7 Steps to Defining Your Life Goals

I bet you’d agree that when you aren’t clear on your life goals you lack a certain degree of direction in life. Essentially, you end up feeling lost.

It’s unfortunate that so many people don’t take the time required to set their life goals clearly in a way that provides them with this direction. Fortunately for you, I have taken the time to study some of the worlds most successful individuals and high-performers and figure out how they set goals. From my research, I have put together a specific step by step process that lets people define clear life goals that provide a much-needed direction.

Through this post, I am going to take you through that process step by step and show you exactly what you need to do to clearly define your life goals!

reach higher

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The Problem with Your Life Goals

Do you ever think about what your life goals are? Life goals are the things that we need to achieve in life in order to obtain a sense of happiness and fulfillment. What your life goals are will be unique to you. You may want to create a family, start a business, live healthier, or simply travel. These goals help you choose which paths to pursue in life and provide you with that much-needed sense of direction.

So ask yourself, what are your life goals? If you don’t have an answer you don’t need to worry. You certainly are not alone. Most people fall into one of two categories when asked about their life goals. They either have no answer and no idea what they want to achieve in life. Or, they define their life goals so broadly that they don’t provide any true direction.

Take the above examples of the life goals I provided in the intro. Those are all quite broad. In my opinion, these goals have a strong and valuable premise but are poorly defined. For example, the life goal of starting a business provides minimal clarity. You need to sit down and figure out what type of business and what skills you need to achieve that goal.

Unfortunately, most people aren’t willing to sit down and write out their life goals. Thus, they don’t have the clarity to get any real direction  from them. They’d rather sit around watching TV or playing with their phones.

This is why I’m so excited to share with you my 7-step process for defining life goals!

Take a Quick Second to Watch This Goal Setting Clip

If you’re a visual learner, this video will be a good intro for you today. This TED talk by John Doerr reveals how some of the most successful people and organizations set goals. He reveals how the secret to your success may simply be learning to set the right goals!

Your Life Goals Shape Your Future

This heading shouldn’t shock to you. Your life goals shape your future. When you set a life goal you set yourself on a journey. Though the path won’t always be clear, you will have a direction to head even when you feel lost. Each of these paths should take you closer to your best life. That is, assuming, you’ve taken the time to define your life goals carefully.

For this reason, it’s important to set clear life goals that align with your life values. If you haven’t figured out your life values yet you need to go back to my last post: 7 Steps for Determining Your Life Values.

I regularly help people align their life goals with their life values. They’re often surprised by how their life seems to take-off shortly afterward. They find they’re more focused, more productive, more successful. It’s no surprise to me though. You’re finally working on the values and goals that are important to you. So, it’s not surprising you’re more motivated and positive about them.

When you’re working towards the things you want to achieve you’re more willing to invest. You’ll dedicate more time and effort into planning and actually doing the work to get there. You’ll be more willing to create your vision of what success looks like to you and what it takes to achieve it. Additionally, you’ll be more likely to persevere and overcome the challenges you face because your goals are actually important to you on a personal level.

Essentially, your life goals will help guide you towards your true purpose. This will lead to a life that is happier, more fulfilling, and more successful to you personally. This is why it’s important to set SMART life goals.

find your path

What Are The 5 SMART Life Goals?

SMART goals are by far the most popular format for goal setting. It’s adopted by many successful individuals all across the globe to help them set their own life goals. It helps them turn their vague goals into actionable steps towards success!

A lot of people learn about SMART goals at one point or another. You probably have as well. Unfortunately, few of you, maybe even including yourself, ever stick with this goal setting technique for longer than a few days. So commit yourself to it right now. Put up a sticky note you’ll see every day as a reminder. Dow whatever it takes! This technique is so effective!

If you’ve never heard of SMART goals, essentially, SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Let’s break down what each of these means in relation to goal setting!

S – Specific

A goal like you want to live healthier, despite being a great thing to aim for, is a poorly defined goal. It’s nowhere near specific enough. Is your goal to up your exercise game and increase your strength? Are you looking to just start eating a healthier diet? These questions aren’t answered by the vague goal of living healthier. The value of the goal is in the DETAILS! Who is involved in the goal? What is going to be the target outcome? When are you going to work on this goal? Where are you going to work on this goal? Why is this goal important to you? And, how are you going to achieve it?

The who, what, when, where, why, and how of each of your life goals should be addressed in order to make them specific enough to provide you with any true direction.

M – Measurable

Once you’ve got a specific goal your next step is to determine how you’re going to measure it. Are you going to track the time you spend exercising every day? Perhaps you’d prefer to track your calorie intake vs. your calories burned? Whatever you decide is fine. All that matters is that you have a way to track and measure your progress toward your life goals.

Try to create a specific and measurable life-goal now!

A – Attainable

Now that you have some specific and measurable life goals, it’s important to evaluate whether they’re even attainable. There is no point in setting a goal that is so outrageous that you’ll never be able to achieve it. If your life goal is to live healthier and exercise so much that you bench press more than Superman, I’m sorry, but you’ve set an unattainable life goal.

The best way to set an attainable life goal is to look at your past history and evaluate any trends in your behavior. Is there any logical path that could lead you from where you where and where you are now to the life goal you’ve outlined?

If the answer is no or probably not, maybe consider scaling this back a bit. Or if the opposite is true and you are going to attain your goals within the month, maybe you’re being too conservative. Make sure your life goals challenge and push you, but also make sure they are attainable at some point.

R – Relevant

This might be the most important of the 5 steps. Make sure your life goals are relevant to what you actually want to achieve in life. For example, if you want to improve your health so that you can run a marathon or simply be more active with your family, living healthier is a very relevant goal for you! However, hitting the gym every day for 2 hours a day with Arnold may not be relevant to you because that doesn’t align with your life values.

It’s so important for you to align your life goals with your life values and then begin building a lifestyle around those things. It’s the best way to reach personal happiness, success, and fulfillment.

T – Time Bound

Finally, you must ensure you have a time constraint on your life goals. Give yourself that deadline. This will motivate yourself to achieve that life goal by a certain time. Or, if you haven’t reached your life goal by that time it will signal to you that maybe you need to re-evaluate it.

Setting a specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant goal of living healthier so you can run a marathon by next year is a goal that meets all 5 criteria! If you achieve your goal fantastic. However, if a year rolls around and you still aren’t ready for that big run, it’s time to re-evaluate.

Examples of Common Life Goals?

There are tons of different types of life goals you could try to achieve. Honestly, the ones that resonate and are the most important to you will depend on things like your aspirations, your personality, your skillset, and a variety of other factors.

Here are just a few common examples.

1. Discovering Your Life Purpose

It’s unfortunate, but many of us end up working jobs that we don’t enjoy. These people invest all their time, energy, and effort into pursuing someone else’s goals and values. Usually, this ends up being a huge regret for these people. They wish that they had taken the time to discover and pursue their passion in order to live a more fulfilling life.

Don’t let this be you! Don’t leave any chance that you will look back on your life with regret or disappointment because you didn’t spend the time and effort figuring out what you wanted to truly do. This is why figuring out your life purpose and how you can share it with the world is a very common and beneficial life goal.

Some of the best places to start figuring out what your passions are is to look at your hobbies. Invest some time into developing the skills necessary to master this hobby and then find ways to share what you’ve learned with others! This is why I became a soccer coach. As a result of taking these actions, you’ll end up doing more of what you love in life and will spend less time being bored.

If you want some help figuring out your passions I’ve actually written an article on the process, I put people through in order to achieve this goal. If you’re interested check it out here: How to Discover Your Life Passion.

2. Start Living Healthier

This one might look familiar to you. I used it already as I outlined SMART goals. I used it because healthy living life goals are very common and relatable for most people.

You healthy living goal may be to simply exercise more or eat healthier. And those are great life goals! However, you can also have a variety of different goals beyond this.

For example, maybe you’re looking to achieve a better state of mental, emotional, or social health. All of these would fall under healthy living life goals. It’s also possible that you simply want to begin balancing these different aspects of health in a more personalized way that suits your lifestyle. Again, that’s a great healthy living life goal. You could consider taking an even broader view and define some healthy living life goals around the topic of self-care. This could be as little as setting aside some time to journal or meditate each day.

All of these types of goals would fall under the category of healthy living life goals.

3. Giving Back

Another common category of life goals regards those which involve giving back in some way. Now I bet immediately a bunch of you thought of donating money to charity. Yes, that definitely would fall into this category of life goals. However, there are many others as well which is great for those of us who may not have the financial resources to give back in a way that leads to the impact we want to have.

You could simply look to give back by volunteering your time and energy to help people. You see a lot of people who register with volunteer organization because this is an important life goal for them personally. Without volunteers, who know where our world would be after all.

Basically, a goal where you are seeking to bring about a positive impact for someone else without expecting anything in return could potentially fall within this category of life goals.

4. Just Enjoy Life

Now I might be biased, but this is a big one for me. I’m all about helping people to align their life goals and life values with the lifestyle that lets them live their best life! I’ve seen the benefit that it can bring people. I’ve seen how it improves people’s happiness, success, and fulfillment in life. That’s why I’m not surprised that learning to enjoy life to a greater extent is such a common life goal.

The first step to this process is defining your core life values. To do this there is a specific sequence of steps you must go through. Luckily for you, this is the process I took you through last week! So if you haven’t seen it, head on over to that post to define your life values.

After that, the next step is to define your life goals. Again, lucky for you that’s exactly what I’m teaching you today. Then, the final step is to align this with a lifestyle that lets you incorporate those goals and values into your daily life.

enjoy life

How to Determine Your Life Goals

I think you’d agree with the statement that if you don’t have any goals, you’re probably not heading anywhere fast. I was the same way until I took the time to learn from some of the best goal setters and high-performers across a wide variety of industries.

These lessons and experiences allowed me to define a specific set of steps that allows one to set clear life goals that provide direction. This process has proven to lead to increased levels of happiness, success, and fulfillment in life because it finally helps people to focus on the life goals that resonate the most with them. Essentially, they spend less time chasing the wrong things and more time chasing the right things.

So for the rest of this post, I’m going to walk you through my unique process of setting effective and clear life goals. In the end, you’ll have a clear direction of where you want to go in life. Even if you’ve done something similar to this exercise in the past, don’t brush it off today. Take the time to commit to investing in yourself and your future!

So grab a pen and a note pad and let’s get started! Here’s how to set the right goals for the life you actually want:

Step 1: Start Setting Goals for the Right Reasons

The first thing you need to do is get in the right frame of mind for setting life goals. Don’t set goals that will bring you a life you don’t truly want.

For example, I’ve heard so many people tell me that one of their life goals is to become a millionaire. Then I ask why? Often they either have no answer to why they want this goal, or their answer is simply so that they can buy things and be financially secure.

First, you don’t need a million dollars to buy most things. Second, you don’t need anywhere near a million dollars to be financially secure. They haven’t really thought about what this goal actually means, what the journey would look like to get their, or why they even want to achieve this goal. They’ve only thought about the destination and the glory that comes with it.

Don’t set life goals for the glory or because they look good to other people. Set your life goals based on your unique personality and desires for your life. This is what will help you find life goals that are actually meaningful to you and that you will enjoy pursuing.

reflect on your reasons

Step 2: What Life Path and Struggles Make You Happy

Real talk. Every single life in the history of mankind has challenges. Yes, some challenges are a lot tougher, but everyone faces them nonetheless. So choosing a life goal that takes you down a path that has struggles you won’t enjoy is a horrible idea.

Think about the direction you want your life to go and what struggles and challenges you would enjoy confronting along the way.

Ask yourself questions like:

What do you want to spend your time on?

Who do you enjoy spending time with?

What do you want to learn about?

What problems are you good at solving?

Your answers will help you pick life goals that set you on the right path! For example, check out my answers:

What do you want to spend your time on? Helping people define their life values and life goals and helping them align this with a lifestyle that leads to their best life.

Who do you enjoy spending time with? People who are motivated, positive, and eager to learn and grow.

What do you want to learn about? Personal development, self-improvement, and life balance.

What problems are you good at solving? I’m good at teaching people the true meaning of life balance and how they can figure out how to incorporate their life goals and values into their daily life to facilitate their personal and professional success and happiness!

Many goals could bring about this journey. In the end, it led to the formation of the Excellence Addiction brand! This life goal allowed me to pursue a journey that had all the things I really valued in life and I’m enjoying the struggles I’m confronting along the way!

Additional Tips for Picking Goal Journeys

Remember, goal journeys lead to life goals that are achievable if you are willing to put in the work. This is why it’s important to think about these life goals carefully, but it’s also important to consider your feelings about them. The more honest you are with yourself regarding your life goals, the more likely they will be to set you on the right path.

To get you thinking more, here are a few extra questions that might help you pick which life goals are going to set you on the right path for you personally:

What do you want to do with your life?

Is there anything you really want to accomplish during your lifetime?

Can you think of anything you might look back on and regret not doing in your life?

What is really important to you?

What struggles would you be willing to face on a daily or weekly basis?

Each of these will help you define your goal journey and destination more clearly.

Finally, remember that a life goal is the final stage of a journey, not a stepping stone. So if one of your current goals simply leads to the next goal, take it off your list of life goals.

your path

Step 3: Write down your goals clearly

Ok, now that you’ve figured out some of the journeys you want to take and the destinations you want your life goals to bring you to it’s time for the next step. Here is where you actually clearly define what your life goals are.

This is important because research has shown that people who take the time to write down their goals are more likely to achieve them. This is what will cement the goal into your reality. This step outlines exactly what your life goals are going to help you achieve.

So at the top of a separate page each time I want you to write down one of your life goals and the associated journey and destination.

Some potential examples could include:

“Earn a graduate degree – this would be associated with the life journey and destination of academic success and achievement.”

“Get married and have a family – this leads to the journey of family support and commitment as well as love, maintaining relationships, and raising children.”

“Start a business or brand – this would be associated with the life journey and destination of entrepreneurship, potentially managing a team, and developing business expertise as you become a recognized figure.”

Remember, these don’t have to be your life goals forever. They can change as the things that are important to you change and as you evolve and grow as a person. But don’t worry about how these goals might change in the future. Focus on what’s important to you right now.

If you need help, look at your answers again from the previous steps. What life goals will bring you closer to those answers?

write out your goals

Step 4: Create an Action Plan for Your Life Goals

Now that you’ve got your goals and journeys on top of each page, it’s time to add the process. Any goals that you outlined as a stepping stone earlier, will now fall under the heading of the main life goal. This could be getting a certain type of education, a career move, developing a new skill, etc.

Under each goal, you are going to write down the things you are going to need to do and the steps you are going to need to take in order to achieve that life goal. These items will essentially serve as a checklist as you progress towards accomplishing these life goals. They’ll also help you keep yourself accountable if you feel as though you’re falling behind.

Remember to Set SMART Goals

We already took the time to go over what smart goals were in this post. So keep that in mind as you create your action plan. Not only should each life goal meet these criteria, but each step should meet the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) criteria as well.

Building the Action Plan

Have you ever heard the saying that a goal without a plan is just a wish? Well, that’s certainly the case when it comes to your life goals. If you aren’t going to create a detailed plan, you’ll have no idea what path you need to take to achieve your life goals.

The best way to build your action plan I find is to start with the final destination and attainment of your life goals and work backward from them.

For example, if you had the goal to run a triathlon the final step is running and completing the race. Prior to that though you need to engage in a conditioning training schedule, you may need to get a coach to create this training and help you commit to it, you may need to get the appropriate equipment, etc.

Essentially, you’re working all the way back to the beginning step by step. If you’ve done this correctly, you’ll have a step-by-step plan and checklist you can progress through as you move towards your life goals.

This plan goes directly under each goal heading you’ve already created. Then when you have the plan and steps outlined you need to begin placing them on a timeline with specific and realistic deadlines. This helps you to continually be progressing towards your life goals, will keep you on track to complete them by a certain date, and will hopefully prevent you from falling behind. As you do this be sure you’re thinking about both the short-term and long-term steps.

Tips for Building Effective Action Plans

Reflect on them frequently

You need to take the time to reflect on both your life goals and your action plans frequently. As I’ve said a few times in this post, things change, your desires change, YOU change. There is no point sticking to goals and action plans that don’t suit you anymore. Take the time to reflect on your life goals and actions plan at least four times a year, once each quarter. That should help you to continue to tailor your plans and keep yourself on the best path for your life!

Keep your goals positive

You’re a heck of a lot more likely to stick to a goal with a positive message or meaning behind it. This is why people who write out positive goals that reinforce positive behaviors tend to have greater success in pursuit of their goals. If you have a goal like you want to lose weight so that you can live a healthier lifestyle, that’s fine. However, if you write out the same goal as you wanting to lose weight because currently, you’re fat and overweight, all of a sudden the goal takes on a negative tone. Keep your life goals and action plans positive!

Prioritize your life goals and action plans

Being realistic, not everything can be done at once, you’re only one person. So take the time to prioritize your life goals every week. What steps for which goals are you going to knock off the list this week? Usually, it’s good practice to aim to hit 2-3 priorities a day, regardless of how small they are. The goal here is to keep that hard-earned momentum you’ve built moving forward. It also removes the time-wasting question of what am I going to do today from your life entirely.

Talk with Experts and Mentors

It never hurts to get the opinion, suggestions, and feedback from people who have gone before you. Try to find someone who has accomplished a similar life goal to the one you’re working on and ask them for some advice. Often, these people are more than happy to help you out and may provide you with some unique perspective on how you can move forward and progress towards your life goals. Even if they aren’t willing to help, the worst thing they can say is no I won’t help you. I’ve been there, trust me, it doesn’t hurt that bad.

plan ahead

Step 5: Take Action

Now that you’ve got the destination figured out, you’ve clearly defined your life goals, and you’ve put an action plan in place, it’s time to actually begin taking action! This should be easy since you’ve already put together your step-by-step plan.

It can be intimidating to look at you’re your life goals and all the steps it’s going to take to accomplish them. So don’t look at them this way. Always look at the next step. This prevents you from becoming overwhelmed by the big picture. 

Take the next step for the life goals you want to work on right now and place them somewhere on your calendar for this month. If you’re eager, you may even want to schedule out each step on your calendar depending on how far into the future the final step for the life goal is.

Figure out what you can do today, this week, this month, this year, etc. to move closer to your life goals. When you break it down like this, your long journeys become much more manageable.

This should help remind you regularly to take action and actually get proactive with pursuing your life goals. After all, all this would be for nothing if you never actually took any action. Knowledge is great, but knowledge combined with action is so much more powerful!

Step 6: Conduct Progress Reviews

A progress review will be essentially you checking-in to see whether or not you’ve stayed on track towards your life goals. I would advise conducting these reviews yearly. It will help keep you accountable to your most important life goals.

The questions you ask to conduct this review will vary depending on the goal. But the idea is really just to make sure you’re on track.

What if Your Life Goals Aren’t Working?

It would be great if all of us achieved every goal we ever made for ourselves wouldn’t it. It would be great if every action plan we spent time pouring our efforts into ran smoothly. Unfortunately, the reality is not every goal will be a smooth journey. There will be unforeseen barriers and challenges that we didn’t predict when we originally made our life goals and action plans. So what do you do when this happens?

There are a few questions I would suggest you answer:

Are the life goals you’re struggling with still important to you?

If the answer is no, then maybe it’s time to consider removing this from the list. Remember, these life goals aren’t meant to be permanent. They will change as you change. Your life goals should excite and inspire you, not drain you. The life goals you choose are meant to take you on a journey. If you don’t like the current journey, it’s not that hard for you to change the path by changing your life goals.

If the goal is important to you maybe it’s just not a priority at this moment so you aren’t working on it as much. That’s OK, as long as you’re working towards other life goals. Remember you can’t work on them all at the same time.

If the goal is important to you and it is a current priority but you still aren’t progressing, you need to ask why. What is preventing you from making progress? What challenges are you facing with this goal specifically?

progress review

Step 7: Final Celebration

Every time you reach a milestone or actually achieve one of your life goals it’s important to not just let that moment go by. Take some time to celebrate when you make progress or accomplish your life goals. It can be something as small as having a treat or checking something off a list. But you need to take the time to appreciate your effort and your progress. This will reinforce your positive behavior and encourage you to continue progressing towards your goals in the future.

 On top of celebrating though, an important part of this stage is also to debrief yourself. Take the time to understand what worked well this time for you and what didn’t. This will help you to prepare for future life goals because you’ll have this experience and knowledge to draw from.

celebrate

Life Goals Wrap Up

That’s it! That’s the 7 step process for defining your life goals. You just took a massive step towards living your best life. Don’t underestimate the importance of what you just did if you took the time to work through this post with me.

When you combine this process with the 7 step process for defining your life values, you create a much clearer picture of where you want your life to go. It outlines what you need to be living your best life, the one that brings you happiness, success, fulfillment, and meaning. So if you haven’t go define your core life values and then come back.

On top of that, you’ve actually learned how to set effective life goals. So everywhere in your life, you will be able to set clear goals that provide you with motivation and direction.

I hope you’re as excited as I was when I first discovered this process. If you take the time to invest in it, you will be able to successfully create a strong foundation from which you can strive towards a better future. Committing to this process can literally change your life.

So, let me know in the comments below, what life goal will you be setting today?

Next Week

Last week I took you through my 7 step process for defining your core life values. This week I then took you through my 7 step process for defining your life goals. These are huge steps towards you creating the life-balance which lets you live your best life.

Next week we will be building on this 7 article series. We are going to combine what we learned last week with what we learned this week. That’s going to allow us to take the next crucial step to unlock the life balance that leads to a life which facilitates your success and happiness and is filled with meaning!

That article will be on aligning your life goals with your life values.

I’m super excited about this one, so I hope you guys are also!

So until next week, stay excellent! Keep on chasing those life goals in the meantime!

-Mark

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Mark Lynch

Mr. Lynch is the founder of the Excellence Addiction: Balanced Living Community (go here to subscribe and learn how to unlock your personalized balanced living formula that will facilitate your own success and happiness). Last month, over 1000 individuals were excited to join Mark’s balanced living community. Read his inspiring story, “Achieving a Balanced Life Took Me From Distress to Success.” Feel free to send Mark a message here.

Life Goals

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