What You Don't Know About Goal Setting

What is happening? Come on in here. Happy Tuesday. Good to have you here today. So yesterday I said, you know, I'm not going to teach you goal setting because AI could do that.

And then here I come today with a kind of a twist on goal setting, two things that you need to pay attention to that are going to go very deep, very psychologically savvy, if I do say so. I need a boost. I need a daily boost. I need a daily boost.

It is the Daily Boost from MotivationToMove.com. Happy to have you here today. Come on in. It's me, Scott Smith. Welcome to the program that goes real practical and just kind of has to see it.

Listen, it's a it's a trade of mine. It's if you ever wonder where my head is coming from, I am completely obsessed by kind of one thing. Why don't people do what they say they want to do?

That's kind of my obsession or one of a lot of obsessions. That's one of them. Myself, too, by the way, why, you know, come up with this idea, set a goal, decide I'm going to do something and then, you know, then get life gets in the way.

Always been obsessed by that and always been obsessed by, well, how do I cut through that? How do I get exactly what I want? And sometimes it's very subtractive. It's taking things out of our life before we add things into our life.

More is on the other side of less. You'll hear me say this in lots of different ways, but I'm just obsessed by that. And one of the things that I'm always obsessed by is goal setting.

Now, let me frame this before I get in. This may be a short show, maybe a long show. I have no idea how long I'm going to go with this thing, but let me frame it a bit. I don't want to teach you goal setting.

If you want to learn goal setting, go Google Brian Tracy goal setting, the seven steps to goal setting. Go ahead and do that. And every other coach and consultant and leader on the planet has their version of goal setting.

I look at that and I go, yeah, okay, great. All this goal setting stuff that's out there, and yet people still mess up their goals. They still don't do it, right?

You got to get motivation, got to motivate them to get their goals, the whole thing. And I said, why is that? It drives me insane. And a lot of the literature out there, if you've studied any kind of goal setting that goes back, particularly back into the 60s or so, you're going to find a lot of that has been like, really, it's been disproven.

It just doesn't work. It's like things like setting a habit in 21 days. That's been completely disproven. Remember the Harvard study where it's like, you know, the people who set goals are 93% more effective to reach them?

Never done, ever. That's been research. It's a wives' tale that's out there. It is crazy how these things work. Smart goals. Y'all like smart goals. I've said forever, I don't like smart goals.

And y'all yell at me every time I say smart goals suck. The truth is it's been disproven. It doesn't work for so many different levels, but it's okay. It's where we were at the time.

And we have so much data. It's like driving a Tesla these days, a neural network. There's so many people driving Teslas, getting data driven up into the computer and the web that, you know, the car knows how to drive better now. That's all there is to it.

So all of us are basically automated machines and we're driving our cars, right? So goal setting is one of those things that I'm not going to go into the details of why we're driven to do it in so many different ways, but we are. It's built into you. It's something that happens.

A very simple explanation is if you look at your two eyes and your one nose, you kind of triangulate everything you do. Wherever you look, your eyes kind of come across your nose and it points at something. There's your goal.

That's a bit of automatic goal setting. Automatic goal setting has also been a bit disproved at the same time. It actually works in some areas, but does it get you what you want?

So these are the two areas I want to talk about that are most likely to be able to get you to what your goals are without going into any details about how many goals you should have or how you should manage all that stuff. It's just crazy. By the way, you shouldn't have more than three. So what are the two things you need to work about if you're going to set a goal today?

So you're sitting down going, man, I got to figure this out. But the first thing is I want you to use the word that I use all the time. It's part of my daily awareness diary. There are two questions at the beginning of my daily awareness diary.

Number one is retrospectively what happened yesterday. Retrospectively, if you don't understand the word, go look it up. What I'm saying is not what did you do yesterday. I'm saying what happened yesterday.

Really, for real. I mean, how did you feel? Did you get the results you wanted? Did you create the day you wanted yesterday? I start with retrospective because we have that grounding.

Now, if you think about it, if you set some goals and you know what you're going to be doing, and then I ask you to retrospectively think about yesterday or the past week, you're kind of automatically going to kind of check and balance that goal to see if you're on path, aren't you? That's why I ask that question all the time. I literally start my day asking a retrospective question. It's like, you know, was I a royal screw-up yesterday or did I move closer to what I want to be doing?

Did my life yesterday match what I wanted it to match? In many cases, it's no. So retrospective is a real key here. If you're not taking the time, if you've written down everything and all your planning, and yet you're not retrospectively looking back on what you've been doing, you're missing 90% of it.

I can tell you this. If I have people write a list of goals in the way I like to write them, and then I compare that up against my daily awareness diary, the daily awareness diary will hold you honest forever.

It will expose you for what you said you want to do and what you're doing. That's why I use it. It's so freaking powerful. People underplay it all the time.

It's the most powerful thing I have. So retrospective is that. And there's the other word that I want you to use. And this is so unique to human beings.

In fact, some people say we've seen apes use this. So people said, well, it's not just humans. But I think, you know, if it's an apes, it's probably close enough. Right.

That's about it, though. And that is a word called prospection. Uniquely available to humans. And pretty much that's it. the ability to creatively create whatever you want to create, respectively create your day.

So imagine this. If you retrospectively looked at day yesterday or the week before and you're like, man, I didn't kind of get what I wanted it to get.

Then you can prospectively say, well, great, that's fine. That didn't work. What do I have to adjust today to create the day I want today? I start my days like that.

I do. I know it's not that easy. And sometimes when I have to work with people, when I work in my groups, I work one-on-one, a lot of what we're doing is going back on retrospectively calling attention to what you said you were going to do and now you're not doing. And then we're saying, okay, prospectively, what are we going to do this week?

That's kind of the basis of it, which is why it doesn't happen overnight. It takes some time to get there. So if you learn nothing from today's program about goal setting, retrospectively look at what you said you were going to do and just say, well, how am I doing?

And prospectively say, what will I create today? Those two things will change your life. Now, there's seven other, eight other questions I add to it. Not going to go through those today.

That's a whole nother podcast or probably no whole nother seminar, honestly. But start with that. So I told you I was going to teach you two things. I already did teach you two, but let's call it one.

What's the other thing that actually makes goals work? Well, velocity is the key. It's more important that how fast you're getting to your goal than if you're getting to your goal.

So remember that velocity is the key. When you feel like you're moving quickly, you're making progress towards your goal, you're more likely to stay motivated and inspired to go after that goal. So it just makes sense that you should take all goals and break them into kind of velocity segments. So you can actually measure the velocity moving forward.

Have you ever felt just stuck and trapped? That's usually, by the way, most life coaches are like, oh, you feel stuck? You feel trapped? That's where they start.

Well, the problem is what happens is they've set inappropriate goals, their velocity has stalled, and when velocity stalls, for lots of biological reasons... your motivation stalls. Make sense?

So when we set a goal, we want to make sure that we can measure a velocity toward it. Now, there's something else that happens here, and this is probably the biggest key to making this happen. A lot of people set a singular goal. It could be a big-ass goal, like I like to call them, way off in the future.

And that's fine. That's the most important thing to be able to do, have a big goal to go after. But if it's six months down the road, you're going to have velocity problems.

It is very difficult for you to stay in the game when something is so far away because it takes time to get there. And here's the reason why. Because the reward mechanism that gets you there actually is kind of in a step process. So think about it in the sense that if the goal that you're going to accomplish is six months down the road,

you kind of have to break it up into a whole bunch of mini parts that you accomplish at the same time. We can chunk that down. And the reason is we can maintain velocity. And as you get closer to a goal, have you ever noticed how you naturally get more excited to finishing it up or naturally get excited to get the reward?

Think about that for a second. If you have a goal at six months or a year of the way, you are six months to a year from getting close enough to the goal to even experience that feeling of, wow, I'm almost there. I'm going to do this thing. You're dragging your ass through it the whole time.

That's where people fall off the wagon. So when we take a longer goal and we pull back to it and say, well, let's build some velocity goals in the middle of this thing. Let's get a couple of steps that you can always feel like you're making the progress to the next benchmark, if you will, the next milestone. If you can do that, you can move yourself very closer to these goals.

And notice what I didn't do. I didn't go into all the crazy details of your why and your what and all. I didn't even care about that stuff because goals are automatic.

I know this. I know most of y'all, you just come up with an idea and say, I want to do that. My wife gets afraid of me. I said, I'm kind of in the mood to get a Tesla.

I'm kind of shopping around, kind of new in that. We'll see when that happens. She gets scared to death because she knows that my brain figured out that I'm interested and maybe it'll happen. And she's like, uh-oh.

So now what am I doing? Well, I know two things. I know that if I keep moving in that direction, I'm probably going to buy the car. So the velocity will continue, continue, continue until I finally own the car.

Or I can pull back a little bit, install the velocity, and then the need and desire to get the car will probably go away and fade until another time when I get the idea again. Make sense? You do that all the time. In my coaching clients, I'm always measuring velocity.

I'm always measuring how excited they are to getting where they're getting because almost every single person that I take down a path and say, here's the answer, let's do this. I go, great, we're going to do that. Then they start doing the work and the work slows them down. The reward slows down.

Suddenly they want something else to make them excited again, to keep them from being bored. That makes sense. So a lot of what I just told you, that's really just maybe the top 10% of actually how this all really works. This stuff is very brand new.

We know this because of the amount of information we've had. And frankly, you can look in the world and realize that almost everybody fails in their goals.

Listen, I'm not the smartest guy on the planet, although I'm beginning to realize I'm one of them. I kind of sort of mean that maybe. But what I now know is that, listen, if I look out and I realize that most people don't set goals, okay, there's something going on there if most people don't set them, right?

And most people who do set them don't achieve them. Okay, there's something going on there too. There has to be another way. And yet sometimes without even knowing you set a goal, you did.

And without even knowing you were going to achieve it, you did. There must be something going on there. That's how Scott thinks. So I always think a couple layers down because I just noticed the stuff that everybody else is teaching, all the pseudoscience just doesn't work.

So you just got like a 10-minute masterclass on about 10% of what current goal-setting science is. And honestly, it has nothing to do with goal-setting, does it? It has to do with your mindset. That's about it.

That's how this stuff works. That's why when I like to work with people, I like to work back and forth in kind of an iterative environment because we can slowly push these things and reframe our mindset and our worldviews. And we can just get there little by little and make amazing progress in just a short amount of time. It's crazy when you do that.

But the bottom line is life is long, and I pretty much figured it's going to take our whole damn life to figure out stuff, right? That's just how it's going to be.