is an acronym for Purposeful, Actionable, Consistent/Continuous and Trackable. This focuses on taking action, allows you to reassess, and encourages continuous progress. Very good for long term goals.
These four factors combined make for great goal setting:
PURPOSEFUL: Your goals should be related to your long-term purpose in life, not just relevant to you in the moment. It’s much harder to stick to a goal when you don’t really care about it. But, when your goals are aligned with your passions and missions in life, you will feel a lot more motivated.
ACTIONABLE: Good goals should be based on factors within your control. Your goals need to be actionable and controllable. This helps you shift your mindset from the distant future outcomes to present outputs that are within your reach today. Take actions today instead of planning for tomorrow.
CONTINUOUS: An important aspect of goal setting is making sure that the actions that you should take towards it are simple and repeatable. Many goals are not reached simply because of something called choice paralysis. Choice paralysis refers to having so many options you end up spending all of your time doing research instead of doing things that will help you progress towards completing your goal. Continuous goals have an air of flexibility to them which allows you to change your approach once you start and as you learn more. Goals should be about continuous improvement rather than reaching an achievement or end goal.
TRACKABLE: Trackable not measurable. Statistics are overrated and do not apply to many different types of goals. A “yes” or “no” system for goal tracking works well. Did you complete the task or not? Have you called three hot leads? Have you published your daily blog post? Yes or no? This makes progress towards your goals much easier to track.
PACT Goals is a technique useful in setting long-term goals that measure your output. This helps you to set realistic goals that help you feel motivated to achieve your goal.SMART Goals is a highly versatile goal setting technique and can be useful for setting both short-term and long-term goals that measure your outcome. But this may lead you to set overly optimistic goals which you may not be able to achieve and result in failure to achieve your set goals.Both PACT and SMART goal-setting strategies are great ways to set goals.Each goal-setting strategy, SMART and PACT goals will suit different people with different needs.
Ref: PACT: https://1huddle.co/blog/outdated-smart-goals/