Often when we set ourselves a Big Goal, its not something that we can achieve right away or in a small period of time, often these can take months even years. Like my friend Will who is building his own boat, which will take 2-3 years, and is then planning to sail around the world, which will take another 4 years.
When we are in this position, whilst we need to keep our eye on the big picture, our ultimate goal, we also need to create some smaller interim goals that will be our short and medium term focus, which will ultimately help lead us to our big goal.
We need to be able to manage our own expectations and ensure that we set ourselves short and mid term targets that we can achieve, in order to increase our motivation and belief.
I was reminded of this whilst I was out on training run today, one of my goals is to run a marathon and to try and do this in Sub 4hrs 30.
But as a I’d never run a marathon before, my first goals were to run a half marathon, and then complete a couple full marathons.
Only then I could look to see how I could improve my times.
If I have tried to do my first marathon in sub 4hrs 30 mins, I would have failed to complete it.
So sometimes our first goal has to be to just cross the finish line, to complete a new task, prove to ourselves that we can do it, that alone is a success in itself.
Then once we have done that, then we can look at improving it, working to make the small changes that can have an impact on our overall performance and help us ultimately reach our goal.
I saw a talk last year about 2 German mountain climbers, the Huber brothers, who were looking to set the speed world record for climbing El Capitan, 2300m, in Yellowstone National Park.
At that time the record for the climb was 2hrs 48 minutes and 55 seconds.
So I was very interested to hear that on their first climb it actually took them over 12 hours to climb it. This was some way off the record 🙂
Their explanation was that, they had never climbed it before, so they wanted to take their time get a feel for it and then look to start to find ways to increase their time.
Their goal wasn’t to break the record on their first attempt, as they knew that wasn’t possible. They needed to climb it several times, get used to it, see what opportunities there were to increase their speed.
In fact it wasn’t until over a year after their first climb that that eventually broke the record.
With some of the goals that we set ourselves, we need to remember that whilst we might complete a task, we might not actually achieve it in the way we would like until we have done it many many time
This is not a failure on our part, this is part of the learning process, first we need to complete a task and then we can look to improve it.
For those interested I include here a video of the Huber brothers record climb. They no longer hold the record as it has since been broken by other climbers, but it is still an amazing achievement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGP-l6fFBSs
Gordon Tredgold
Excellent article, Gordon! Many people set big goals. Setting a series of smaller goals that get us to the final big goal is not only effective, it is very efficient! To me, it is interesting to see why people fail at reaching their goals. Goals should not only challenge our skills and abilities but should also be realistic in the sense that we give ourselves a chance of goal attainment. People have to be successful otherwise frustration sets in and achievement motivation is diminished! It is sort of like finding that balance between not too hard and not too easy. This becomes critical especially when we help others set goals for performance improvement. Another critical step in the goal setting process is to anticipate obstacles, both internal and external to ourselves, that will stand in the way of goal attainment. I am sure the Huber brothers identified many things ahead of time that might have kept them from reaching their goal; the contour of the side of the mountain, the weather, personal issues that might have kept them from task completion like never having climbed El Capitan before, etc. If I am a sales person and I am setting a big goal to reach the highest sales numbers in the company or to land a strategic account; not only do I need to identify steps to obtain the goal, I need to identify those things that will keep me from success as I journey to the goal. Anticipation will help us identify ways around those obstacles when and if they do pop up. Who or what can be valuable resources in overcoming those obstacles? Obviously, we can’t anticipate everything that may keep us from reaching our goals, but we can often use common sense, past experience and the experiences of others to turn the tables in our favor when it comes to success in improving ourselves and reaching our goals, especially those big goals! Now go run that marathon, Gordon! You can do it!
Jim thanks for the response, love it. If we set out goal to lose 20lbs, we need to set small goals at say every 4lbs. Losing 4 lbs is much more doable than the straight 20lb, but it set us on our way, it shows we can do something, and we then just need to keep going. If we try and just do the big goal we will fail, we will lose motivation. We need little sign posts along the way tat show us we are making progress, that we’re on the right path. With that then we can keep going on towards the bigger goal with more confidence.
thanks for the response, its greta to get into discussion on these topics 🙂