Contract Worker - Freelancing Experiences

How to Set Goals Effectively

by Rico on October 21st, 2007

Last night, I was in a team bowling tournament. By the last game, my teammates and I were pretty tired, and our scores were suffering. Halfway through, we all realized that placing first or second was next to impossible. The other teams had finished our rounds, and one of us came up with the brilliant idea of checking their scores to see what it would take to place third.

With this concrete goal in our minds, our games suddenly picked up. Most of us started striking consecutively, even those who rarely struck during the entire tournament, and all of us did a better job of closing out frames with spares. We fed off each other’s success, eventually earning our highest team score ever.

By the time the organizers totaled the scores, it turned out we placed second!

So what does a friendly yet intense game of bowling have to do with effective goal-setting?

Set clear goals. Entering the tournament, we all strove to get the highest score possible. But I’ve witnessed how generic objectives such as “get the highest score”, “earn lots of money,” and “create the best-looking design” are counter-productive. For some reason, their ambiguousness doesn’t provide a point to focus efforts on. That changes when you make your goals specific (”Score 949 points to place third”).

Believe you can achieve those goals. What’s the point of setting a goal you think you can’t reach? Of course, this impression is very subjective, depending on who’s setting the goal. If you lack confidence, then it’s easy to think that you can’t achieve anything. On the other hand, if you already have a very optimistic outlook, as did my teammate who automatically believed we could score higher than we ever did before, the number of achievable goals increases greatly.

Strive to surpass, not meet, them. Ever heard of that story shooting for the stars when trying to reach the moon, just in case your shot was too weak? Well, we were desperate to reach third, and we all unconsciously knew that trying to simply meet the goal may result in scoring less than what was needed. Ironically, working with a clear goal really pushed us to score as high as possible!

In short, if you want to set goals effectively for your freelance career, or any part in your life for that matter, you’ll need the certainty of your goals’s clarity, the belief that you can achieve them, and the willingness to do more than what’s needed.

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POSTED IN: Ramblings of a Freelancer