The Seven Biggest

Mistakes
in Goal-Setting
(and how to avoid them)

by Andy Smith

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#1. Thinking about what you want to get away from, rather than what
you want to achieve.
Resolutions like "I will not smoke" are expressed in negative language - they're
describing what you don't want. But this only gives you a mental image of what
you're trying to get away from - in this case, smoking.
Your brain unconsciously filters your perceptions of the world around you. Given the
huge amount of sensory data available to you every single second, you have to ignore
most of it there just wouldn't be time to take it all in. So, without even thinking
about it, you choose to notice what you are interested in and ignore the rest.
Some of the filters are instinctive, designed to help us survive by noticing events that
are likely to affect us - if somebody yells in your ear or starts taking off their clothes
in front of you, they will probably attract your attention!
Some filters are learned - for a fashion-conscious person, someone with the latest
handbag or top will stand out from a crowd of thousands.
The rest of the filters are the ones you install yourself, through your goals. Once your
goal is set, your unconscious mind will be scanning the information coming in from
your surroundings for anything relevant to achieving the goal.
You will notice opportunities, resources and people that can help you to get closer to
your goal. It will seem like you are 'attracting' these helpful opportunities and people.
If you had not set the goal, on the other hand, you probably would not even have
noticed them, because they would not be relevant to you. It
So since we tend to attract what we are thinking about, telling yourself "I will not
smoke" will just keep your attention on your cravings.
Other examples: "I wish I wasn't in this job/relationship/flat" if you think this way,
without clarifying for yourself what you do want, your next job/relationship/flat may
not be any better.
"Away-from" motivation can be great for giving you the kick you need to get going
but it's undirected ("away" can be any direction) and it runs out quickly, as soon as
you get far enough away from what you're escaping. It's also stressful, because you
are carrying around your mental image of what you want to get away from.
So: think about what you want, rather than what you don't want.
Bonus tip: if it's not easy at first to focus on what you want, start with what you
don't want and ask yourself: 'What do you want instead of this?'

Coaching Leaders Ltd 2011 www.coachingleaders.co.uk

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#2: Trying to set goals that are not really yours

Whose goal are you trying to achieve? You will only be truly engaged with a goal if it
is really yours. If you are trying to live up to someone elses idea of who you should
be, you are bound to have some unconscious resistance unless your vision for
yourself exactly coincides with theirs.
Your unconscious mind likes to be given instructions. It loves to have things to do.
And if you don't give it any instructions, it will take them from wherever it can find
them which is why advertising works.
If you have not fully examined what is important to you and what you want, the goals
you set may be influenced by family, the media, or peer pressure. You may be fine
with this but you can't be sure until you are clear on your own needs and values.
Why I know this is important
When I left college I had no real idea of what I wanted to do. Eventually, I followed
my dad's advice given to me with the best of intentions: "Get a professional
qualification so you'll always have a secure job" - and became a trainee chartered
accountant. Big mistake!
I was terrible at it. Perhaps 'infantry soldier' or 'professional footballer' would have
been less well suited to my skills and personality, but it would be a close-run thing. I
found it extremely hard to motivate myself to do the studying required, and managed
to extricate myself days before taking the first set of exams which I would
undoubtedly have failed.
Why did I find this so hard? Because I was following someone else's advice, not
listening to my own deepest inner self. If you try to force your unconscious mind in a
direction it does not want to go, you will find that it will keep placing obstacles in
your way: you'll miss that train, mislay that vital document, the dog will eat your
homework, and so on.
So: look within yourself and find what is really important to you before you set your
goals.
Bonus tip: What's wrong with S.M.A.R.T. goals
If you are in business you will probably have come across the S.M.A.R.T. approach,
which states that goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and
Timed.
These are all necessary criteria for success, but they leave out an important factor:
do you care whether you achieve the goal?
In the environment where the S.M.A.R.T. approach originated there was no shortage
of away from motivation. If you did not carry out your tasks, you could be fired.
When you are setting goals for yourself, you need an approach that resonates with
your values and harnesses the power of towards motivation.

Coaching Leaders Ltd 2011 www.coachingleaders.co.uk

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#3: Not fully engaging your imagination

You already know that to maximize their chances of success, goals need to be
specific and measurable. This is what distinguishes them from aims or feelings
something has to change in the real world. For example, "I want to be happy" is not a
goal it's a feeling. You can make yourself happy right now, just by thinking of
someone you like or something you're good at.
Goals are different. They take place in the real world, where changes take time. You
need to know what will be different when the goal is achieved, so you will know when
you have achieved it. The more vivid the picture you can make of your goal, the more
motivating it will be.
Specific and measurable are easy when it comes to financial goals like savings or
sales targets, because money is easily quantifiable. But those figures on paper are not
going to excite you on their own. No what motivates the salesman to achieve his
target is what the figures will get him: being top dog in the sales team, the stuff he
can buy with the money, or just securing his job for another quarter. When images of
these desirable things flash through his mind, however fleetingly, he feels an
emotional pull to achieve them.
In that example the images more or less generate themselves. With less easily
quantifiable goals you can still 'measure' and get specific about what will be in place
when you achieve the goal. Even if you can't put a figure on it, you can specify your
goal in sensory terms what you will see, hear and feel (and maybe even taste and
smell) when you achieve your goal.
The more vividly you can imagine your goal in sensory terms, the more compelling it
will be for you. Images, sounds and feelings will usually be far more motivating than
just words. They also give you more detailed information, so you are more likely to
notice any aspects of the goal that you need to adjust.
When you have got your goal exactly the way you want it, and you're feeling really
good about it, step back out of it. Why? Because to your unconscious mind,
imagining that you have achieved the goal will feel much the same as really achieving
it (depending on how vividly you imagine). Rather than spend all your time
daydreaming about the goal, you have to make things happen in the real world.
Stepping back out of the goal reminds you that you are not there yet. When you see
that image in front of you (metaphorically in your future), you know how good it feels
and you will want to get there. The goal will be 'calling' to you, almost pulling you
towards it.
Bonus tip: what if you're not the world's greatest at visualization?
Actually anyone can daydream and see images. You may find it easier to talk through
with someone else what your goal will be like, or to write about it in as much detail as
you can. Use the present tense, as if you have already achieved your goal this will
make it more vivid.

Coaching Leaders Ltd 2011 www.coachingleaders.co.uk

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#4. Not putting a date on the goal

Until you have put a date on your goal, it will keep getting pushed to the back of your
queue of priorities.
Why? Your unconscious mind is a good and faithful servant, and it will do its best to
give you whatever you ask it for. But it will always take the line of least resistance. If
you don't put a date on your goal, there will always be something more urgent to deal
with. This (I believe) is why important but non-urgent tasks tend to be neglected, as
time management guru Stephen Covey pointed out in The 7 Habits Of Highly
Effective People.
You therefore need to put a date on your goal. Make that date as soon as you
reasonably can. If it turns out that you overshoot it by a day or two, that's a lot better
than setting the date several weeks later than you could actually have achieved it.
Make sure it's an actual date. If you estimate that your goal is achievable in a year,
other than saying "next year", make it an actual date by taking today's date and
adding one to the year.
The reason is this: if you tell your unconscious mind "next year", the goal will always
be a year in the future.

Now

Next
year

2 years
later

Still
"next
year"

Instead, if you put a definite date on your goal, it stays where it is. As you move along
your "timeline" into the future, the goal gets closer and closer, so you have to do
something about it.

Coaching Leaders Ltd 2011 www.coachingleaders.co.uk

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#5: Not taking into account the knock-on effects of achieving your
goal
The ancient saying "Be careful what you ask for, in case you get it" is a very wise one.
Because your unconscious mind will do its best to give you what you ask for no
more, no less you have to be very clear about what the goal is that you are setting.
Consider a businessman who very single-mindedly sets a SMART goal of owning a
company with a turnover of a million in its first year.
A year later he has his company, it's turned over a million, so he has achieved his
goal. But his health is shot due to working 19-hour days, he's a hundred pounds
overweight because he's been living on junk food, his wife has left him because he's
never home, and he has no friends left because he has made deals with them that left
him with a big profit and them with very little.
This is not where he wanted to be, but because he did not consider the consequences
and knock-on effects, his unconscious mind gave him exactly what he asked for
and no more.
How could he have avoided this? As well as making the goal sensory-specific and
putting a date on it, he also could have looked at the consequences of achieving the
goal on every other area of his life:
!
!
!
!

his health
his family
his friendships
the wider community

If you don't consider all the consequences of your goal, you may end up with
something you don't want. The smarter way to set goals is to take the consequences
into account, allowing you to make changes to your goal and/or your route to
achieving it. That way you stand a chance of getting the benefits of your goal while
avoiding unwanted side effects.
Bonus tip: listen to your unconscious mind
The conscious mind can only track around seven "chunks" of information at a time
(less on a bad day) so it's easy to miss something vital when you are thinking your
goal through.
Your unconscious mind, by contrast, is potentially aware of everything, and it can
notice pitfalls that the conscious mind overlooks. Generally it communicates with the
conscious mind by means of feelings. So check how you feel when you think about
your goal. Do you feel enthused and energized, or tired and discouraged?
If you feel less than 100% about your goal, that may indicate that your conscious
mind has missed something about the consequences of achieving it, so check again.

Coaching Leaders Ltd 2011 www.coachingleaders.co.uk

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#6: "Taking too much on" and getting discouraged

It can be very easy to set a big, compelling goal and then feel overwhelmed by the
perceived slog of getting there. The goal is so big, and so different from how things
are now, that getting there by the deadline you have set will surely demand too much
of you. And the more you think about the legwork it will take, the more discouraged
you feel.
There are two things you have to do to regain your motivation.
1. When you think about your goal, picture how great it will be when you have
achieved it not what you will have to do to get there. This will instantly feel
more motivating. When you book a vacation or a weekend away, you are
thinking about what you will do when you get there not about traffic jams or
delays at the airport.
2. Break the goal down into smaller sub-tasks that feel easier to achieve. Make
each of these tasks a goal in itself. This means that you can feel good when you
achieve each one maybe even give yourself a reward.
Sometimes it isn't easy to see what you should be doing first. The smart way to
decide on the sub-tasks that will form your route to the goal is to start from
imagining the position of having achieved the goal already. From that perspective,
ask yourself:
"What conditions had to be in place in order for this goal to be able to happen?"
Ask the same question for each of these conditions and so on, working backwards
through time until you arrive at the very first step you have to take. This gives you
your route to the goal (or routes as there may be more than one way to get there).
If the first task still seems overwhelming, break it down into smaller tasks until the
first step is one that you can definitely, no question, accomplish.
Remember what management guru Peter Drucker said:
"We overestimate what we can accomplish in one year, but
we underestimate what we can accomplish in five".
The key is to get started.

Coaching Leaders Ltd 2011 www.coachingleaders.co.uk

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#7: Not Knowing What You Want

This is the biggest and most common goal-setting mistake of all not getting round
to setting any goals because you don't know what you want.
You can be an expert in all the goal-setting techniques known to man, but if you
haven't taken the time to find out what you really want, one of two things is bound to
happen:
1. You don't set any goals. This means that you drift, and life just happens to you,
and you have to react to whatever it decides to throw at you. This might work out
OK if you're lucky and it might not.
(It's perfectly possible to drift in a well-paid corporate career, by the way for the
first twelve years of my working life, I sleepwalked through my IT career and was
quite comfortably off by the end of it. But because I had no direction, I was
unfulfilled and also vulnerable to career upsets.)
2. You set goals (because you think you should, or because someone else tells you
to) but they are not really about what you want. You don't achieve your goals,
because your unconscious mind sabotages them, or you achieve them but
discover they are not what you really wanted. Either way, you still feel unfulfilled.
So how, in Carlos Castaneda's words, do you choose "a path with heart?" How do you
find your calling?
You can use either or both of these methods:
!

Take some time to discover your values in each area of your life for example,
what's important to you in a career? What's important to you in a relationship?
Elicit the values for each area in turn by asking just that question: "What's
important to you?"
You will get the best results when you get a friend to ask you this question,
especially if they keep asking even after you think you have found all your values.
Some of the deepest and most motivating of your values will be the ones that you
are not at first consciously aware of.
Some values are more important to you than others, so decide which are the
'must-haves' and which are the 'nice-to-haves' - and then go for fulfilling all of
them anyway!

Try different experiences out. Notice what you enjoy (or don't enjoy) about
them? What is it about each experience that you really liked? Which of your
values was it calling to?
The more reference experiences you have, the clearer idea you will have of your
preferences, boundaries, and the 'hot buttons' that really excite your motivation;
ultimately, the more idea you will have of who you really are.

Coaching Leaders Ltd 2011 www.coachingleaders.co.uk

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About The Writer

Andy Smith is an NLP trainer, Emotional Intelligence consultant and

Appreciative Inquiry facilitator based in Manchester, UK. He has been
running the Create The Life You Want workshop for the last 15 years.
His company, Coaching Leaders Ltd, runs NLP Practitioner and Master
Practitioner courses in Manchester, and provides Emotional Intelligence
coaching, assessment and training to organisations. Andy's corporate
client list includes O2, GlaxoSmithKline, The Cabinet Office, the NHS,
and Lancashire County Council.
Find out more about Andy's book, Achieve Your Goals:
Strategies to Transform Your Life (Dorling Kindersley
2006) and read all the 5-star reviews on Amazon here.
You can also download the Achieve Your
Goals hypnotic audio MP3, designed to
boost your motivation and focus at the
unconscious level.
For more tips on goal-setting and personal and
organisational evolution drawn from NLP, Emotional
Intelligence, Appreciative Inquiry, and psychology
research, visit www.coachingleaders.co.uk
You can contact Andy by these means:
Tel: +44 (0) 7967 591 313
E-mail: andy@coachingleaders.co.uk

Coaching Leaders Ltd 2011 www.coachingleaders.co.uk

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