5 simple steps to simple, inspirational and manageable (SIM) goals
If you take a moment to think of your goals, you might feel overwhelmed. All of the things you want to attain may seem too complicated and difficult. It may exhaust you to just think about them. Now, picture this. How would you like to have goals that are so simple, so easy that you need only minimal motivation to get yourself to achieve them? Further more, what if those simple goals not only increase your productivity, but also help achieve all the results which the more complex goals promised? What if you had goals which seem really attainable, and make you charged up when you just think of them? If you would like to have such goals, this article is for you.
Clutter really complicates things. Through this exercise, we de-clutter your goals into precise, manageable and simple tasks. Our aim is to make each goal a SIM goal - Simple, Inspirational and Manageable goal. The following five steps help you do just that.
Step 1: Write down your goals
At this stage, just take any one goal which is of primal importance to you, and write it down. Let us say your goal is to get physically fit. But it is not enough to write just that - be specific and write down exactly what it is you need to attain, for example: I want to lose 20 pounds in 6 months time. Check out the effective goal setting guide for more help with this step.
Step 2: Research
This stage is essential. Here, you are leaving the problem domain and progressing to the solution domain. This stage may involve detailed research for some goals, or maybe pretty straightforward for other goals. Ideally, at the end of this phase, you would have found several potential paths you can take to reach your goal. For example, you might find out that you can achieve your weight loss plan by going on an Atkins diet, or by joining a gym, or taking swimming lessons and cutting down on carbs. The importance of this stage is in that it opens up several new paths which you potentially might not have considered before.
Step 3: Know thyself
This part is often skipped in many goal setting guides. Your personality and your character is perhaps the most important consideration when it comes to deciding goals that make sense to you. In this step, you analyze yourself. Are you the kind of person who can get going and never stop until you get through to the goal? Or are you the kind that gets occasional bursts of energy, gets things done, and then go back to a slump? Are you organized, methodical, messy or chaotic? Are you a team player or a lone horse? Depending on all these, you need to analyze the results of the previous step. If you are the kind that loves lists and charts, go ahead and make a comparison chart of each path, stating whether each suits your temperament in areas like individual/team effort, prolonged determination requirement, socializing requirement and any other component which matters to you. Depending on all these, you can choose the most ideal path. If no single path seems ideal, you may want to think outside the box and create your own unique combination, for example your Eureka moment might be lie in the solution: raw food diet on alternate days plus aerobics training on weekends. Anyway, the key is to find a path that charges you up. Keep looking until you find such a path, because the only goals worth pursuing are the ones which charge you up while pursuing it.
Step 4: Break it down!
Now that you have a goal and a path to it that suits you to a T, and inspires you, you can concentrate on breaking it down to simpler and more manageable portions. For example, your original goal may be to lose 20 pounds in 6 months. Now you can break it down to a weekly or monthly weight loss goal, or to a pound-by-pound goal. Losing just one pound is not a scary goal now is it?
Step 5: Merge
Now is the time to merge the problem and the solution together. In other words, now is the time to write your goal down in terms of the path you choose to take to achieve it. It might look like this: Lose one pound this week by taking raw food diet on alternate days, and taking aerobics training in the weekend. Now, assuming you did the third step correctly, this means you are looking forward to a week which is full of activities you love. And at the end of the week, you have attained the result as well - one pound less!
There you go - you have your SIM goal - simple, inspirational and manageable. Once all your goals are transformed to SIM goal, you can find that setting and achieving goals is actually pretty fun. It all adds up to a successful and congruent life.
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