Identifying the Steps to Reach Your Goal

Let's say you have a goal, a result you want to reach. To get there from where you are, you will have to identify the action steps to take.

For example, if your goal is to improve at tennis so that you win at least half of your games you might identify steps like the following.

• Practice one hour three times a week with someone as good as or better than you are
• Take a tennis lesson once a week
• Do specific weight-lifting exercises twice a week to strengthen your backhand swing
• Always use the stairs at work to increase cardio endurance

If you see no improvement after a month, revisit the steps to see which need adjusting. (Disclaimer: I don't play tennis, so take this example list with a grain of salt, not as real tennis advice.)

If your goal is to lose weight, as mine was, these might be some of your steps.

• Do a cardio workout at least four times a week for 60 minutes each
• Decrease sweet treats (cookies, cakes, name your weakness) one day at a time, eventually cutting back by 95%
• Lift weights twice a week (not randomly, but with a plan)
• Gradually move from whole milk down through the range to skim milk, with a set date for each change
• Eat more fish and less butter, and have salad at least 4 times a week

These are not all the steps, and other steps would work better for someone else, but you have the idea.

Some goals will be easier to identify the steps for than others. Remodeling your kitchen or learning a new language—easy to identify; changing career fields and finding a great job in the new field—not so easy, but still possible. The key is to break the process down into very specific steps, identifying which ones need other ones accomplished before they can start, e.g., getting a passport comes before practicing your new language in another country. (For more info on this, check out the jargon of project management, especially dependencies and precursors.)

To track my process goals, I needed a checklist of some sort. For me, an Excel spreadsheet works well. There is a row for every date, and columns for weight that morning, cardio time, other exercises I track, and a set of columns for what I eat each day. This design makes it easy for me to spot correlations between what I eat, how I work out, and my weight (the actual goal).

Being a visual person, I don't skip days because they leave a gap in the colorful graph I run periodically to see my progress. The graph also makes it easier for me to see that, although my weight goes up and down daily, the trend over time is clearly in the right direction.

In the past I have used bright colored stars on my calendar as a reward for tracking process goals. While that is fun and very visual, I got better results with the spreadsheet. The key is to find out what works for you. Perhaps it's a daily check-in with a specific friend, or posting your workout progress on Facebook, or putting a quarter in a jar for every "good choice" you make (and perhaps taking one out for each "bad choice" as well). What you measure is where your attention will be, so set yourself up with a process that works with your goal and your personality.