Setting goals – How flexibility helps us accomplish what we truly desire

Don't be inflexible over goals

Changing destinations

As some of you know I am on my way to Alaska on a bicycle. The original plan was to bike up as far as I could and visit my friends father’s house then rent a car and drive home. This seemed like a reasonable outline for my travels but something happened as it always does. A long-term friendship disintegrated while I was on the road and I am no longer able to visit Ketchikan. What do I do? I am on Vancouver Island about ¾ of the way there but I no longer have a destination. I don’t really care about seeing the city of Ketchikan or spending the extra hundreds it will take just to say I made it, so what now?  

Focus on the meaning not on the goal

I have been an active student of goal setting for the last seven years but like any skill there is a learning curve and many of us miss the point.

A few years back I decided I wanted to double my salary, what I didn’t stipulate was to double my salary for the same amount of work hours! I did double my salary but I was working so much that I found myself enormously stressed. I had to ask myself, why, when I was eating up all that extra money with silly purchases and costly stress relieving activities. Reaching this goal left me worse off than when I started.

Evaluating your goals

Doubling my salary and my stress at the same time made me realize that I needed to constantly evaluate my goals. Now I ask myself a series of questions if a goal starts to give me bad mojo.

• Is this goal out of my reach? Do I need to reduce it? (Tripling my salary in one month)
• Is this goal too obtainable? Do I need to increase it? (Running a 10K, when a half marathon is in my ability)
• Am I fracturing my focus by trying to take on too many big goals at the same time? (I stick with two large goals at a time and a few smaller less challenging ones)
• What is the ultimate purpose of this goal? Will changing it still fulfill that purpose? (My goal to ride to Alaska isn’t that important, what is important was to ride my bike for 3 months and do some soul searching)

I review my goals about every other day and I constantly refine them. If I find that a goal no longer suits me I ask myself how can I alter this goal to get the feeling/outcome that I want? The feeling I wanted for this bike trip was to challenge myself physically/mentally while moving towards a place I really wanted to visit. Now the place is no longer an option and I have to pick another destination. So while the weather is still somewhat manageable I am going to bike across Canada and drop into Michigan to see my dad. This will be somewhat harder than biking to Alaska but I get to see my dad! I am happy with this goal and even though it seems less cool than Alaska, it is cool to me!

The danger of goals

When I first started goal setting I had grandiose visions of making mass amounts of money in a very short time period. This was not realized and I taught my brain something very negative. It learned that goals are things I can fail at and since my goals where so lofty and misplaced, I often would. This made me leery of goals and lowered the value of anything I set in the future.

Setting yourself up to win

I believe now that it is imperative to set goals that you believe you can accomplish and if they suddenly seem unobtainable it is crucial to reduce them to something obtainable. This teaches the mind that goals are positive things that we succeed at over 80% of the time. If you are not hitting that 80% you need to set more believable goals, more passionate goals and be flexible with the outcome. There is no reason to chase something you have no desire to catch.