Episode 04 - Are You Setting Goals Or Writing A To-Do List? Goal Setting Series - Part 3

APPLE PODCASTS │ SPOTIFY │ GOOGLE PODCASTS

We are finally actually setting those goals!

So grab all your notebooks, sticky notes, highlighters, and colored pens. You name it! Go buy out Staples if you’d like. But you don’t actually need all those things. Just The Upgraded Goal Setting Workbook will do. 

Setting a strong foundation first by reflecting on how our previous year went and the vision we have for our future we can setting meaningful goals and actions that will actually get us where we want to go without burning ourselves out.

We are going to reverse-engineer our goals from the vision we set in the last episode and start by identifying our most important focus areas for this year. Then decide on our goals or outcomes, and finally plan the actions we are going to take to actually achieve those goals.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why not every focus area of your life needs a goal

• How a brain dump list can set you up for success 

• Keeping your goals flexible

• The importance of only planning in detail for 90 day increments 

Full Transcript:

Welcome back to another episode of the Upgraded Career Podcast. On today's show, we are finally here. We're finally actually setting those goals. So get out your upgraded goal setting worksheet. I'll link to it in the show notes at Nicole Case speaks.com/podcast/zero four. If you haven't already download.

So grab that. Get all your notebooks, your sticky notes, your highlighters, your colored gel pens, you name it. Go buy out staples if you'd like, but you actually don't need all those things. Just the worksheet we'll do. But hey, I love a good sticky note colored pen session. And of course I walked around TJ Max this week and came home with five brand new notebooks.

So I'm not here to judge. So let's dive. So we are going to be reverse engineering our goals from our vision that we sat in the last episode. We're gonna start by identifying our most important focus areas for the year, then deciding on our goals or outcomes, however you wanna think about that, and then plan the specific actions we're going to take.

Again, we're gonna reverse engineer our big vision for ourselves. So setting goals can really be overwhelming, and one of the reasons why people don't achieve their goals is because they set too many of them and then they get stretched in too many different directions and then they burn out. Does that sound familiar to anyone over here raising my hand myself?

Well, we're not gonna do that here. We're not gonna do that this year, but we're also not gonna make this super complic. So to start breaking this down, let's first think about the focus areas in our life, in our lives. So what are the areas of your life that would benefit that vision you set? So some examples could be health and wellness, financial relationships, community, faith and spirituality.

Professional. I mean, I mean, it could just be as simple as just two focus areas that are just personal and professional. I did that one year recently, just I was like, two buckets, two focus areas, just personal and professional, and that's it. Because really not area of, not every area of your life needs to have a focus, right?

You don't have to focus on every single area of your life every year. And frankly, we can't give that special focus every year. Not to say again that you're not doing something in that bucket of your life, it's just that it's not a growth focus area this year or in this in this season. So for example, this year I've decided that community is not going to be a focus area for me.

And for me, community means volunteering, being part of other groups or organiz. That kind of stuff. I had been the co-president of a women's leadership group for four years and on the board for over six years, and I stepped back from that leadership role and then turned down three other groups who wanted me to be on their leadership teams.

Now, this isn't to say that I'm not doing anything in my community. I still attend events. I'm a volunteer mentor coach for a different women's leadership. But I'm not focused on growing in this area this year.

So I'm not adding any new groups to my list and I'm saying no to leadership positions in the groups that I'm already a part of. When I was asked by one of these other groups to be a part of the leadership team, it was really easy for me to say no. Well, I mean, of course I wanted to say yes cuz that's my natural tendency to say yes.

But I was confident in my saying no because I know that that's just not an area I'm focused on this year. And what that is doing is that it's freeing me up to be focused in other areas this year that are really important. And as driven and ambitious women, we tend to wanna do all the things and we're we wanna help everybody and we wanna support everybody.

And we can either put that pressure on ourselves because again, you just are drawn to these positions, people are drawn to you and like you would make a great addition to this leadership team. Please come and support us. We'd love to have you. I get it. It feels really good to be wanted. And again, you want to support in so many different ways.

So we might put pressure on ourselves, you know, to, to sign up for these things or say yes to some of these things. And we get pressure from other areas too, right? So we get pressure from society to focus. Certain places in our life we maybe we're comparing ourself to others. Just because your sister has a goal to read 52 books this year does not mean you have to have that same goal.

It's admirable, it's cool. Reading books is great, right? But I just, that's just not a focus area for me this year specifically. Right. You might get pressure from your boss to focus in a particular area, or just again, your friends and family we're constantly getting this pressure. And all these signals and messages that we need to be working on ourselves in this area, growing in this area, and, and again, it's really awesome to want to continue to grow and develop, but frankly, we just, we can't spread ourselves so thin because

the truth is we can't focus on every area of our. Well in this way, right? It's not to say that you aren't doing things in these various buckets that you've figured out for yourself, it's just that you don't need to have a goal associated with it every year. And, and again, I'm sure if you would want to achieve things in these focus areas of your life, you probably wanna do it really well with quality and sustainability.

You don't wanna just check it off your box, right? So what's the magic number on focus areas or goals? Well, the answer is there isn't one. It really just depends on, again, where you're at in, in your life and what season you're in. And it depends on how long and how much effort it's gonna take and how much time and effort you have to spend in these areas.

Right? So there is no magic number. Or even even a number that I can recommend to you . And then when we get into goals, there's also no magic number on goals. What I would say is think about what would feel achievable, what would feel really good, and what would feel stressful and overwhelming, whatever that is for you.

Whatever physical reaction, visceral reaction, you're. Um, then you know that that's something that maybe I need to back it off a little bit, or, you know what, maybe I'm not pushing myself enough. Maybe I can stretch myself a little bit more. Or maybe you just start with a few and you can always add, right.

No rules. You get to choose. You are in charge. . Okay. So once you've decided where you wanna focus the various focus areas or buckets, if you will, that you wanna focus on, then you can break down each focus area even further to get into the nitty gritty of setting specific goals. So let's say your vision was that a successful woman has a healthy mind and body, whatever that definition is for you, whatever healthy mind and body means to.

That's the vision that you have for yourself this year, and so maybe a goal to support that vision of being healthy, having a healthy mind and body. Maybe that means getting seven to eight hours of quality sleep most nights. So you've decided that health and wellness is kind of the bucket that you wanna, one of the buckets that you wanna focus on this year.

And so a goal to support that again, Working on your quality of sleep. So once you identify that goal, then I want you to pause just real quick and ask yourself, what will achieving this goal do for you? Get crystal clear about how achieving this specific goal supports your overall success and vision.

This is just a double check, right? Because if it doesn't align with your vision, then I encourage you to really think about if this goal is something that you wanna spend your energy and resources on, right? Because your energy and your resources, if that's going out, you have less to go out to something else.

And, and I want you to think about this at work as well. So if you're setting goals with your team or your boss sets a goal for you, I want you to stop and think about what achieving this goal is going to do for your team, for your com, for your customers, for the company. If it doesn't seem to connect to a broader company goal, you have to ask why are you working on it?

 I cannot tell you how many times I've seen. Teams and individuals just get so bogged down in just a bunch of crap work that just isn't, that just doesn't matter, it's not moving the needle. It's. Supporting the business in any other way. And so they feel that and they realize that, and they're just like, why am I here? Why am I doing this? I have so many conversations with clients and with people who are just like my work.

It does not matter. Like it doesn't, there is no purpose to my work, and I'm not even saying like, oh, it serves a higher purpose. No, it's, it's just that like my work is just busy work. If I stopped doing it, nobody would notice or care. Well, my boss would probably care because they're giving me this task to do and this work to do.

But the bigger picture, like if I stopped doing this work, it would not matter to the company. And I can tell you that if you aren't working on something that supports the company, It's gotta be a lot harder. It's gonna be a lot harder to be seen and valued as a strategic leader and move up, especially the higher up in the organization you get.

This is where people get stalled out when there are conversations being had behind closed doors about who's getting the promotion, who's getting the raise, that kind of stuff. Or even, God forbid, who, what team is gonna get cut. Right? They're looking at the impact that you're making on the business, and I can tell you that the team.

Makes really pretty beautiful PowerPoint presentations is not the team that gets to the top of the list of the team that wants to get, that's going to get saved in a restructure situation, right? It's the team that is digging in and doing really impactful, important work to the business that if they stopped doing that work, the business would suffer really, really greatly.

And that's, and that's also true again, just as an individual when they're having conversations. Who's gonna, who's getting cut or who's getting a promotion? They're talking about the people who are doing really impactful work. And so if you find yourself spinning your wheels on things that just aren't supporting the broader company vision and the broader company objectives, then you have to ask yourself, why are you.

Okay, back to our goal of getting seven to eight hours of quality sleep most nights. So now once you've landed on a meaningful goal, I want you to brain dump a list of all the things you could do to support that goal. This is what I call my big list of possibilities. There are no rights or wrongs or limitations here at this point.

This is just a list of all the ideas that you can think of that would support that goal. And I personally have been working on my quality of sleep for a few years now because I know the research is out there that demonstrates that if you are getting. Quality sleep in this way, seven to eight hours of quality sleep that you are waking up, refreshed, energized, ready to go.

Your brain is firing on health cylinders. You're able to have, you know, make decisions and just perform really, really well when your body is fully rested because it's in sleep where your body is repairing all of the damage that we've done to. During the day, right? So again, getting really quality sleep is so important, and I recognize that it's an important piece to being a high performer

so here's my brain dump list of things that I could do to support my goal of getting seven to eight hours of quality sleep. I could set an alarm to start winding down every night to signal, Hey, it's time to start winding down. I could create a wind down routine for one. Um, I could plan for my next day, whether that's writing in a journal or in a calendar or something like that.

Just planning for that next day. Um, I could do some yoga or some stretching. I could do a meditation. I could take melatonin or maybe another supplement that helps with sleep, I could drink one of those, um, sleepy time teas or just a tea, you know, that, that again has, um, Amgens or something like that in it that helps people with, with sleeping.

I could read, I could watch a funny show. Uh, I could reduce my caffeine. I could make sure I'm exercising earlier in the day cuz it's, um, research shows that exercising maybe later on in the day keeps you a little too revved up and then it's a little harder to, harder to go to sleep. Um, and you could reduce, I could reduce my alcohol intake.

And so, um, over the last few years, I have cut out or greatly reduced the amount of caffeine I drink. Now don't get me wrong, I love coffee. And I usually either have just decaf or I drink a half calf on days that I have. Um, I know I'm having a longer day or, or an ear early morning. So I've done that. I have done my gratitude journal for years now.

Um, I always plan for my next day so I can get some of those, that uncertainty of, oh, what's gonna happen tomorrow? What am I doing tomorrow? Um, like I find when. Make sure I'm planning out my day. I'm, I have a specific routine that I do at the end of each workday that kind of help prepares me for that so that whenever I go to bed, I'm not thinking about it.

I already know it's ready to go for the next day. I do take some, um, some antigens and different supplements to help me with sleep. I don't take melatonin. I've never tried that before. But, um, I take some other supplements that seem to. And I drink a special tea that helps me, helps me with sleep with, again, that has different Amgens and things in it, that that helps me relax and, and, and sleep a little bit better at night.

I also notice that I sleep better on the days that I go to the gym. And so I typically work out in the mornings. That just works better for me in general. Out of that brain dump list. Those are the couple of things that I've started with, and if as you're going through and working on, on your goals, if you find that the specific actions that you chose previously, like they're just not either working for you anymore or you're just like, eh, I'm not keeping up with this.

This isn't working. Then come back to this list and try something else. You've already brainstormed. You've already brain dumped all of the possib. You don't have to do that again. I mean, you can, you can obviously continue to add to this list, but it feels good to just come back and revisit this list and just pick something else up.

Right? And you don't have to feel like, oh, I have to completely scrap this entire goal, or I have to completely scrap this entire plan because it's not working. And it's like, well, you've, you've tried a couple of things, it didn't work. That's okay. Come back to this list. Pick, pick a few more and, and move forward.

Right. . And so, um, and so you might again just start with a few things on this list and then slowly add more, which works. So for me, I've, I've started on doing some of these things already over the last few years. So now my focus is to add a couple of things from this list. So I'm gonna start adding in the alarm to start telling me to wind down and probably.

You know, create a wind down routine if I'm gonna do that. Um, but, but one of the things I've already started doing is I'm gonna start reading a few pages of a fiction book on my Kindle in bed. I love to read. Um, I read almost exclusively now business books and professional development books and things like that.

And I love that. But I prefer, I found that I prefer to have hand, um, hard copy books. When I'm reading that type of material, and I, of course I like to get my sticky notes out and write my notes and all of that kind of stuff, and I just, my brain is going whenever I'm, I'm reading those types of books, so I find that I cannot read those in bed, um, at the end of the night or something like that.

That's something I have to read during the day. So I miss reading fiction and I just have not been prioritizing that or just haven't been focused on. And I miss doing that and, and I have a Kindle, but again, I found that reading business books on my Kindle doesn't really work as well for me. And so what I'm experimenting with now is winding down in my comfy bed with my cat and my husband who's over there scrolling something on his phone.

But I don't wanna be on my phone. So the Kindle reading a little bit of fiction on my kind. At night. I'm really excited that I've, I've started doing that over the past few days already, and I'm excited to add that to my routine to help me wind down and go to sleep every night.

Okay, so once you identify the specific actions that you're going to take to work towards this goal, I encourage you to then plan out only in 90 day increments. It can be really. Attempting to want to just, oh, let me just go and plan out my entire year how I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna hit this milestone at this time, and I'm gonna work on this project at this time.

Do you wanna have some larger milestones? Sure. If that works for you, if that. That type of goal. If that, again, if that makes sense for what you're driving towards, then yeah, sure. Plan out a couple of larger milestones, um, in your calendar. But in terms of like really nitty gritty, specific things, I really only recommend planning out 90 day increments just so that you're able to shift and pivot when you.

And I am certainly guilty of this. I think I've shared on this podcast before that I used to have this. Wall calendar system with sticky notes and stuff that I had my entire year planned out. Different milestones, different things like that. And frankly, I had to scrap it after a first couple of weeks because I realized that it just wasn't gonna be realistic, or I had shifted my priorities at one point after a few weeks or after a few months, and it was just, I felt like I had just wasted a ton of, Planning and then didn't even stick to the plan.

And so then I felt like a giant failure when the reality is things in our economy, in our businesses, in our companies, in our lives, they're just, things are just moving and shifting so much faster than I think they just have before. Right. And I think these last several years have really proved that things pop up and in change.

And so this brings me to my last. Point today, which is that we must be flexible with our goals. They are living things and can shift and change over time. And that is okay. You're gonna learn new things, you're gonna get different priorities at work or at home, and you're gonna need to refine your goals or even refine your vision.

And sometimes you don't know if you're gonna even like a goal or wanna stick to it or stick with it until you get out there and start working on it, right?

 I know people that, you know, started on that training and would run their first 5K in their first 10 k in their first half marathon. And they were just found that they were obsessed with running and they kept running races and that's awesome. And then some people I know would have this goal of running a marathon or running a half marathon or like those tough utter races and, and things like that, which also, all of those things, by the way, sound horrible to me, but.

Completely in awe of the people who, who can do them. And I'm, I'm there to help cheer you on, but I'm just gonna stick to running if somebody is chasing me. Right. But anyway, I know some people who have like these goals to like, again, run a marathon or run these really, really difficult obstacle courses.

And so they start training for it and they find that they. And they're utterly miserable the whole time and they get injured and all these different things, and they fall off the protocol for a while and then they're beating themselves up and then they're like, well, I have to do this race. I have to do this thing.

So they get back on the protocol and they keep training even though they're utterly miserable the whole time. And I don't know that, that makes sense to me. It doesn't make especially a goal like that where that's like completely self-imposed, right? This is just a goal. You know, you picked, and if you picked the goal, then the great news is you get to change the goal right?

so again, if you don't like the process or the journey that you're on, it's okay to switch it up. Be flexible. Allow yourself a little bit of experimentation. I don't know if you've ever seen the meme tweet out there by art author Rachel McCarthy James, and it says, all of my plans for the future involve me waking up tomorrow with a sudden sense of discipline and adherence to routine that I have never displayed even once in my life.

And I can't tell you how much I resonate with that quote. I'll have to find it for you all, and I'll put it in the show notes. Out on the website because it's just so often, you know, we get so excited about these plans and these goals and we're like, we're gonna just basically completely change who we are overnight.

And that's just not reasonable. That's just such a high expectation that we're putting on ourselves. That's just right for failure, that is the meat and potatoes of focus areas and goals. So decide on just a few focus areas and just a few goals to support that overarching vision, brain dump list of possible actions that you could take and decide which few you're gonna start off with,

just figure out just a few of those possible actions that you're gonna start and then plan for the next 90 days only. Really resist the urge to go further than that. If you have some bigger milestones or some bigger things that just require a longer, timeline, that, that's fine. But again, I really encourage you to resist the urge, to plan the nitty gritty every single day, every single week type of milestones and type of things.

Keep it just to 90 days that, that level of. , and again, be flexible. If you're finding that these actions aren't working for you, then go back to that brain dump list of possibilities and pick something else. Or if you're just like, you know what? I don't know if I'm really aligned to this goal anymore. Now that I've started with it, something's changed in me, or I just didn't know until I got in here working on it that, you know what?

It's just not that important to me. And that's okay. You can take it off. You get to choose. You are in. So don't forget to download that worksheet out in the show notes. And in the next episode we're gonna talk about the specific habits, boundaries, and potential roadblocks that we need to create or break to ensure that we are actually going to achieve these goals that we set.

So happy goal setting and remember, your career deserves an Upgrade!