I attended an excellent seminar last evening and I had an epiphany.  I have been setting goals for myself for years and I did not realize that I was doing it all wrong. I wasn’t actually setting goals. I was setting desired outcomes.

Allow me to explain.

For the last few years, most of my goals have been dependent on other people. I had goals to grow my business to a certain income, to increase my presence as an artist by landing gigs in specific bars, etc. The problem is that those goals depended on me convincing other people to do something and as we know, other people are unpredictable. So when things don’t work out as expected, what did I do? I became discouraged and set another “lesser” goal. Of course, this does not make me feel confident and productive.

A goal is an action that you take that is only dependent on you. Otherwise, it is a desired outcome.

That means that my desired outcome was to increase the profit of my business. The goals were to make 20 prospecting calls per day. If you rely on statistics, then by accomplishing your goals, you will likely hit your desired outcome. However, the important thing is that you do the best you can to hit your goal.

In sports, you rarely hear professionals talking about how they are going to win the game. Typically, you hear them say that they will “go out there and perform at their personal best”. This is a goal. That way, if they end up losing the game, there is no reason for them to feel bad about themselves as long as they performed at their personal best. The desired outcome is out of their control.

I found this new way of looking at goals to be very liberating. I can now focus only on what I can do in order to move forward and reach my potential. If I set a goal and I do my best to achieve it, then if I fail, I have only myself to blame. However, by setting goals that I can control by simply performing the actions to the best of my ability, then I will hit more of my goals and will likely also get my desired outcome.

Something to think about!