Rethink Goal Setting

This video is about habits being more important than goals. So this applies, of course, to personal life but also a lot of times in the professional setting as well. You know, often, especially as we rise higher up and we’re in more of these leadership positions, we tend to think about goals, right? What are the outcomes? And those are certainly important, but I would argue that habits or systems or processes are far more important than goals. The primary reason for that is whether you’re thinking about personal life or you’re thinking about business is that successful and unsuccessful people, successful and unsuccessful teams, often have the same goals. That’s right, you know, how many people out there want to have a six-pack and make a million dollars and read a book every week, etc.? Right? But there are very few people that actually execute on those goals. So what we’re getting at here is that goals are really an output or a result, right? They’re dependent upon inputs or consistent actions. Right?

So think of it another way. Again, we’ll use maybe a more professional or organizational-focused scenario. If you think, “We want to improve efficiency in XYZ part of the business,” and you say, “Oh, well, it needs to be a SMART goal,” so we want to make it specific, measurable, achievable, results-based, and give it a timeline. So we want to improve efficiency by 10%—they’re specific and measurable, it’s achievable, it’s a specific result. So we want to do 10% over the next 3 months. Okay, well, you haven’t at that point actually addressed how that result is going to happen. It’s sort of like you said, “Oh, I can’t wait to have 10 lbs of tomatoes and 5 lbs of peppers and 3 lbs of strawberries at the end of the summer,” and you just throw the seeds in the ground and you never water them, never fertilize, never weed, never take care of it. Right? There are certain processes that will make the results inevitable. And there’s a neuroscientist from Stanford University, Andrew Huberman, who puts out a lot of great content. I was just watching a podcast he did that was really interesting, talking about this and this idea of taking goals and redefining them so that they are verb-based; they are behaviors. So you can think about a big outcome-oriented goal, but you sort of drill down and define it in verbs or behavioral principles.

So we’ll give a personal example first, not a business one. A personal one might be, “Hey, I want to lose 10 pounds,” whatever. So that’s your goal, right? But you need to boil that down to a verb-based inputs kind of behavioral goal. So you might say, “Well, that could mean I need to do three hours of cardiovascular exercise per week,” and if I look at that, how that fits into my week, that means Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I’m going to jog for 1 hour after work. So you’ve taken what’s a sort of ambiguous goal and you’ve defined it into now a goal that you can actually control, which is, are you going to show up for that hour a day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? So there you have it. You know, a professional example maybe if you say, “Hey, I want to improve my leadership and really improve the climate of my team,” well, what are some actual verb-based sub-goals that would roll up to that big goal? Well, maybe you say, “Once a week, I want to spend one hour getting to know one of my team members on a personal level and better understand how their work supports the big picture for the organization.” So if you were to do that every single week, right, you would be hitting those behavior-based goals or those habits that ultimately lead you to your desired end goal. So it’s really the verbs, the behaviors, the actions, the habits. The habits are the inputs that cascade up to the bigger outputs. So that’s what I want you to think about whenever you’re setting both personal or professional goals. As a leader setting goals for your teams, you can start with an outcome, but you need to think about what are the habits, the processes that need to be done consistently in order to achieve that.

So here is what I want you to do: in groups, you’re going to get into small groups. You can do this in pairs, but it’s also fine to have a handful of people per group, whatever works for the group watching this. I want you to pick one personal goal and one professional goal, and I want you to try to condense that down using the framework I just taught about using it and thinking in terms of verbs, behaviors, and habits. What are the sub-goals, kind of the showing up, that would lead to the big goal? So again, if you say, “I want to improve an XYZ thing,” it’s “I’m going to show up for 40 minutes at this time in this place Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,” whatever it is, right? You’re defining it down into a specific behavior that you can do that becomes a habit that leads to the desired outcome.

So there you have it. Break into small groups, discuss one personal and one professional. I think if you take this and write it down, which is a very important part of goal setting and goal pursuit in order to achieve results more effectively, so you write this down at the end, I think it’s going to help you to live in a much higher state, achieve more both again in work and in life. So thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.