Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.
This saying (or some form of it) is commonly heard when talking about making errors in judgment when setting goals.
When you take the time and effort to set a specific goal, you’re doing so to improve yourself or your life. Unfortunately, it’s easy to unknowingly sabotage your success by committing goal-setting mistakes.
Another thing that people underestimate is the planning required to set an achievable goal. It’s easy to say, “I want to be rich,” but if a few years later you find yourself in the same financial situation that you’ve always been in, you will probably feel unsatisfied about realizing your dream.
If you tend not to achieve the goals you set due to goal-setting mistakes, you’ll probably lose motivation to create goals in the first place.
We’ve talked a lot about setting goals on this site and the steps that you need to take in order to achieve your dreams, so I’m confident that you’re familiar with the “Do”s of goal-setting.
But, what about the Don’ts?
Being aware of the pitfalls to avoid when setting goals can help ensure that you’re on the right path to living out your long-term dreams.
This article will look at five goal-setting mistakes to avoid at all costs to keep you inspired while working toward your goals. Eliminating these potential mistakes will help improve your chances of success and quality of life.
Before we proceed, if you're someone who learns through watching instead of reading, here's the video version of this article:
Let’s take a look.
5 Most Common Goal-Setting Mistakes to Avoid
1. Focusing on Year-Long Milestones
While it’s great to think long-term, it’s also critical to rein yourself in a bit. Year-long goals don’t align with the reality of most of our lives because things are subject to change at any time, which can quickly derail our plans.
Think about the New Year’s resolutions you made for 2020 or the goals you initially set out to achieve this year.
While creating a meticulous plan to make a positive change in your life, did you consider the impact of a worldwide pandemic and economic crash? Or did these factors take you by surprise?
Just over two months into 2020, COVID-19 turned everyone's lives upside down, forcing everyone to slow down and stay home. This introduced new obstacles and distractions into our lives as children stayed home from school, people lost their jobs, and we had to learn how to function in our personal and professional lives in unprecedented ways.
Everyone had to make adjustments, and I’m willing to bet your annual goals weren’t immune to that.
Rather than making annual goals, quarterly goal setting allows you to make more practical plans that are less likely to be thwarted by unforeseen circumstances.
Prioritizing your goals by the season will let you refocus your objectives based on developing priorities in 90-day intervals. In our fast-paced and ever-changing world, our personal and professional priorities can change overnight, so planning too far in advance is often a waste of time.
2. Being Too Outcome-Specific
Without creating process goals, the outcome you’re hoping for isn’t happen. Your process goals are those smaller milestones within your control today that add up in the end to amount to your outcome goals.
An example of an outcome goal is “I will have money saved up by the end of the year to buy a new car.” This goal is vague. Without having objectives, you’re giving yourself a lot of room for error with minimal direction in mind.
A process goal related to this outcome goal would be the action that, if achieved, will lead to your desired outcome. For example, “I will put 20% of every paycheck I earn into a savings account.”
The main reason to create process goals instead of outcome goals is that outcomes don’t come with specific instructions.
Let’s say you want to know more about the current political climate. How do you go about doing that?
It can be hard to make an outcome specific enough that there’s no wiggle room for error. Instead, you must set process goals such as, “I will spend at least 30 minutes each day reading the most recent political headlines and the most pertinent articles.”
This is a process goal that, if achieved, will help you reach your desired outcome.
3. Being Too Vague
How will you know when you’ve reached your goal? What will success look like in the end? You want to make your finish line clear, so you know exactly when you can start celebrating.
Vague goals can’t be accomplished. Vague goals aren’t even goals–they’re ideas.
If you think you want to save money, that will lead to a lot of frustration if you’re counting on having a healthy savings account in a few months. Motivation increases with clarity, so without any clarity, you’re left with nothing pushing you to take action to reach your goal.
Failing to follow the SMART goal formula is a big mistake when it comes to goal setting that can leave you spinning your wheels. SMART goals give you a blueprint for the specific objectives you need to accomplish to make progress toward your goal.
By writing your goals in a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound format, you will be able to track your progress, keep your goals organized, and know precisely when your goal has been met.
Let’s look at some examples of goals that do not follow the SMART goal formula so you can know what types of mistakes you should be looking out for:
Without having specific goals, you won’t have focus or direction. Your goals should give you a benchmark for determining your success, and they must be clear and well-defined. It would be best to have SMART goals to show you exactly how to get to wherever you want.
4. Not Having a “Why”
Have you ever felt pressured by someone to accomplish something you didn’t care about?
Years ago, when I worked in sales (which was not for me), our team's supervisors created goals for us. This was the first time in my life that I was faced with solid, hard-numbered goals.
However, they didn’t have a single impact on my work ethic. I didn’t care. The outcome of achieving these goals didn’t benefit me personally; it helped the company, so my motivation was low.
Because that was the only model of active goal-setting I had ever been exposed to, in hindsight, I see that it made me feel like my overall motivation in life was low. I associated setting and achieving goals with people who were productive, energetic, and successful—which was not me.
But now I know that working in sales isn’t a source of energy for me like it is for others. And, if you don’t feel like you fit into this mold either, it’s probably because you haven’t found what that energy source is for you.
Accomplishing anything meaningful requires a sense of intrinsic motivation. You need to feel rewarded by the process and be personally invested in the outcome.
Your goals need to serve a purpose strong enough to carry you through the obstacles you’ll face along the way. If you don’t feel dedicated to the purpose, you won’t feel the sense of urgency required to make your goals a reality.
To stay motivated, you need to see the value in reaching the outcome of your goal. If the potential outcome is irrelevant to the bigger picture of your life, then the chance that you will make it a priority is slim.
It didn’t impact my life in any way if my team’s sales goals were met. In the absence of this push, I wasn’t driven to take the necessary steps to achieve the goals set by my supervisor.
Ensure that all of your goals are attached to your “why” or whatever gives you a feeling of purpose in life. Without limiting and focusing on your goals in this way, you may end up with many meaningless goals with little time to commit to each one.
Write exactly why your goals are valuable and worthwhile to accomplish to ensure you remain enthusiastic about achieving them. Ask yourself:
Answering these questions will help you recognize whether or not your goal is attached to your life’s purpose.
The video below explores and provides practical strategies for finding more purpose in your daily routine.
5. Failing to Make a Plan
“Sow a thought, and you reap an action; sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
One thing that is more dependable than motivation is your habits. Do you feel you need to be motivated to brush your teeth in the morning?
No, because you do so out of habit. Every action you do on autopilot daily is part of a habit loop–a cue, routine, and reward that happens without having to think about it.
It’s essential to turn your goals into habits so the actions become an integral part of your routine. By using implementation intention statements, you remove the option to decide whether or not you’ll follow through with your objective for the day.
Your implementation intentions answer the questions “when” and “where” to satisfy the two most powerful cues for any action—time and place. Doing this forms concrete plans that don’t leave your success up to chance.
Implementation intention statements give you a new “normal,” so you don’t have to wait for what feels like the “right” time to take action. You simply follow the plan that you’ve created for yourself, leaving all of the guesswork out of it.
For example, “I will meditate for ten minutes after brushing my teeth in the morning and at night on my meditation cushion.”
With this implementation intention in place, you will practice meditation automatically after brushing your teeth–eventually without having to think about it.
By planning out the actions that will lead to your goals, you will default to meeting your milestones, and you’ll be guaranteed to make progress toward your ultimate goal.
Final Thoughts on Goal-Setting Mistakes
Setting goals takes practice. But once you get the hang of it, it will be life-changing. Once you accomplish one goal, it can easily lead to more goals and ultimately evolve who you are.
Setting goals that set you up for success can be the key to staying motivated and inspired to persevere until you’ve achieved your dreams.
So, learn from the successful people who have come before you and avoid making the mistakes in this article. With the proper planning and a well-thought-out process, you’ll be on your way to accomplishing great things.
And if you're ready to start setting goals, here are some goal-setting roundups of templates that can help you get started:
- 9 Best Goal-Setting Planners
- 7 Career Goal Setting Worksheets
- 7 Printable Goal Setting Worksheets for Kids
- 7 Common To-Do List Mistakes and How to Fix Them
- 7 Steps to Learn from Mistakes and Grow as a Person
- 9 Life Goals Worksheets & Templates to Design Your Future
Finally, if you want to take your goal-setting efforts to the next level, check out this FREE printable worksheet and a step-by-step process that will help you set effective SMART goals.
Connie Mathers is a professional editor and freelance writer. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Marketing and a Master’s Degree in Social Work. When she is not writing, Connie is either spending time with her daughter and two dogs, running, or working at her full-time job as a social worker in Richmond, VA.
