Cathy Liska 
From shifting to a coaching mentality to writing what you envision for the future, here are 16 answers to the question, “What are your best tips for how to set goals?”
● Have a Coach Mentality
● Try Working Your Way Backward
● Be as Clear as Possible
● Focus on the Process Rather Than the Outcome
● Create a Vision Board
● Look at Them Every Day
● Balance the Difficulty Level
● Gain Motivation Through Specifying and Tracking
● Regularly Reassess Your Goals and Progress
● Start Small
● Build Your Staircase Towards a New Story
● Visualize What You Will Celebrate
● Know Yourself
● Write Them Down Using Paper and Pen
● Try the SMART Method
● Explore the Vision
Have a Coach Mentality
A leader can follow in a coach’s footsteps by setting goals. In any sport, a coach helps their players set short- and long-term goals, and a manager needs to do the same in the workplace. This can start with yearly performance reviews and progress.
What is the employee’s vision for their career, and how can a leader help them achieve it? This leadership style helps team members become more engaged in their work and have an end goal at the end of the day.
Stephanie Venn-Watson, Co-founder, fatty15
Try Working Your Way Backward
Try setting goals with the end in mind. This means beginning with a clear understanding of your ultimate objective and working backward to determine the specific steps required to achieve it. You will create a roadmap that guides your actions and decision-making by visualizing the end result and breaking it down into step-by-step pieces.
This approach helps ensure your goals align with your overall vision and priorities and that you work toward a meaningful outcome. It also provides clarity and focus, making it easier to prioritize your time and resources and track your progress.
Michael Green, Co-founder, Winona
Be as Clear as Possible
The most important thing when setting goals is to be clear. Know exactly what your goal is, when you plan to reach it, and how and when you are going to work on it.
If you don’t know what counts as reaching your goal, you can never really reach it. And if you don’t have a plan for how you are going to work on your goal, there’s a good chance that you’ll do nothing.
Nina Joanna, Blogger, Goals Calling
Focus on the Process Rather Than the Outcome
One of the best tips on how to set goals is to focus on the process rather than the outcome. While having a clear goal in mind is important, it’s easy to become fixated on the result and forget about the journey required to get there.
By focusing on the process, you can break your goal down into smaller, more manageable steps and focus on making progress every day. This can help you stay motivated and build momentum toward achieving your goal.
Remember that setting goals is a journey, not a destination, and by focusing on the process, you can make steady progress toward your goals and develop a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment along the way.
Will Gill, Event Entertainer, DJ Will Gill
Create a Vision Board
Any life or business coach would advise you to sit down and write your objectives. Use paper or digital tools to record your actions; this will make you more accountable.
Your goal list also provides you with a tangible item to look at to maintain motivation. Making a Pinterest vision board is a fantastic idea. Or, you might really create your own vision board by assembling magazine clippings and motivating objects on a whiteboard or corkboard.
You can define your goals and picture your dreams with this technique. Not least, you need to work hard to achieve your objectives. Setting goals is useless if you aren’t attempting to achieve them. Plan out clear action steps and be consistent in your behavior.
To help you stay on track, divide those steps into daily, weekly, and monthly chores. Follow your development as well. You might also want to think about methods to treat yourself when you accomplish particular goals. This is an excellent approach to maintaining motivation.
Joe Li, Managing Director, CheckYa
Look at Them Every Day
It may not seem like a big deal at first, but writing your goals down and displaying them where you can see them every day will ultimately allow them to permeate your psyche.
For example, suppose you have a whiteboard in your office where you list what you want to accomplish. This will force you to confront your goals daily rather than forgetting them or putting them on the back burner.
Natalia Morozova, Partner, Cohen, Tucker & Ades P.C.
Balance the Difficulty Level
Goals should be specific and measurable. They should be large enough to stretch you and create an accomplishment you can be proud of, yet not so large that, at some relatively early point, they’re likely to appear impossible, making it seem useless to keep trying.
As a consultant to thousands of businesspeople of all types, I frequently see goals impeding success. If they’re too high, they can be discouraged, and after struggling for a while, people often simply give up.
On the other hand, I’ve seen just as many people slack off because they’ve achieved a specific goal. In my experience, the yearly goal that works most consistently is simply the goal of doing the best job you can possibly do during every minute of the day: this day, this week, this month, and this year. And after each day, each month, and each year, you do a quick evaluation: “How could I have done that better?”
Barry Maher, Principal, Barry Maher & Associates
Gain Motivation Through Specifying and Tracking
Keep in mind that you are setting goals for yourself. Make use of this when planning goals. Choose goals that are important to you personally or professionally. Your goals should satisfy the following four requirements:
- Be as specific as you can when describing your objectives. You can never stay focused on hazy goals.
- Measurable—Your objectives should be quantifiable. Establish more modest benchmarks. Knowing exactly what you have accomplished at each milestone will keep you motivated to keep moving forward.
- Attainable—When establishing goals, be reasonable. Before you begin, avoid setting goals that are well beyond your capabilities. Otherwise, even if you are making progress, you will become discouraged and give up.
- Relevant—Again, create a personal connection with each objective to make them pertinent and significant to you. Setting a timeframe or target deadline for achieving particular goals is another important step.
Himanshu Sharma, CEO and Founder, Academy of Digital Marketing
Regularly Reassess Your Goals and Progress
Setting goals is an important part of achieving success, but it’s easy to become complacent when things go well. You should constantly re-evaluate the objectives you have set for yourself and make sure that the strategies you are using are still effective in helping you reach them.
Through this method, it will be easier to identify areas that need improvement and provide a sense of motivation to stay focused on achieving your goals. In agile project management, this idea is referred to as sprints or intervals; these are predetermined periods of time in which you focus on certain tasks and measure your progress.
Practicing the habit of regularly re-assessing your goals will help you stay focused and on track, while also allowing you to adjust your strategies as needed.
Geoff Cudd, Founder, Don’t Do It Yourself
Start Small
Break big goals into smaller ones that are more manageable and achievable. This will help ensure that you make progress toward your larger goal without feeling overwhelmed or discouraged in the process. Make sure that your objectives are specific, measurable, and time-bound so that you can track your progress along the way.
Michael Dadashi, CEO, Infinite Recovery
Build Your Staircase Towards a New Story
Goals boost our growth in such a powerful way, and they come up in different sizes: they can be small and modest goals, and they can also be incredibly ambitious and daring. The level of transformation can range from apparently uneventful to absolutely groundbreaking. Regardless of the magnitude of the goals, all of them require at least two levels: strategic and tactical.
Strategy generates tactics, while tactics inform the success of the strategy. When you set a goal, start by attaching it to an outcome, a purpose, or a reason. Good goals have a strong, emotionally charged reason to exist. Then, break the goal into big, sequential milestones. Finally, break each chunk into smaller steps that are easier to manage and achieve. It’s so much more effective to accumulate small wins that yield a composite impact over time!
Not only will you have a full perspective of the ultimate outcome through the milestones and steps, but you’ll also feel empowered to take one step at a time and celebrate!
José Mota, Agile Coach and Product Manager, josemota.net
Visualize What You Will Celebrate
What timeline is important for my client? Once they have that, what do they visualize at the end of that time… whether it’s a person or a professional, what are they celebrating? Seeing? Feeling? It helps us to back into action plans to achieve.
Diane Gongaware, President, Diane Gongaware Coaching LLC
Know Yourself
We’re not all wired the same way, so what works for one person may not work for another. It’s important to understand how you are motivated and what your follow-through style is so that you can set goals that are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound) for how you operate.
There are many solutions and tools available, so finding the one that works for you will set you up for success.
Sarah E Roberts, Executive Leadership Coach, Clarity Matters Consulting LLC
Write Them Down Using Paper and Pen
Write goals down. Go old-school and use paper and pen. Handwriting engages multiple parts of our brains and helps us remember our goals better and longer.
Don’t just write goals down once, but rewrite them regularly, even daily. You can also write them some place where you will see them frequently—a dry-erase marker on a bathroom mirror works great for this. The old adage “out of sight, out of mind” certainly holds true here. Anything we can do to help our brains recall our goals brings us one step closer to realizing them.
Craig Kain, Psychologist and Psychotherapist, Dr. Craig Kain
Try the SMART Method
I encourage my clients to set goals using the SMART method. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. If we think through our goals using this strategic and well-crafted framework, we are much more likely to achieve them.
The SMART framework also allows us to recognize our existing strengths and identify areas where we need to improve to reach our goals. It allows us to celebrate our small wins along the way and feel a genuine sense of accomplishment when we reach our end goal. And, if we find we aren’t going to make the original goal, we can re-evaluate, recalibrate, or adjust where needed, and keep making forward progress.
Jennifer Stutzriem, Certified Professional Coach, Roberts Consulting Services, LLC
Explore the Vision
Many people succumb to the pressure and urgency of getting “things” done by setting goals. However, how do you set goals? If one were to ask me, my immediate response would be, what is your vision for your future self? It is time to connect, truly ask yourself, home in on what you want to achieve, and then create a vision statement that incorporates that vision that results in setting the goal(s).
