How to Set Meaningful Goals

You've probably set goals for yourself—goals like New Year's resolutions, nutrition and exercise goals, or goals for work. And you're probably familiar with the concept of setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-specified) to increase the chances that you'll achieve those goals. But there's another important aspect to setting goals that shouldn't be overlooked: the idea of setting meaningful goals. Without that focus, you can spend your time and energy chasing goals that don't really matter.

What are meaningful goals?

Meaningful goals are goals that

• Help you be true to and bring out the best in yourself
• Touch you at your emotional core
• Connect you to a sense of purpose
• Inspire you to work toward your goals, even if the effort involves risk and sacrifice
• Add value to and improve your life over the long term

The pursuit of meaningful goals is rewarding in and of itself. It pushes you to learn and grow, step out of your comfort zone, and come closer to being the best you can be. You'll know you've chosen a meaningful goal when the thought of achieving it fills you with excitement and inspires your full commitment.

How to Identify Meaningful Goals

Start big and broad. You're looking for answers to big questions: "Who am I and who do I want to be?" "What do I want from life?" "What changes would make my life more fulfilling?" Those aren't easy questions to answer. But you need to begin somewhere, so start writing down some initial thoughts on what's most important to you, what you'd like to change or improve, and your vision for your future. One of the rules of effective brainstorming is that there are no bad ideas. That's true with this exercise, too. Just start putting some thoughts down in writing. You can go back and refine your ideas later and turn them into meaningful goals.

Ask yourself some open-ended questions. Here are some that can help you get started:

• What is most important to me (relationships, family, peace of mind, service to others, spirituality, creativity, good health, financial security, recognition)?
• What are the biggest challenges I face?
• What motivates me?
• What are my fears?
• When in the past have I been happiest and felt most fulfilled?
• What would I do if money weren't a concern?
• What are my most important strengths? How might I use them for good?
• What have I yet to accomplish?
• How might I live in a way that is true to me and who I am, rather than the expectations of others?
• What do I want people to say about me after I die?

Come up with a vision for your future. Now that you've written down some thoughts about your priorities, strengths and values, and hopes and dreams for how you'd like to live your life, draw on them to create a vision for your future. What do you want your life to be like in 10 or 20 years? How would you like to develop as a person? What impact do you want to have on the world?

Write down a vision for your future. You might think of this as your dream for yourself or your personal mission statement. Challenge yourself to make this your vision for your future, not the vision or expectations that other people might have for you.

Compare where you are now with where you want to be. Once you have a draft of your vision for your future, compare it to where you are now. Where do you see the biggest gaps between where you are now and where you want to be? Those gaps are good places to look as you start developing and refining your list of meaningful goals.

Refine your initial ideas into a set of possible goals. As you look at and think about your vision, as well as the gaps between that vision and where you are now, think of some outcomes, accomplishments, or activities that could bring you closer to reaching your vision.

Make sure that the goals are achievable. Meaningful goals should be ambitious and challenging—maybe even a little scary—but they should be within the realm of possibility. They shouldn't depend on chance or forces that are out of your control. You may not know how you'll achieve a goal yet, but you need to believe that you can.

Narrow your list of goals, and prioritize them. Once you have an initial list of goals, compare them to your vision for your future, both to narrow the list and to rank them by priority:

• Does every goal on your list relate to your vision for your future? Remove any goals that don't. Those may be useful goals for other reasons, but they aren't your most important and meaningful goals.
• Does every goal on your list line up with your most important personal values and priorities? Remove any that don't.
• Do any of the goals on your list feel like they fit more with someone else's expectations of you than with your own priorities and values? If so, those don't belong on your list.
• Which of the goals on your list excite and inspire you as you think about working toward them—even if that process might challenge and scare you? Rank those high on your list. (If it's only the outcome that excites you, not the process—and hard work—of reaching the goal, it's probably more of a dream than a goal and shouldn't be on your list.)

Congratulations! You've come up with a draft set of meaningful goals.

Refine your most important goals.

Now that you have a draft set of meaningful goals, the next step is to refine them and break them down into smaller steps. This is critical in coming up with an action plan to achieve them. Some aspects of the SMART methodology can be helpful here. For each of your goals, refine the scope and wording so that it is:

• Specific—Is the goal clear and well-defined? Sharpen the language on any that are vague and unspecific. You may be working toward the goal for a long time, and it should be crystal clear what you're aiming for.
• Measurable—How will you know when you've accomplished the goal? How will you measure success?
• Actionable—Is the goal worded in a way that lets you take steps to achieve it?
• Realistic—A big goal may not be easily or quickly achievable, and it may be a giant stretch for you, but it has to be possible. It also has to become more achievable by your own actions, not dependent primarily on chance or the actions of others.
• Time-specified—This is less important for bigger life goals than it is for smaller goals, but timing objectives can be a useful motivation as you push for progress on the steps required to reach a big goal.

Break big goals down into smaller steps.

Stephen Covey is the late author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of his key messages was, "Begin with the end in mind." Your vision for your future is to keep in mind that end, and each of your goals is a pathway to bring you closer to your vision. But meaningful goals can often be so big and ambitious that it's not clear where to begin. To make progress on big goals, you'll need to break them into smaller steps:

• One useful approach is called backward planning. For a big goal, this involves imagining its final step—what achieving that goal will look like. From there, you work backward: What's the step before that? And the step before that? All the way back to the first steps you'll need to take. What will you need to learn to reach each step toward the goal? Whose help will you need along the way? How much time will you need to carve out?
• Another helpful exercise is to imagine all of the obstacles that could stop you from reaching the goal. This might seem discouraging, but it's actually empowering. By imagining the obstacles, you also come up with plans to get past them. What has kept you from starting work toward this goal until now? What could stop you as you begin to make progress? What will you do to overcome the obstacles as you move forward?
• Another element in breaking big goals into smaller steps is a realistic assessment of your skills and strengths. How might you need to change to reach you goal? What skills might you need to master, and how will you learn them? What new qualities might you need to develop, and how will you develop them?

Using any or all of those methods, you can break down your bigger goals into a series of steps and begin to work toward them.

If you have more than one meaningful goal, you'll need to decide which to tackle first. You might choose one that's quicker and easier as a way to get an early taste of success. Or you might start with the one that your heart tells you is most important, even if you know it will be a challenge. However you choose, pick one meaningful goal, and focus your efforts on that goal first.

Keep your vision in mind as you track your progress.

Set up a system to review your progress and sustain your motivation. That might be

• A weekly appointment in your calendar to reread your vision statement and track progress toward your goals
• A written log of your work and progress toward your goals—the steps you take and the results you achieve
• Setting timed objectives for each step toward a goal
• Sharing your goal with your family or close friends as a way to affirm your commitment to a goal and enlist support and encouragement

Whatever system you use, keep your vision in mind as you work toward your goal. Celebrate the successes as you make progress. And keep your vision alive by refining it as you learn and grow.