Alan W. Goff
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Goal Setting Flaws That Guarantee Failure
(Part 1)
We have all been taught, and I use that term lightly, to some extent about goal ‘setting’ but never really about goal ‘achieving’. Do you find that you get frustrated with never quite reaching the goals you set? Well you’re not alone. Currently the national North American average states that less than 3% of the goals people set actually get achieved. That is a startling and horribly low statistic… but it no longer surprises me.
I remember the first time I went to see one of my heroes, Zig Ziglar live on stage. I was so excited; all I wanted to do was learn how to be a millionaire and the last thing to enter my mind was goal setting. I sat in the second row, first chair, on the centre isle. I swear I could see my reflection in Zig’s shoe. If you’ve ever seen Zig, he gets down on one knee in a crouch sort of pose, sticks his arm out in front of himself like a child crossing the street and says, “You've got to set goals”. On this day, I swear he was looking right at me as he performed his famous pose and instructed me to ‘set goals’. I remember thinking, “Yeah right… whatever, just tell me how to be a millionaire.” He just kept saying “You've got to set goals... you’ve got to set a goal” and quite frankly he was making me mad. One of Zig’s famous questions is “Are you a meaningful specific or a wandering generality?” He goes on to teach us that truly most of us are just wandering generalities simply because we don't set goals. Or if we do set goals, we just don't know how to set goals properly.
Most people think they know all about goal setting and how to set good goals. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of good speakers, trainers, coaches and the like that teach us methods for goal setting, but I’m convinced that if we were really honest with ourselves most people could write down everything they know about goal setting on the backspace of a postage stamp. While we know we should at least write our goals down and if we do we have instantly become one of the few to do so and that act alone sets us up for more success than at least the ones who don't. Other than that we don't know what to do with our goals besides posting them on our refrigerator.
The reason the masses never achieve their goals in the first place is because we set them incorrectly. There are three main flaws with the way people set goals and although they are universally accepted as logical goal-setting techniques all three of them are will generally set you up for failure.
Part 2 and Part 3 of this article will walk you through each of these three goal setting flaws that guarantee failure.
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