Goals The Samurai Way: Start With Intention and End With Impact

Setting goals is something of a tradition most of us at the start of a new year. It’s either to advance our careers, to be healthier or just be more inspired.

MindTools says setting goals gives us a long-term vision and short-term motivation . It focuses our acquisition of knowledge, and helps us organize our time and resources so that we can make the most of life.

For me, achieving goals is a struggle. I set my goals at the beginning of a new year only to forget about them after a couple of months. But I think I found something that will help me stay more aware of my goals this year.

7 Steps To Setting Goals

If you haven’t worked out your goals this year, or even if you have, this might be helpful for you to really feel confident that the direction you are taking is true to your life’s purpose.

Step 1.

Start with your intention. This part has never failed me. When I can visualize down to the color, smell and sound of what I envision my future should look like, the universe has a way of sending it back to you. Questions to ask yourself: What does my ideal work life look like? How do I want to spend your day? What does my ideal home life look like? What about my physical space?

Step 2.

What “life clutter” is standing in your way? This could be anything from “I hate how disorganized my closet is,” to, “I have an unhealthy relationship to deal with.” Get it all down on a piece of paper large and small. Then rate the clutter on two dimensions. First, how much is it affecting your life negativity (1=low, 10=high). Second, how easy/ hard is it to remove (same scale). Start tackling the high-high scores and go from there.

Getting on the path to remove life clutter removes the friction keeping you from achieving your goals.

Step 3.

What roles do you play? For example your job likely embodies a number of roles such as ‘people leader,’ ‘business leader,’ ‘program manager,’ etc. think through and write down each role. Don’t forget every job also has an admin component so allow for that too.

Step 4.

What are the expectations of these roles? For each role, imagine what you, your boss, customers and other stakeholders expect from you in the context of the role. For example, if you are an account manager, you would expect that you are well-versed and well-read on all the news and happenings of the customer account. If you are a researcher, you may be expected to keep up with new discoveries in your field.

Step 5.

Deliverables (goals), communications and habits/ behaviors. These are the outcomes connected with your various roles. Work through the results you uniquely can deliver, what sort of regular communications you should have and with which audiences. For example, should you be summarizing a particular project for leadership each month?

And finally, what habits and behaviors do you need to cultivate to be successful? Perhaps it’s planning out your week each Friday or Sunday or maybe you don’t say yes right away when someone asks you to do something for them and instead weigh it against your other priorities.

Step 6.

Identify the impacts you want to see based on your outcomes. This can be connected to your purpose, for example, provide clean water to those who don’t have access or teach children math or discover a new drug. 

Step 7.

As a final step, identify the obstacles standing in your way. What is holding you back? For example, do you need to make a change in staffing on your team? Do you need to delegate a project? Maybe you need to change anything about your personal life such as your relationships, your physical space, your health.

Wrapping Up

This may seem like a great deal of work just to get to a set of goals. For me, I had to go through this process to get clarity on what I should focus on. I though these seven steps could be helpful to you too.

Stay tuned for my next post where I describe a method for breaking down those big deliveries into smaller tasks so you can make continuous progress.