How To Accomplish Your Goals
The Complete Guide To Sustainable Goal Setting & Achievement
The Situation
What’s your vision for your life or business’s next chapter? Where are you starting from? What are you trying to achieve? What’s your plan for getting there?
These can be daunting and overwhelming questions, and the data shows that the odds are stacked against our success in achieving our aspirations.
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What’s your track record with setting and achieving goals?
So often, we conspire against our own desires when it comes to making real progress in what we say matters to us.
Why is that?
Here are some of the reasons I see, based on my experience and work with hundreds of clients.
Lack of clarity and specificity - How do you establish a plan for “Get healthier” or “Be more successful?” How would you know if you succeeded?
Arbitrary timelines - What’s the point of starting a new regime on the first of the year or month?
Rigid regimes - Willpower and motivation crumble when they collide with unrealistic expectations and life’s inevitable curveballs.
The list of challenges and excuses goes on—procrastination, lack of motivation, absence of accountability, insufficient support, fear of failure, etc.
But the biggest challenge is that in order to achieve goals, you need to set goals that are specific, realistic, planned, tracked, and supported. That’s really hard to do at the beginning because you have no experience or data to establish these guidelines.
Establishing guidelines without data or experience to draw from is one reason so many struggle to achieve goals using otherwise sensible goal-setting concepts like S.M.A.R.T goals (goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).
What to do?
Sustainable goal setting and achievement rely on micro-stepping1 into specific and realistic expectations, a clear and stepwise strategy, honest and diligent tracking, and establishing a support network and contingency plan.
But to better explain how to do all of this, I first have to tell you a bit about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is an idea in psychology proposed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation. This hierarchy is a powerful and persistent framework that explains human growth, societal evolution, and business management. It’s also a tool used in education, healthcare, and personal development.
Although Maslow never configured his hierarchy into a pyramid, the image below is a typical representation.
Interesting, but how does this help us understand how to establish and progress in meaningful aims and aspirations?2
Here are some takeaways that will map onto a goal-setting and achievement framework based on Maslow’s Hierarchy.
Sequential progress - chasing psychological needs like love and belonging or respect and recognition before you’ve acquired the basic needs of food, water, and security is a fool’s errand. Status and friends won’t do you much good if you’re starving to death or immobilized by dehydration.
The law of diminishing returns - the further up the pyramid, the more time and effort are required to get results. Securing food and shelter is relatively easy compared to the complications involved in cultivating intimate relationships or personal excellence.
Ascension is optional - after acquiring your basic needs, who’s to say that continued ascension up the pyramid is “better?” Some of the happiest individuals and societies are quite content without chasing wealth, reputation, or optimized personal performance.
If you’re tracking with these insights, let’s look at how we can layer them onto a goal-setting and achievement process that provides greater, more consistent, and sustainable results.
I’ll also provide some tools and concepts to expedite your success.