How many times have you heard that it is important to have goals in life? In reality, perhaps one day you decided to take the plunge: you took a pen and paper to write yours, but over time you have forgotten them, you have relegated them to memories. Well, the good (or bad) news is that you are not alone. Millions of people are in the same situation as you, setting goals but then failing to accomplish them. Because?
There can be many reasons, but one of them is that many of us don't know how to plan goals. For example, "I want to look more beautiful" is not a goal, much less "I want to be successful." These are dreams, vague ideas, ... however, far from objective.
Results and procedure objectives
Outcome goals are those that indicate a clear and measurable goal, such as "lose five pounds" or "get a promotion at work." These objectives have the advantage of leading to a precise result, it is almost always possible to know at what point of the journey you are and therefore, they tend to be the most motivating.
Process objectives, as the name suggests, have the purpose of acquiring a process, which in our case will almost always be a habit. For example, "exercise daily" or "get to the office early every day." As you can see, these are goals that are maintained over time, at least until the habit is created or the final goal is achieved.
As you can understand, process objectives are generally more complicated to achieve than outcome objectives. In fact, do you think it is easier to lose five pounds or to exercise regularly every day?
The good news is that once you have achieved your process goals, they usually have a profoundly positive impact in other areas of your life.
If you want to reach a goal, you usually set yourself results goals and not procedural goals. This is why we often lose five kilos, but then we go back to recovering them immediately. We are not interested in promoting the habits necessary to maintain the result once our goal is achieved.
The key to success
The secret to achieving a goal and making change permanent is to combine result and process goals. It is a vision that comes from the business world, but which we can apply perfectly to our daily life.
Let's continue with the example I used at the beginning of the article, imagining that our dream is to look more beautiful, to change our appearance. We first need to transfer this dream to goals that are easily measurable. So, we could say that we intend to lose ten pounds in three months. At this point, we have emphasized that it is important to define goals over time so that we take action immediately, otherwise we run the risk of procrastinating.
But to lose weight, you can adopt different strategies, such as following a low calorie diet. However, if you take only this solution, it is likely that after six months you have regained the lost weight.
Therefore, it would be wiser to also consider procedural objectives along with the diet: "run every day for 20 minutes", "eliminate all foods rich in sugar", "eat more fruit and vegetables" ...
As you can see, process goals not only help create a healthy habit that will be maintained over time, but they are the perfect weapons with which you can achieve your ultimate goal.
Of course, this reasoning can be applied to several objectives. So, the next time you have a dream it would be appropriate to ask yourself what you are doing to make it come true and, above all, if the procedure you are following is the right one to promote a definitive change over time.
