Goals Don't Matter After You Set Them

This is a summary of my latest video.  If you’d rather watch that, you can do it here.

How are you doing with your New Year’s resolution?  At least 91% of people who set New Year’s resolutions have given up by the end of January every year, so if you’re still keeping yours, you are ahead of the game.  And, it’s exactly why I don’t set them.

That’s probably close to the percentage of people that fail at any goal they set.  I spent a lot of years in corporate America, and in every one of those years, each of us had to set SMART goals – you know, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.  The goals are supposed to be specific to you, something that can be proven to be reached with metrics, realistic to achieve, relevant to your values and long-term objectives or the company’s, and must be completed by a certain date, usually the last day of the year or performance evaluation cycle.  Whether or not those goals were realized was supposed to play into your evaluation or rating for the year.  Sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn’t.  Close to the end of my corporate career, I realized that the important thing about goals is in setting them.  Setting goals and speaking them or writing them down (or, even better, both) puts your intention to move in the direction of those goals out there in the universe.  Intention is powerful.  I’m sure you’ve heard where your intention goes, energy flows.  That’s exactly what we’re talking about here.  You’ve set the INTENTION to achieve a certain goal, and that naturally means your energy and the energy of the Universe are flowing in that direction.  That’s all good, and I’m completely in favor of it.  But, life happens.  Nothing ever turns out exactly like you planned it or pictured it in your mind.  And guess what.  That is completely okay.  The only constant is change, so as time goes by, you may need to change those SMART goals – maybe it’s just a tweak, or maybe they need to be blown up and a brand new goal set.  We spend too much time ashamed that we didn’t meet a goal that we had no control over.  What if we just let it go?  What would be possible, if you realize that any kind of control is just an illusion?  Instead of pushing through to achieve a goal that doesn’t matter anymore, what if you simply changed that goal to better align with the direction you want to take in your life or your career?  

Setting goals is worthwhile, because that allows you to act with intention.  But don’t be so attached to achieving them.  Focus your energy on that intention and see just how much easier life can be.