Goal setting

Goal-setting is an important tool to stay motivated and focused. But it can also make us both frustrated and stressed if we set them wrong. In this post, we will look at how you can set your goals to positively build yourself up while remaining highly ambitious. 

One of the first things you need to do is to define very clear goals for yourself.

I know you have probably heard this a million times! You might also have tried it with little or limited success. Maybe goal setting for you is associated with negativity and frustration… Or maybe you think it´s an overrated tool, that a lot of people talk about, but no one really uses. Here is the thing: Clear and ambitious goals can be one of the strongest tools! It and can lead you on your way to success, but you need to use them smartly.

Connect your goals with your dream

Often you hear people stating something like: “You have to have realistic goals that you can actually achieve“. In opposition to this, you might hear other people saying that you need “to aim for the stars and make clear and ambitious goals to get there”.

I believe the truth is that you need both. You just have to be smart about how to use them simultaneously. If you want to stay motivated and focused at the same time, you need to combine your dream (as unrealistic as it might be) with your practical capability. At the bottom line, we all live for our dreams and not our “realistic goals”.

In order to do this in a way, so that we don´t end up beating ourselves up for not fulfilling our biggest dreams, I came up with the following three categories of a personal goal setting:

1. The Visionary Goals (dream)
2. The Practical Goals (path)
3. The Daily Goals (plan)

The Visionary Goals

Your visionary goals are strongly connected with your inner dreams. They are therefore always positive. These goals work longterm and they don´t have a specific deadline. It should be a vision of where you want to be in 5, 10 or maybe 15 years from now. The visionary goals are very flexible and might change through the years as you develop and change perspective. They are very exact in terms of emotions and feelings but never specific towards practical conditions that you can´t control. In this kind of goal setting, you can use phrases like:

I want to master my instrument, so I can sing on it as if it was my own voice

or

I want to play at a level where I can win an audition for an orchestra, in order to live my dream and play and contribute to a professional orchestra every day. 

In opposition to this, the visionary goals should never contain specific phrases about where exactly you want to work or when you want to win it etc. They shouldn´t be dependent on unknown variables that you can´t control. There is a lot of excellent musicians in the world, but not all musicians can work in the Berlin Philharmonic. However, most excellent musicians can work with some excellent orchestra.

Connect your visionary goals with strong positive emotions

In order to really feel connected to your visionary goals, and in order to use them to keep highly motivated, you should strive to connect them with positive emotions and experiences from your past. Remember and write down those events and experiences that made you discover your passion and dream.

For me, one of the strongest emotions connected to my personal goal (which was to become a professional trumpet player) was when I first time sat down with the local professional symphony orchestra and heard them rehearse Carl Nielsen’s 5th symphony.  To this day this music, in my opinion, is some of the best music ever written. That will always be MY truth –  even if in the big picture there are better compositions out there.

 

The Practical Goals

As the name itself states, the practical Goal Setting is more specific towards which exact goals you want to reach. This could be a specific technical issue that you want to overcome on your instrument or exact pieces you want to learn and play.

In other words, the practical goal setting is an overall plan designed to bring you closer to your visionary goals.

Connect your practical goals with your vision

The practical goals can be set either by your own ambition or by outside factors that require specific advancements from you, such as concerts, exams or auditions. This means that your practical goals- unlike your visionary goals – often have a very specific deadline for accomplishment. This time-lapse can vary greatly though, from weeks to months and even up to a year or more.

Working with a deadline can be very powerful. However, in order to not lose the motivation and enthusiasm throughout the process, it´s important to hold these goals up against your visionary goals. By doing this, you never forget WHY you practice and work so hard. It ’s important to actively remember all those positive emotions we have connected to our visionary goals while working on a day-to-day basis. It’s crucial because working on our practical goals can be tiring. It might at times take a lot of hard and boring work.

It´s easy to dream and hope for a better and more successful future! But if we don’t use those dreams and strong feelings to work determined and well day-by-day, the dream is very unlikely to be outlived – Jens Emil Holm

Keep your long-term mindset

The curve for learning goes up and down for everybody. What really makes the difference is how we work while the curve is hitting the bottom. If we get overly focused on our practical goals, we tend to give up. We give up if we don’t feel that we are improving in those specific areas our practical goals require. By being aware of this process and reminding ourselves that the brain develops in between sessions, we can remain calm and look at our overall process. If we furthermore use the visionary goals to remind ourselves of the bigger purpose and perspective, we are much more likely to turn “bad days” into something positive and productive.

Different circumstances will cause that you are not always able to fulfill all your practical goals within the deadline or to the level you wanted. This is completely ok!

It’s the sum of all your fulfilled practical goals that, combined over the years, will bring you closer to your vision. Don´t get stuck in the small failures on the way, but learn from those experiences and keep going.

The Daily Goals

The daily goals are meant as a very concrete plan for what you want to accomplish in the near future. This could be within the day or the week. The plan should include which exercises or methods you want to use and study. Furthermore, it should contain practical matters such as times and settings for possible run-throughs of a given program you are working on etc.

You should also make sure your plan contains breaks during the day and week!

It can, of course, vary from person to person how this works the best, but one successful way of doing this is to plan a week ahead with all your major goals. Afterward, you can then adjust the plan from day to day as the week goes. It´s very important to make a plan, that is both ambitious and flexible at the same time.

Finding the right balance

When making these kinds of plans, you need on one hand to take them seriously. You need to do whatever you can to be consistent and dedicated while executing them. On the other hand, you need to allow unforeseen events to make changes to your plan, without getting frustrated and demotivated. This can be a very hard balance at times. Depending on your personality, you need to go over your planning every now and then. Realize, whether you need it to be more ambitious or more flexible.

In my own case, I always tend to be overly optimistic when I make my daily plan. In my younger years, this caused a lot of frustration and stress when I couldn´t follow through. A state you definitely want to avoid, since it´s extremely hard to be creative and focused when you are frustrated. Often it can be helpful to get a second opinion on your daily plan, either from a colleague, spouse or maybe a professional coach. You yourself might not always see which states you end up in during a working process.

Prioritize

By writing down your flexible yet ambitious plan, you have a chance to make good priorities and begin every day with the most important things – all that you didn’t make the day before. In this way you might get everything that you initially wanted to be done in a week, done in 8 days instead. Not a bad compromise, if this secures a focused and healthy work process, where you are calm and concentrated during most of your study time.

People usually overestimate what is possible in a year, and underestimate what is possible in a decade – Tony Robbins

Unlike the visionary goals, there is a limit to what you can accomplish in just one day, and that´s completely okay. Keep your daily goals realistic while realizing that the effect of 365 realistic goals within a year can be overwhelming. Then think about what you can achieve in 10 years after accomplishing around 3650 realistic goals!!