What is your relationship with goals?

Goals are like a roadmap for motivating more potential to excel. Maybe you want to grow in your career, become a better leader, launch a business, share an idea with the world, or turn a passion project into a full-time role. Whatever it is, goals focus attention, guide direction, and energize effort to increase higher performance.

Even so, most people do not set goals, or set goals that are far too easy. Like Michelangelo said: “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”

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Here’s the deal. Challenging goals motivate success. Easy goals demotivate.

Science tells us that goals that are specific and challenging motivate higher productivity and performance in all cultures (Locke & Latham, 1990). Easy to achieve goals, vague “do your best” goals, or no goals can result in aimless wandering and lower performance.

Locke & Latham and other researchers have examined more than 88 different goal tasks in 1,000+ scientific goal studies conducted in Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America. Together, the research findings show a positive linear relationship between goal challenge and task performance if a person is committed to the goal, has the ability to achieve the goal, and has no conflicting goals.

Challenging hard goals that stretch you outside your comfort zone motivate higher performance (Locke & Latham, 1990). Task motivation can diminish if the goal capacity is within reach (or beyond reach), lowering performance. The greater the task challenge you set out to achieve — without going into a state of panic — the more likely it is that you will excel. The fragility of proximal balance of task skills and attainable challenge opens the pathways of high-performing excellence.

Plan your 2020 goals here.

Goal mnemonic devices like S.M.A.R.T. and OKRs are easy tools you can use to set and track personal and professional goals. 

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