Use Goals to Align to Your Dream Life

Goals provide the focus and the direction to create your dream life.

Goals encapsulate what you want to create in life.

What are Goals in the Life Design Framework

Goals are the primary, broad outcomes you wish to achieve in your life. A goal as a broad outcome may make it difficult to specify specific criteria for when the goal has been achieved. The achievement criteria will be subjective. Only you will know when you have achieved one of your goals.

Without goals, we are leaving our lives to random chance.

Goals should be specific, relevant, not necessarily measurable, achievable, or time-based. As a goal is a broad primary outcome for achieving your vision it may not be measurable. If you have a goal to live a healthy lifestyle, you do not know what that lifestyle will be until you get closer to the goal. The goal needs to be fluid until you discover what a healthy lifestyle is for you.

Examples of Goals

Financial independence, expertise in your field, creating a healthy lifestyle, or creating an online presence are examples of goals. Each of these are broad primary outcomes. The next step will be defining specific measurable objectives to reach these goals.

Goals can vary from small goals that are readily accomplished to huge moonshot-type goals. Having a mix of goals results in progress and therefore motivation for completing more goals.

Examples

• My goal is to reach a healthy 190 pounds
• My goal is to have a million dollars in the bank
• My goal is to enrich the lives of 1 million people through journaling practices

Setting Goals to Design Your Life

The defining of our goals is the first step of turning your [vision] into a plan. For a life design, you require a set of goals that if achieved will create your vision. As you specify your goals it is important that each goal specifies one primary outcome. In the beginning, you shouldn’t be concerned about how you are going to achieve the goal, or how long it will take. All you need is for you to understand what it means to achieve the goal. Each goal will have a plan for achieving the goal that we will discuss in the next post about objectives.

Goals are what take us toward our vision. Our vision should be what we can ultimately be. Aim for the stars. When we create our vision, we don’t know how we are going to create it, therefore we can’t know if our goals are achievable until we try. Same with time-based, when we create a goal we don’t know how long it is going to take for us to get there, we just have to keep working towards it until we get there.

When you first create a goal, you may not know how to achieve it. As long as there is at least one step you can take towards that goal you are ready. Once you achieve that first step the next steps will be easier to identify.

Sometimes, once you get closer to achieving a goal you realize the goal was just a stepping stone towards some larger outcome. If you were initially aware of the larger goal, your goal would have been an objective towards that goal. As an example, if you had a goal of reaching a healthy weight, a larger goal would be a healthy lifestyle of which weight would be one objective.

We have goals for achieving our life vision, as well as achieving our life vision in each of our life areas. Managing which goals to pursue at what time is part of creating an effective life design map or plan.