SMART Goals

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Tanya Unterbrunner, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

In order to be accountable for your life, we have to set appropriate goals. It is not enough to say, “I want a better life” or “I want to lose weight”. We have to know how and when we are going to do those things.

The first step we have to take is getting to know what we really want. For example, if our goal is to have a better life, in what way do we mean? Do we want to make more money? If we do, how much money and by when will we get it? If we want to lose weight, how much weight and how long will it take us? There is a simple formula to follow to create the best goal, and that is SMART.

For this demonstration, we will say our goal is to have a better life.

S is for Specific. Our goal needs to be specific. If we make too broad of a goal, how will we ever know if it is accomplished? Let’s say our goal is to have a better life by making more time for family. Is that specific enough? We could get more specific, so let’s take it a step further. We want to have a better life by making more time to enjoy our family while still being able to pay the bills.

M is for Measurable. How will we know when our goal is complete? We cannot complete a goal if we don’t know how big, how far, or how much of something it will take. For our goal, we want to have a better life by making more time to enjoy our family while still being able to pay the bills. What constitutes enjoying our family and how do we measure that? It could be something as simple as, “We want to have a better life by sitting down for supper together and then spending at least three hours with our family every night, while still being able to pay the bills”.

A is for Attainable. It really doesn’t make sense to create a goal that we will never be able to attain. I wouldn’t make a goal something like “I wanna have a million dollars by tomorrow”. When we set a goal for ourselves that we know is not attainable, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Our example goal to make our life better is attainable.

R is for Realistic. This goes hand in hand with attainable. Again, is it realistic for the average person to get a million dollars overnight? Not really. It would be nice, but it’s not realistic. Our example goal to make our life better is realistic and can be done.

T is for Time. How long are we going to give ourselves to accomplish our goal? This is an important part of the process because it gives us a timeframe that will give us an end. With no timeframe, a goal can seem never-ending which can be intimidating from the get-go. For our example, “We want to have a better life by sitting down for supper and then spending at least three hours together every night while still being able to pay the bills. We will have this put in place within two weeks.”

Once we have our goal, the process of figuring out how to complete it begins. This is where you and I come in. If you haven’t considered getting assistance from a coach, like me, at this point, now is a good time for my guidance.I will look at your goal and discuss the logical steps you will need to take in order to accomplish them. Then, I will work with you to discover your path to success! Your probability of success increases when you have someone to help you, and I am here. Let’s do this!