Setting Goals by Writing Your Own WHAT?!?!

Goal Setting
In last week’s vlog, I wrote about mission statements.
One of the things about a mission statement is it doesn’t include goals. A mission statement should not be specific, measurable, or time-bound.
Its point is to be lofty and paint a picture of what you are working toward.
But this week, I am talking about goals.
One of the things that characterizes a goal is that it is specific, measurable, achievable, and has a deadline. That’s the only way you’d know if you achieved a goal!
Read about my process below and if you like it, you can sign up for a FREE workshop to work on your goals.
Weird Times Call for Weird Measures
During the pandemic when — like everyone else — I was floundering with too much time and too many questions on my mind, I learned this goal-setting process from Donald Miller.
Donald Miller is the author of the book, StoryBrand, which is a method of copywriting (my favorite) I use all the time. He has written many books for business owners and coaches and I love his work.
Back in March 2020, he offered to share the goal-setting process that he uses. And since he's been extremely successful in life and is a good-hearted person, I wanted to learn his secret sauce.
What I love about this process is that it starts very weirdly, and I love weird things!
“It starts very weirdly, and I love things that are weird!”
Starting at the End
You begin the process by writing...your obituary.
Writing your own obituary is an opportunity to future-think your life’s goals and purpose and ask yourself the question: What’s the legacy I want to leave?
Some people think this is morbid.
I think it's really empowering. So take it or leave it.
This exercise is not about setting a dollar amount you hope to earn in your lifetime (though that could be a part of it). It’s about what you want your life to have meant. How you want to show up. What you want people to remember about you.
Because when you do that, your life has purpose.
The point is to think about what you want to be able to say about your life after all is said and done.
It’s Quite Timely for Me
I’m in the process of writing my mom’s obituary and planning her memorial service, so it’s very poignant for me right now to talk about writing your own obituary.
It would have been fascinating had my mom written about how she would like to be remembered.
I always wonder how well we see ourselves like others do.
Fortunately, my mom did write a lot about her family history, and that was helpful for writing her obituary and the services.
And I hope my children appreciate the obituary I wrote for myself (even more so, I hope I achieve what’s in it so they don’t have to re-write the whole damn thing).
Writing Your Obituary
Writing your own obituary is like reverse-engineering your life.
You start with the legacy you want to leave and figure out what you’re going to have to do to get there.
I recommend you find an hour or two where you can begin the process undisturbed. Find a comfortable and quiet place to write. Eat something yummy, feel the air on your skin, take a few deep breaths, and appreciate this life and body you are in.
Then just start writing all the things you’d want people to say about you, how you touched their lives, how you inspired them, what you accomplished, what you are most proud of, what you enjoyed the most in life, and what you are known for.
You could also include a few of your major screw-ups if you want because, hey, we’re all human! But it’s mainly about celebrating what you did.
Get it all down on paper (or device) and then look for the major themes and accomplishments. Then, order those things chronologically and see if you can find the ‘bridges,’ the things that connect one theme or accomplishment or time period of your life to another.
You should end up with one and a half to two pages. I hope you find the exercise as uplifting and inspiring as I did.
Next, the Decades
The next step is to list all the decades in your life, from birth all the way to the end.
Imagine living as long as you’d like or expect to. How many years is that?
For me, I was 60 when I wrote my obituary, and — gods and goddesses willing —I expect to live into my 90s. So I’d had six decades so far, and another three to accomplish the things in my obituary I hadn’t done already.
Now, you start at the beginning.
What did you “accomplish” in the first decade of your life?
That may sound like a joke, but it’s actually a very important question.
Drop into your heart and ask: What aspects of who I am emerged in my first 10 years of life? Things like your general nature, your personality, your natural talents, your place in the family, your style as a learner. These are the ‘accomplishments’ of your childhood.
Then, what happened in your life from 10 to 20? Your identity was forming, you pursued and developed some of your natural talents, you developed relationships and activities independent of others, you emerged into a young adult and perhaps left home, worked out in the world, sought out higher education, and discovered key traits of how you move in the world. You likely came up with your worldview.
Now keep going, decade by decade, looking for the aspects of who you are now that emerged during those 10-year increments. You might include significant relationships that influenced you, jobs, mentors, places, and achievements that contributed to your legacy, and any shifts to your belief system.
Each decade is just one paragraph that sums up what you discovered or developed about yourself in that time period.
Do this until you bring yourself to the present.
And Then the Fun Begins!
What is left for you to do so that folks say the things about you that you wrote in your obituary?
List out the things you have yet to accomplish, and place them in the decades you have left.
You are going to figure out the trajectory of the rest of your life (and this is where we get to the goal-setting).
As you are outlining the coming decades, remember to not only focus on work. Be sure to include things that will lead to the quality of life you want — inner peace, personal development, time with family, contributions, etc.
Turn that list into a paragraph description of what you will have done (write it as if you DID those things) for each decade.
When you’ve mapped out the remaining decades of your life, your Life Plan is complete.
Your Life Theme
Now search through all the decades — past and future — and pull out the major themes about you and your life. The throughline that runs through your way of being in the world. The thing that was evident in you at any age. An undeniable quality or characteristic that everyone recognizes in you. The meaning and purpose of your life overall.
Write those things into one paragraph that encapsulates how and why you lived your life.
This is your life theme and is the capstone of your Life Plan.
Bringing It Into the Present
Okay, take a deep breath. That was a lot of work!
Now, we’re going to focus on the here and now.
Take a look at the description of the decade you are in. (If you are nearing the end of a decade, you might want to just skip to the next decade. If you are just starting or in the middle of a decade, stay where you are.)
What will you need to do in the next 10 years (adjust the number of years depending on where you’re at in this decade) to achieve that vision?
Your 10-year goals will be high-level. Things like: buy a house, build a retreat center, start/change careers, have children, create a farm, travel the world... things that may take an entire 10 years to plan, save up for, implement, etc.
I like to divide my 10-year goals into categories: Career/Work in the World, Family/Community, Health, and Spirituality. You can create any categories that make sense to you.
Your 10-year goals do not have details about what you need to do or how you’ll do them. Just be realistic about what can be done in 10 years.
The Climactic Scenes
In any hero/heroine’s journey, there is a climactic scene: The thing that happened to create the shift that was necessary for transformation to occur.
You see, you’re not writing a fantasy novel here, you’re actually creating the map for your transformation to become the person you just wrote about in your obituary. This is powerful stuff!
So for each future decade, you’re going to forecast a climatic scene. What's the big thing that needs to happen in those 10 years to influence your career, family, community, health, or spirituality (or whatever your categories are)?
Doing the same old things year after year, decade after decade, isn’t going to create big change. So what's the event that's going to move you forward and get you closer to the vision you have of yourself?
Here’s an example of a Climactic Scene:
After the pandemic canceled my travel plans and I returned to Seattle, I found land to settle on and began to build a community there. I had to start a new career, so I took marketing coaching training and started to consult with other small companies for my livelihood. In the process of growing roots in this new community, I met someone with shared values in farming and social justice. We built our home together, grew the gardens, planted the orchards, and raised flocks and herds within a shared homestead.
Breaking It All Down
Now we're going to start making your 10-year goals more doable. Remember, your 10-year goals are not detailed enough to implement. They create the vision. Now we’re going to make them real.
Take a look at your goals for this decade and decide what you have to do to reach them.
For example, if you want to build a house, you have to save a certain amount of money for a down payment, decide where you want to live, decide what kind of home you want, find land, develop a budget, get a loan, hire an architect, and find a builder.
Each one of those goals is SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound.
But it’s impossible to do all of them today, and still fairly broad.
What you can do sooner and what will take a while? You could probably hire an architect today, but what's the point if you need to save $50,000 for a down payment and you currently have $500 in your savings account?
Start plotting out what has to happen first, which things are contingent on others, what will take the longest to do, etc.
Now you’re going to identify which of those things you have to, or can, start working on in the next 5 years. Make sure it’s realistic to accomplish those things in the next 5 years, and leave the rest for the following 5 years.
There! You’ve got your 5-year goals, which are simply smaller pieces of your 10-year goals.
Making Your Goals Actionable
But 5 years is still too broad to drive what you can do today. So you’re going to break it down even further. Using the same process as above to go from 10 to 5-year goals, go from your 5-year goals to a 1-year goal.
You are not listing out all the goals for all 5 years, just the year in front of you.
List what you can realistically accomplish this year that's going to get you closer to your 5-year goals. Make sure they are SMART goals.
Put your yearly goals into a spreadsheet, checklist, or something that you can track.
For each goal, create subgoals or milestones. Assign a due date to each one. But don’t have them all due on 12/31/24. Spread them throughout the year so you have subgoals due every month.
Then, transfer all the things due for each month onto monthly goal sheets. I don’t recommend creating them all at once, because during the year, goals will get moved around or delayed. Just do one month at a time before the month begins.
From your monthly goals, assign them to the weeks in that month, and then — I bet you can guess the next part — break the weekly goals down into daily tasks.
You should create daily task sheets that include the tasks you are doing each day to achieve your weekly and monthly goals. And don’t forget to include meetings, appointments, errands, activities, and personal/family/social time so you have a realistic and comprehensive view of what you can and will do each day.
The Clincher
Here’s the most important thing you should know:
Every successful business owner has goals that they check and monitor every day.
Any task from your daily goals that doesn’t get done gets reassigned somewhere else in the week. Anything from your weekly goals that doesn’t get accomplished gets moved to the following week. Months and years...same thing.
You do NOT have to be perfect. NO one is. You just have to constantly monitor, track, adjust, and revise your goals to keep you pointed toward your bigger vision.
And even that can change.
A goal-setting process is never about chaining you to a set of ideas. It’s about mapping out your path and keeping you on track.
When you can say, “This is what I’m working on today because it’s one step toward my vision for my lifetime,” you are on track!
This process will help you put the nitty gritty daily details of life into a larger context that brings meaning to your life.
When the context becomes meaningful --> the daily task becomes meaningful.
I think what most human beings want is meaningful lives, a meaningful existence. We want to know that the shit we’re doing on the daily matters for something. Because sometimes it's hard to remember that, isn't it?
I hope this process will help you move yourself, your family, and your community toward something bigger and grander and better. Something you will be proud of when you’re looking down at what your survivors are saying about you.
If you are interested in this process and would like to attend a FREE workshop to get started on your goal-setting process, click here. You’ll get all my templates, guidance on getting started, and more hints and tips.