Dec. 13, 2022 - Goal Set… and Now What? (Part 2)

Life Coaching: Goal Set… and Now What? (Part 2)

This is a follow up to “Life Coaching: Goal Set… and Now What? (Part 1)”, where I provided some tips on how to proceed once we had set a goal for ourselves, starting with reflecting on:

What’s important about that goal?
What does Success look like? and
Checking with ourselves.

In this article, I continue to provide tips on how to proceed from there:

What Do We Need to Achieve our Goal?

We could think that the self-reflection stages listed above are the most difficult, especially if we’re used to more “logical”, “Cartesian” thinking… But here are more questions leading to more reflection…

What skills, knowledge and strengths do we need?
Which of these skills, knowledge and strengths do we already have?
Which do we need to refine, to develop or to learn from scratch?
What do we need to refine, to develop or to learn these skills, knowledge and strengths?
Which of these “needs” are under our control, and which ones aren’t?
What are the obstacles stopping us from progressing right now?
How can we start to deal with these obstacles?
Do we need a mindset shift to move forward?
What are potential future obstacles, and how can we plan to deal with them?
And what else can we think of?

Who Could Support Us?

Yes, I know – more questions…

Who’s achieved something similar to what we want, or even only part of what we want? How can we learn more about how they did it?
Who could help or support us throughout our journey toward our goal? Think life coaches, mentors, role models, sources of inspiration, sponsors, friends…
If we don’t personally know these people, or don’t know them well enough, how can we connect with them? Yes, this is a hint to “networking”, but in the broader sense of the term… What type of networking are we ready to do, to stretch ourselves to do?
And who else can we think of?

But what if we can’t think of anyone? What if what we want has only been achieved by people so different from us, with a “better” start in life than us, with a “better” education, with “better” connections, etc.?

Well, someone has to be “first”… and that includes each and every one of us…

Also, no one is “reinventing the wheel” – everyone who’s been the “first” in doing something started from something that already existed and then improved it, twisted it, adapted it to make it a “first”…

So, even if we can’t think of anyone in direct connection with our goal, let’s look around for inspiration and let’s keep going forward!

How to Establish a Broad Roadmap

This step can appear “scary”, as in identifying and detailing all the steps we need to take, all the actions we need to carry out, all the deadlines we need to comply with to achieve our goal. But that’s not what I’m referring to here…

The broad roadmap I’ referring to is more like a holiday: we start with a broad destination in mind (a country, a geographical area), then we do some research to refine the destination and the activities to do once there, we start taking some actions to prepare for the trip (vaccination, insurance, etc.), and slowly the whole holiday, from leaving home to getting back home, takes shape…

In terms of construction, this board roadmap could be like a Design & Build construction project, with the design (the steps, actions, deadlines) being developed while the project (our goal) is being build (moving toward achieving our goal)…

So, where do we start? Well, with more questions, of course!

Starting from where we are now:
- What’s one thing we can do right now?
- What steps / actions can we “dump” right now, ignoring timeframe and requirements for now?
- What other steps / actions can we brainstorm?
Starting with the end goal in mind and reverse engineering the path to achievement:
- Where would we like to be in 6 months, 1 year, etc.?
- What do we need to do to achieve the first deadline?
- How can we subdivide our first deadline into smaller timeframes?
- What actions can we assign to each of these smaller timeframes?
- Repeat the process until we’re satisfied with the steps and actions we’ve identified for the short term (whatever “short term” means to us).

When going through this reflection, let’s keep in mind that we’re all inherently capable of creating our very own roadmap, taking the road less travelled rather than the most often travelled one, to achieve a specific goal.

And if we feel like we need some assistance to establish our broad roadmap, let’s not hesitate to get in touch with someone else, such as a life coach, or someone on our “personal board of director”…

What’s Our Commitment Level?

One last thing before we start our journey toward our goal: making sure we know our level of commitment, what we’re ready to do and not do, to move forward:

How much time, money and energy are we prepared to “spend”?
How much fun, relaxation, family time and other opportunities are we prepared to miss?
What are we prepared to say “No” to, to keep saying “Yes” to our goal?
How are we going to sustain that commitment and the changes we need to make? - Think overall well-being!
Who could be our accountability partner(s)?
How will we know we’re progressing in the right direction?

Celebrate the Small Wins and Successes

And last, but not least, let’s remember to celebrate the small wins and successes, to make the journey toward our goal as enjoyable as possible… and not wait until we’ve achieved the whole goal!