“Are your goals putting limits on you? Set proper goals to inspire success.”

Today we talk about setting the right big-picture inspiring goals.

Are you setting big goals for your life? Don’t make the mistake of setting goals that don’t get you the results you are looking for and don’t inspire you.

We are all familiar with the idea of setting SMART goals. Many of us have set them in the past. How have they worked for you? No that great for me. There is a problem with SMART goals. By their definition they are not big enough and they don’t necessarily inspire us. Making attainable goals does not give us reason to get out of bed excited every day. Now, that doesn’t mean that SMART goals aren’t important, they are. SMART goals are the steps along the way to attaining our Big Hairy Audacious goals.

One of the coaches I work with, Brendon Burchard talks about starting with DUMB goals. These are your big-picture goals. What are DUMB goals? They are Dream-Focused, Uplifting, Method-Based and Behavior Triggering. These goals are the 30,000′ visions that we talked about in Friday’s Coachcast about clarity. They are based on the vision you have for yourself over the next several years. They are about where your journey will take you.

If you want to have that fire in your stomach every day and wake up excited about your journey you must have a clear vision of where you are headed. That is where these big-picture goals come in. Actually, I prefer that you call them trajectories. If you set amazing trajectories and move towards them you will never be disappointed with the outcome. As long as you made progress moving towards your trajectories you will have gotten somewhere.

[tweetthis]Are your goals putting limits on you? Set proper goals to inspire success[/tweetthis]

To set these big-picture goals you need to start from a place of clarity. In the Take-Action items from last Friday you should have some visions built around your top 5 values. Now you want to take that vision and start turning into your big goals. Review those visions you have and determine some trajectories of where you want to go that will move you closer to those visions. By setting these up based on your dreams and vision you will have more excitement about working towards them everyday.

When you start writing down these goals you need to be very specific about them. We know that in reality it’s not the goal we are after but the experience so be specific about the experience. For instance, one of my big goals is to have more disposable income. I’ve defined what I want in this are in the way of amounts, etc. but in building the vision I detailed the experiences this would allow me to have. One of the things I envisioned was having more life experiences with my family and this added disposable income would allow me more freedom in doing that. So as I wrote out my description of this goal one of the things I wrote about was the experience of taking the family on a weekend trip to attend a festival or event that we haven’t experienced before.

Why is this important? Because I have described the experiences I want more than the goal itself I can start living this goal now. Just because I don’t have the extra income yet doesn’t mean that I can’t have similar experiences with my family. We just have to do smaller things on a smaller budget. Maybe we didn’t get to fly to NYC last weekend but we were able to get in the car and drive to the next town for a small festival. This gives me that taste of what I want and helps me to reap the rewards on my way to my ultimate trajectory. Does that make sense to you? You need to create these visions and start living them today.

Now that you have some great big-picture goals its time to start developing the methods of obtaining those goals. Look at your goals and see what it will take for you to live that vision. Maybe it’s learning a new skill, maybe you need a partner, maybe you need to start saving some money or maybe you need to make your business more profitable. The key is to understand what methods you will take to achieve this goal. Write them down.

You know your vision and now you know the methods that are required to get there so start figuring out the behaviors that you need to move towards that goal every day. If you need to learn a new skill then you need to establish a learning behavior. If you need to find partners for your business then you need to start focus on a networking behavior. If it’s higher profitability for your business you need to set behaviors that will improve you profit margins. Start building these behaviors today and work at them every day.

In the beginning I told you that SMART goals are still relevant and now is when you can start working in the SMART goals. Use your SMART goals as stepping-stones along the way to achieving your big goals. So, if learning a new skill is one of the methods to achieving your goal then you set SMART goals for the learning of that skill. We will get into this more in a later Coachcast. For now focus on getting you Big Goals defined.

Take-Action Items:

1. Develop 3 to 5 Big DUMB Goals

2. Write them down with detailed vision of the experience

3. Determine the methods to achieving them and the necessary behaviors for those methods