In previous posts, I’ve discussed the importance of setting goals and how they are absolutely essential for success and a more fulfilling life, but how do you get started setting goals?

Especially when you’re first starting out in your career, you may feel overwhelmed with possibilities.

Endless possibility is one of the best aspects of living in a free world, but it can be hard to narrow down where exactly you want to go.

Here’s some guidance on how to set started setting goals.

 

1. Reverse Engineer Your Life: Work Backward from the End

“You are not a manager of your circumstances, you’re the architect of your life’s experience” – Tony Robbins

One thing that few people actually do is sit down and write down a plan for their life.

We put so much thought and planning other things in life such as a vacation or home project, but what’s more important than designing your own life?

One of the best ways to get started setting up your life goals is to practice reverse engineering.

Reverse engineering, if you’re not familiar with the term, is taking a final product or outcome and then thinking backward through the steps that were taken to create it.

Pick a day when you’re feeling fresh, positive, and open-minded and get out a large sheet of white paper. Put on some inspiring music to get in the mood if you wish.

Begin to visualize your end goal: your life once you’ve retired.

The more specific you are, the more powerful this exercise will be.

Where are you living? Who is around you? What pictures are on the wall and what kinds of things are in your house? What activities are you doing daily?

What emotions do you feel? What do you look like? What are you proud of?

As this picture begins to emerge, write freely all of what comes to your mind, no matter how stupid, just get it out.

It’s ok if you don’t come up with a lot the first time. This visualization is something that you should revisit often now that you’ve started to think about it.

Like with many things, it will be continually refined as we progress through life, learning more and understanding more—just start with something.

Now, work backward.

What steps or milestones do you think were taken to get to where you are? Write them down. This step will also take many revisions and will be constantly refined, but just start.

You can separate and organize these milestones into different categories or sub-steps, and practice the same reverse engineering process on these sub-steps.

For example, distilling these down to executable, shorter term goals, run the same process. Just imagine where you want to be in five, ten years from now and work backward.

This is the basic process of reverse engineering…also a great skill for breaking large projects up into smaller tasks, but this should get you started with a long term vision of your life.

 

2. Find Purpose for your Goals

It can be hard to sustain motivation toward goals without deeply understanding the driving forces behind them.

What drives us is pure, deep emotion. These emotions project how we really feel about our mission in our careers and our lives and help us with developing purpose.

Finding the deep emotions behind our goals is pretty abstract, especially when you’re young, but there’s one exercise that helped me a lot, called the Seven Layers Deep Exercise.

It’s a progressive series of questions that guides you toward the deeper, core emotions behind why you’d like to do something. Try it out here.

 

3. Set Short Term and Long Term Goals

Once you have a rough framework of how you envision your career and life to progress, now work on structuring this vision into three goal lists:

1. Short Term Goals: 6-12 months from now
2. Five Year Goals: Where do you want to be in 5 years?
3. Ten Year Goals: Where do you want to be in 10 years?

Begin filling out these lists based on your reverse engineering exercise.

Excellent, nice work.

Just the act of writing goals down makes us 1.4 times more likely to achieve them, according to science.

 

4. Set Smaller, Achievable Goals. Build Momentum.

Another bit of advice that helps is setting smaller, achievable goals initially, especially on your short term list.

Make these some goals that you know you’ll hit.

This creates emotional momentum (dopamine) through success and achievement, helping reward your subconscious and creating more willpower for attacking the harder and more abstract goals.

 

5. Put Your Goals up where you can see them

Once you have your three goal lists, PRINT THEM OUT!

Writing out your goals and putting them up where you see them daily increases your chances of achieving them by up to 42%.

This is a crucial step that few seem to do. (Heck, hardly anyone even sits down to brainstorm goals as you’ve just done!)

You can increase goal achievement even further by moving the location of your goals around often.

Once your brain gets used to seeing something in the same place, it tends to tune it out, so moving these sheets of paper around increases your attention to them.

 

6. Goal Visualization

Once you’ve gotten your goals developed and posted, now you should begin a daily practice of goal visualization.

These articles talk about how goal visualization works and how to do it, but begin a daily practice of visualizing three of you most important short term goals and stick to it.

A visualization practice will help lock in your goals into your subconscious, telling your brain that they are super important. 

You’ll find that your brain will naturally try to find the way toward your goals for you!

 

7. Realize Goals Change

A final piece of advice here is realizing that your goals WILL change with time and that’s OK.

Even airplanes flying across the ocean get blown off course, but they keep making adjustments during flight and eventually arrive at the destination.

Just be open about change and don’t judge yourself too harshly when things change.

You’re WAY ahead of everyone else by just by defining and working toward some sort of plan.

What we really need is a plan that is fun and valuable enough for us to keep working toward.

If it’s not, then change it.

 

Conclusion

It can be a daunting task to sit down and actually design our own lives, but what’s more important than that?

Goal setting is super intimidating because there’s not a set process on how to do it and, of course, it’s different for everyone.

This post outlined several steps and considerations to help you get started setting goals:

1. Reverse engineer your life
2. Find purpose and deeper meaning within your goals
3. Set up long term and short term goal lists
4. Start with smaller, more achievable goals to build momentum
5. Print out your goals and post them up
6. Visualize your goals daily
7. Realize goals shift and may change over time

Once you’ve gotten something down, continue to refine it and concentrate on developing your goals further as you progress in life. Goals point us upward, and if you’re not growing, you’re dying.