Key Ideas

1. Approach life with an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset. Use this to modify any limiting beliefs into liberating truths.
2. Perform an after-action review to help learn from past mistakes.
3. Set SMARTER goals.
4. Aim to set your goals within your discomfort zone, but the first task of any goal should fall within your comfort zone.
5. Understand why you want to pursue your goals. Look for internal motivators rather than external ones.

Introduction

It’s a popular statistic that 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail. Regardless of whether or not this is true, people believe it to be true. We’re ready to believe that statistic because many of us have experienced difficulties in achieving our own goals. Be they small habit goals like exercising regularly, or large life changing goals like earning enough money to retire early. At one point or another, we’ve all failed to follow through on a goal and maybe even abandoned one entirely.

It’s our inexperience with goals and goal-setting that can cause us to fail. We assume it should be as easy as picking a target and aiming at it. But that’s not always the case. It’s easy to set goals that are too challenging and doomed to failure. It’s equally easy to set a goal that’s trivial and fails to capture our attention. We fall prey to a host of other issues too. Our goals are too vague, they’re goals other people want for us but we don’t want ourselves, the timelines we set are too unforgiving, and much more. In this book, Michael Hyatt (a former CEO of a $250 million publishing company) aims to help you overcome these difficulties by outlining his 5-step process for goal attainment.

Setting the Scene

Before you consider goals, you first have to understand and accept that life isn’t one-dimensional. A trap many fall into with their goals is fixating on a single domain of life. By focusing on that one dimension, you miss how it interconnects with the rest of your life and that can have serious consequences on your chance of success. This book is built on 5-key assumptions that stem from this understanding.

This book is built on 5-key assumptions that stem from this understanding.

1. Real life is multi-dimensional. You can consider your life across 10 inter-related domains:
   • Spiritual – Your connection to God or spirituality.
   • Intellectual – Your engagement with significant ideas.
   • Emotional – Your psychological health.
   • Physical – Your bodily health.
   • Marital – Your relationship with your spouse, partner, or significant other.
   • Parental – Your relationship with your children, if you have any.
   • Social – Your relationship with your friends and associates.
   • Vocational – Your profession.
   • Advocational – Your hobbies and interests.
   • Financial – Your personal and familial finances.
2. Every domain is important because they each have an impact on one another.
3. You can only progress forward with your goals once you’re clear on where you are right now.
4. It is possible to improve any life domain if you aim to do so.
5. Confidence, happiness, and life satisfaction are by-products of personal growth.

The assumptions underpin Hyatt’s 5-step process for goal attainment. Each step targets a specific aspect of goals and by following the process you’ll understand where you are currently, where you want to be, and how goal-setting can help bridge the gap.

Step 1: Believe in the Possibility

Your beliefs shape your reality, at least to some extent. If you believe you can’t do something, you might not be willing to even try it. If you do try, you might not give it your best effort – after all, you can’t do it… right? Well, maybe not. If you look back on your life, you’ll be able to find at least one example of something you managed to accomplish even though it felt impossible at the outset. Things only seem impossible when they’re in front of us. Once we’ve overcome it, we see how things were easier than we first thought. It’s one reason why it’s important to understand that your mindset can play a big role in whether or not you’ll be able to succeed. As Hyatt puts it,

To accomplish anything, we have to believe we’re up to the challenge.

There are two interlinked changes you can make in order to improve your mindset. The first is shifting your perspective from one of scarcity to one of abundance. The second is turning limiting beliefs into liberating truths.

Scarcity and Abundance Thinking

When facing a new challenge, you have to believe you can rise up to meet it. That isn’t saying things will be easy. They won’t be. It’s also not saying that you need to know how to overcome the challenge from the outset. You won’t know. Rather, it’s saying that you have to believe you’re capable of rising to the challenge. More importantly, you have to believe you’re capable of prevailing.

Such belief is important because any goal worth pursuing is going to be challenging. Not only will it be challenging, but you’ll always encounter unexpected obstacles along your journey to success. If you don’t believe you can overcome them, you’ll never achieve your goals. This is why Hyatt recommends taking an abundance mindset over a scarcity mindset.

You’re in a scarcity mindset when you take a limited view of the world and your abilities. You believe everything is the way it always will be. Challenges become insurmountable because you either see your skills and abilities as fixed, or you believe you’re incapable of learning new things. When you think like that, you’re less likely to attack challenges from multiple angles. And if your first attempt fails, you’re unlikely to give it another go. In short, you’re destined to fail. This all stems from the web of limiting beliefs (more on those later) that a scarcity thinker operates from.

Abundance thinkers are the opposite. They approach everything with an open mind. If they encounter an obstacle then there’s bound to be a way over or around it. Don’t know something? Then they can learn it. Can’t do something alone? They can find support. Even if things won’t be easy, they’ll at least be possible. In other words, abundance thinkers aren’t bound by a web of limiting beliefs.

Therefore, the key is to find a way to overcome any limiting beliefs you have. Hyatt has a method for this.

Turning Limiting Beliefs Into Liberating Truths

We all have self-doubts; it’s part of being human. What matters is how you respond to them. If you decide to listen to them and allow them to influence your actions and decisions, then that’s the moment they morph from a doubt into a limiting belief.

The challenge with limiting beliefs is how easy they are to pick up without even noticing. They form all the time as a result of our environment, the people we interact with, and the experiences that shape us. The news and social media can make the world feel bleak, our relationships can drain us, we experience setbacks when we take on anything, and on and on. The list is endless. So much of life can cause you to doubt yourself. Before you know it, you’ll have several limiting beliefs holding you back (if you don’t already have some). Limiting beliefs take one of three forms:

1. Beliefs about the world. For example, “I can’t start a business right now because the market is terrible.”
2. Beliefs about other people. For example, “I can never trust management to have my back, they just look out for themselves.”
3. Beliefs about yourself. For example, “I’ve never been good with money so I’ll never be able to save to buy a house.”

If you stop and think about it, you’ll instantly recognise some limiting beliefs you already have. Luckily, it is possible to overcome these through active, deliberate effort. Hyatt proposes a 6-step process to transform limiting beliefs into liberating truths.

1. Recognise the belief.

Whilst understanding the 3 forms mentioned above can help you identify limiting beliefs, there are other clues that can give them away. If you have a belief that involves any of these

• Black and white thinking – where you think you’ve failed if you’ve not achieved perfection.
• Personalising – Where you blame yourself for random negative occurrences.
• Catastrophising – Where you assume the worst with little to no evidence.
• Universalising – Where you take one bad experience and assume it holds true across the board.

then there’s a high chance you’re dealing with a limiting belief.

2. Record the belief.

Don’t just store it in your memory. Physically write your belief down. Once it’s externalised you can sit down and fully evaluate it.

3. Review the belief.

This is the toughest step because it requires you to be brutally honest with yourself. Try to look at the belief objectively and evaluate it honestly. Is it empowering you? Is it enabling you to achieve what you’re trying to achieve? Or is it holding you back? Are there specific examples you can think of where it has held you back? Is it holding you back from doing something right now?

4. Reject or reframe the belief.

Depending on the belief, you have one of two options. And which option you choose depends on how much truth lies behind the belief. If the belief is blatantly false, you can simply reject it outright. Unfortunately, many limiting beliefs have at least a grain of truth to them – that’s why they’re so convincing. If there’s some truth behind a limiting belief, then you need to reframe it.

To do this, try and find a way to turn the negative element you’re focusing on into a positive one. For example, if you’re older and looking for a new job you may feel that your age is a disadvantage. “I’m too old to find a new role” you might say to yourself. But this can be flipped on its head. Many employers covet the assets and experiences older employees have. If you can understand and believe this, then you can reframe the limiting belief to empower you. It could become “my years of experience have given me skills and knowledge that younger applicants lack. By emphasising these I can gain the advantage when applying for new roles.”

This highlights why reframing a limiting belief can be so empowering. It also illustrates why it’s more involved than simply rejecting a belief. You need to take the time and energy to think through the belief, find a way you can put a positive spin on it, and then find evidence that supports this new perspective.

5. Revise the belief.

Once you’ve turned your limiting belief into a liberating truth, you need to reorient your thinking around it. Whilst you should confront the old belief whenever it rears its head, you need to do more than that. You need to actively think from the perspective of the new belief.

6. Reorient yourself to the new belief.

By now, you should already be reorienting your thinking around your liberating truth. Now you need to take it one step further. You need to actively live from this new perspective. You may not fully believe the liberating truth yet, but the trick is to live as if you fully believe it. Push through any doubts or awkwardness you feel because the more you can do this, the quicker you’ll embody the liberating truth.

Step 2: Complete Your Past

After limiting beliefs, the most common barrier to success is your past. More specifically, your relationship to the past. When we experience challenging events, it’s not uncommon to walk away with a story that explains why things happened the way they did. The trouble is holding onto those stories can end up holding you back. It’s not just holding onto the past too tightly that can hold you back. Not holding on at all can be just as detrimental. It’s popular to claim that you live with no regrets. Those who claim this are quick to think that living with regrets means you’re caught up in the past and not making the most of the present. But that’s just wrong. Such a perspective misses that “regret is a powerful indicator of opportunity.” Researchers have found that “feelings of dissatisfaction and disappointment are strongest where the chances for corrective reaction are clearest.” In other words, regrets aren’t just the consequences of bad experiences, rather they are guidelines for how to do better in future.

If holding onto the past too tightly and not holding on at all are equally problematic, then what’s the solution? The answer is simple. You need to understand your past and learn from your experiences. To do this, Hyatt looks at the US armed forces and their concept of an ‘After Action Review’. It’s a straightforward process that can be done in 4-steps:

1. State what you wanted to happen.

This is as simple as it sounds. Explicitly state what your objective, goal, dream, or expectations were going into the event you’re trying to analyse. Even if you never made your expectations clear prior to the event, it’s likely that you still had some. It’s important you know exactly what you wanted to happen. And remember, life is multifaceted, so you might have to look at an event across multiple domains to get the full picture of what your expectations were.

2. Acknowledge what actually happened.

If you have regrets, then what actually happened didn’t align with what you wanted to happen. You need to figure out why. Start by explicitly stating what the outcome of the event was. Don’t sugarcoat things or try to explain why things happened the way they did. Be objective and state things as they were.

Once you have the event written down, assess where it fell short of your expectations. What were the gaps? What were the disappointments? What did you feel should have been acknowledged but wasn’t?

When assessing the event, try not to only see the negatives. Try to think of any positives that happened to. What did you actually manage to accomplish? Did you manage to beat your expectations in some domains? Did you learn something new? Even if you didn’t meet your expectations fully, it’s likely you still accomplished something. It’s important to acknowledge that and celebrate your successes.

3. Learn from the experience.

This is the tricky step. By now you should know what you wanted to happen and what actually happened.  You should also be aware of the gaps between the two. Now you need to figure out why the gaps occurred and how you could prevent them from occurring in future.

This might not be a quick process. It may take hours of thinking on your part. But it is possible to learn from your mistakes. Once you’ve found the lessons you needed to learn, try and distil them into short, pithy statements. That way, you can easily recall them when you need to refresh your memory.

4. Adjust your behaviour.

Now you know what you wanted to happen, what actually happened, what the gaps were, and what you should do differently next time. Now you need to change your behaviour in accordance with what you’ve learned. It won’t be easy, but it’s the only way to ensure you don’t repeat the same mistakes going forward.

The key thing to realise is that if you don’t change, then you’re worse off than you were before. Because not only have you had the bad experience but you’ve also put in the work to understand it and you’ve still learned nothing. As the saying goes, those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.

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Whilst an after-action review can help you learn from your past, there’s another practice worth implementing. The practice of gratitude. It may sound a little cliché, but gratitude can be an immensely powerful tool, especially if you’re feeling negative about your future prospects. Gratitude helps keep you hopeful because it highlights all of the good things that you have in your life. It highlights all of the people and opportunities that have helped forge you into who you are today. But gratitude can do more than just that. It can also help put you in an abundance mindset because it helps you realise that, whilst there may still be more that you want, you already have a lot to be thankful for.

If gratitude isn’t something that comes to you naturally, then it’s possible to train yourself to be more grateful. This can be done through several different practices. Here are a couple of examples.

• Practice thankfulness – Instead of allowing yourself to get caught up comparing yourself against everything you want but don’t have, direct your thoughts towards everything you do have. Think about how worse off your life might be without it and be thankful that you’re fortunate to have it.
• Gratitude journaling – A journal can be used for many different things, so why not use it as a place to capture and express your gratitude? Train yourself to quickly journal in the moments you feel grateful. Not only does this help you focus on the good things in life, but it also generates a record you can reflect on when times get tough.
• Start and end your day by reflecting on the things you’re grateful for – Instead of starting your day by focusing on what you need to accomplish, or ending it by focusing on what you failed to get done, take a brief moment to actively think about all of the things throughout your day that you’re grateful for. The people, opportunities, items, food, and so on, that make your days worthwhile.

Practising gratitude might feel unnatural at first, but the more you do it the easier it’ll become.

Step 3: Design Your Future

You’ve worked on your mindset and you’ve learned from your past. Now it’s time to focus on the future. Unfortunately, you won’t get to where you want to go by drifting aimlessly. You have to be clear and intentional about what you want and then actively pursue it.

Thinking about the future is where goals become valuable. They give you something to aim at and, if established correctly, can help guide you along your journey to success. The trouble is that coming up with good goals isn’t easy. There are plenty of mistakes you can make. You can make them too easy, too hard, set them too far in the future, not give yourself enough time to work on them, and much more.

As with most things in life, the key to goals and goal-setting is employing the right technique. The first thing you need to do is physically write your goals down. The second is to ensure they follow a good structure.  

Let’s start with writing them down. Committing your goals to writing forms the foundation for success. This is because writing is indistinguishable from thinking. The act of writing forces you to clarify your thinking, thus making you more precise when defining what you want. And being clear on what you want is a precondition for figuring out a strategy to get there.

Next is the structure your goals should follow.

Setting SMARTER Goals

If you’ve spent any amount of time learning about goals then you’ll have come across the SMART concept. It’s a popular goal-setting framework, particularly within the business and personal development spheres. It provides a structure for your goals to follow with the intention of helping you move forward, hold yourself accountable, hit deadlines, and generally accomplish whatever you set out to do.

The SMART acronym can vary slightly, but it’s generally taken to be Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. In theory, setting your goals based on these criteria should drastically improve your chance of success. Whilst it can work, Hyatt argues that this system can be improved upon to increase that chance. This is why his system is to set SMARTER goals, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Risky, Time-keyed, Exciting, and Relevant. Let’s look at each in more detail.

Specific

When your goals are vague, it’s difficult to know where to direct your efforts and attention. This isn’t the case when you make your goals clear and precise. Studies have shown that the tougher and more specific you make a goal, the more likely you’ll be to engage your focus, creativity, intellect, and persistence in your pursuit of it.

Measurable

Your goals need built-in criteria that measure your progress. Without it, it’s difficult to know what success or failure looks like. If you set your measure correctly, not only will those be obvious but you’ll also be able to set milestones along the way. It sounds like a small thing, but having milestones will let you chart your progress and see how far you’ve come. So even if you fail to achieve your goal, you’ll still be able to see you’ve come.

Actionable

Fundamentally, goals are about what you’re going to do. So it’s essential that your goals are clear on what actions you’re going to take in order to achieve them. It may sound simplistic, but there’s a hell of a difference between “I’m going to write a book” and “I’m going to write 500 words of my book each day”. Try to utilise action verbs such as write, run, or finish to help make your intent clear.

Risky

This is where Hyatt deviates from SMART. Normally in the context of SMART you discuss setting realistic goals. But if you start asking yourself what’s realistic for you, then chances are you’ll set the bar too low. And when you consider the fact that we’re driven more strongly to avoid loss than we are to achieve gains, there’s no wonder safe goals are such a temptation. But this also gives us an insight into why goals should be risky. If you fail a goal, you’re effectively losing out on the thing you yourself admitted to wanting. But if failing is a loss, and we’re driven to avoid loss, then it stands to reason that you’d push yourself to grow and develop in order to rise to the challenge of your goal.

Time-Keyed

This is similar to SMARTs concept of time-bound. The reason keyed is used rather than bound is to allow for habit goals. If you’re trying to form a new habit, then it’s a little nonsensical to give yourself a deadline for it. Whilst popular belief is that it takes two months for habits to take hold, there’s no hard and fast rule for them. Some habits take longer to stick whilst others may take less time. Instead of thinking purely in terms of deadlines, think also of frequencies and time triggers. “I will exercise at 5pm daily” or “I will exercise 4 times a week” are far better than “I will exercise regularly by December 31^st”.

Exciting

Your goals should inspire you. You should feel excited to get to work on them. For this reason, it’s best to pick goals where your motivation to accomplish them is internal (more on this in the next section) rather than external. You’re far more likely to stick to something that you want to do than something somebody else wants for you.

Relevant

The final aspect is that your goals should be relevant to you. This relevancy needs to account for 3 different things – your life, your values, and your other goals.

Firstly, your life. If you’re going to succeed with your goals then they should align with the legitimate needs and demands of your life. The goals of a working parent will look vastly different to the goals of an undergrad. And that’s okay. Everyone has different circumstances they need to account for.

Secondly, your values. This should be an obvious one but sometimes there are external pressures pushing us towards something that, deep down, we feel aren’t right for us. You should always aim to align your goals with your internal values.

Lastly, your goals should be in harmony with one another. If you set multiple conflicting goals, it’ll only cause friction and frustration. You’ll end up working against yourself and will inevitably abandon one or more of your goals.

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The great thing about this system is that it applies to both achievement and habit-based goals. You merely need to tweak your time-key to account for the type of goal you’re setting.

Armed with this system, you may be ready to set yourself countless goals. But a word of warning – watch your bandwidth! It’s tempting to set lots of goals at once, especially if you’re not happy with where you are in life. But you must avoid overloading yourself. There’s only so much a person can handle at once. Given the pre-existing responsibilities you likely have, setting too many goals is a recipe for burnout and disaster. Hyatt recommends setting no more than 7-10 big goals a year, and no more than 2-3 of these per quarter. This allows sufficient time for you to work on them without overloading yourself.

Let’s Talk About Risk

Many can be put off by risky goals. And why wouldn’t they? Risk can be a frightening and uncomfortable thing. But this fear, this discomfort, can be a powerful tool. As Hyatt puts it, “when it comes to meaningful achievement, comfort equals boredom and low engagement.”

If you stop and think about that, you’ll probably agree. For many people, the best moments of their lives occur when they’ve pushed themselves outside their comfort zone. Think going on that nerve-racking first date, moving to a new city away from friends and family, or starting that new job. Whilst doing these things can be uncomfortable, there’s no denying the benefit they have in terms of helping us grow and develop. It stands to reason that there’s benefit to be had in making goals a little uncomfortable and challenging.

When thinking about your goals, try to evaluate them in terms of 3 zones – comfort, discomfort, and delusional.

1. The Comfort Zone

If you’ve set a goal and you already have the knowledge, resources, and support you need to achieve it, then you’ve set the goal in your comfort zone. A goal like that won’t stretch you enough to trigger any meaningful growth or development. It’s also unlikely to engage you fully because there’s no real challenge to it – after all, you already know how to do it.

The trouble is that it’s easy to allow ourselves to slip into this zone. When we dream of a better future, our aspirations can often feel fragile and far away. We know what we want but we don’t know how to get there. This leads us to worry about how the goals will be achieved, and before you know it the how overshadows the what or the why.  So, we scale our vision and goals back, convincing ourselves that we’re making them more ‘realistic’ or ‘attainable’ when in reality we’re just settling for less and avoiding the challenge. But “for a goal to matter, it has to stretch us. That means it has to stand somewhere outside our comfort zone.”

2. The Discomfort Zone

As mentioned above, we’ve all experienced the benefit of this zone at one point or another. We may not like being in it, but if you look back at pivotal moments in your life, I’m sure you’ll be able to see the benefits of it.

This is the zone where true growth happens. It’s where you’ll do work that challenges you and forces you to engage yourself in a way that leads to true fulfilment. “When we don’t see the path, or we’re unsure about having what it takes to reach the goal, then we’re closing in on a goal worth trying for”.

3. The Delusional Zone

As hard as it is to accept, there are some goals that are simply impossible for you to achieve. Maybe they don’t align with the rest of your priorities. Maybe you’ve overestimated how quickly you can achieve something and set an impossible deadline. Whatever the reason, sometimes things will be out of reach. Whilst you can still grow pursuing these goals, if you’re ultimate aim is to achieve them then you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment.

Step 4: Know Your Why

Starting something is easy. You’re full of enthusiasm because the novelty of something new energises you. But once the novelty wears off, then what? Without the right motivation it can be difficult to keep going – especially when things get tough.

The modern world has made this a lot more challenging too. A lot of modern technology has conditioned us to expect things to be both fun and immediate. The unfortunate truth is that most important and meaningful things require prolonged work in order to be achieved, which inevitably means there’ll be periods where it’s neither fun nor enjoyable.

So, if results aren’t immediate and you can’t rely on novelty or enjoyment to keep you engaged, then what can you rely on? The answer is to leverage your internal motivations. In other words, to understand why you want to set something as a goal.

It sounds silly to say that you should spend time understanding why you want to do something, but it does need to be said. How many times have you pursued something because you had a fleeting fancy for it? Or because someone else wanted it for you? Can you say, hand on your heart, that you always know why you want to do something? Chances are you can’t, so it’s worth spending time trying to understand your why before chasing a goal.

When brainstorming your goals, spend some serious time trying to understand why you want to pursue it. The reason could be anything. What’s important is that it matters to you, is something you find personally motivating, and it’s something you’ve come up with yourself.

Try to write down 5-7 reasons for wanting to pursue your goal. Once you have a list, prioritise them based on what feels most important to you. Then, focus on the top 3. Write them down and keep a copy of them alongside your goal. That way, when you feel like giving up you can look over your reasons and remind yourself why you’re pursuing it.

The key detail here is that you connect to your why. Not just logically, but emotionally too. Whilst understanding a reason logically is good, connecting to it emotionally is what lights a fire within you. With the fire lit, you’ll be unbelievably persistent in your pursuit of success.

When You Feel Like Quitting

No matter how well you understand your motivations, there will still be times when you feel like quitting. When that happens, there are a couple of tricks you can use to try and keep you on track.

The first is to change your perspective. When you see others succeed, it’s convenient to assume that they’ve had it easier than you. But the truth is, nobody has it easy. If you look at the careers of great leaders, innovators, or athletes, they’ve all encountered obstacles, setbacks, and failures on their road to success. If they can overcome the odds set against them, then why can’t you overcome the odds set against you?

The second is to take a new frame of reference. When you run into obstacles it’s easy to get frustrated. And when you’re frustrated it’s easy to fixate on the negatives. But if you reframe your frustrations then you can actually find a foothold for forward momentum. Flip your frustrations on their head by asking empowering questions. Instead of thinking how the obstacle is preventing you from progressing, think about what could the obstacle make possible. What could this challenge help you learn? How could the entire situation trigger growth? The more you focus on these ideas, the less negative everything will appear.

Third, focus on self-compassion. When you hold yourself to a high standard, it’s easy to let perfectionism take hold. But when doing something challenging, especially if it’s something new to you, it’s unlikely you’ll do it perfectly. Fixating on perfection and judging yourself harshly against that standard is sure to derail you. Practice being compassionate towards yourself. After all, there’s more than a grain of truth to the saying “anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”

Last but not least is to embrace your sense of agency. When working hard at something it’s easy to feel like you deserve success. That you’re entitled to success. Agency is the opposite of this. It’s the realisation that not only do you need to work to achieve success, but that you also have the capacity to succeed. If you keep your sense of agency, then you can survive the difficult times where your dreams cease being fun or easy.

Step 5: Make It Happen

Setting the goal is only half the job. The other half is taking definitive action.

If you’ve followed the process thus far then you’ve worked on cultivating an abundance mindset, learned from your past, set some goals, and understood the motivations behind them. Now it’s time for the hardest part – making a start on your goals.

When facing challenging goals, it’s easy to get caught up in planning and preparation. That’s especially true if you’ve picked a goal that you don’t know how to start. But for most goals, making detailed plans is just a fancy form of procrastination. Sure, it makes you feel like you’ve made progress, but the reality is that you haven’t.  All you’ve done is waste time that could have been better spent progressing the goal. But as a species, we’re prone to taking the path of least resistance, and planning is a hell of a sight easier than taking action.

The key, especially when first starting out, is figuring out that first step. You don’t have to have your entire goal mapped out from start to finish. In fact, if your goal is big enough then you won’t even know how to reach the end anyway. And that’s okay. All you need to know is the next step. Any goal can be broken down into and managed one action at a time. When focusing on one action at a time, you might be tempted to ‘eat the frog’. That is, focusing on difficult tasks first. It’s a popular idea for a reason after all. But Hyatt recommends you do the opposite. Start by focusing on an easy task.

If you set your goals correctly, then they’re in your discomfort zone. By focusing on an easy task, preferably one that lies within your comfort zone, you can get some quick wins that can help make you feel more confident when facing new challenges.

Once you’ve made a start, the most important thing is the next step. But keeping the momentum up can be challenging, especially if you’re living a full and busy life. It can feel like you have no time for your goals. The harsh reality is that if achieving your goals is important you, and I mean really important, then you need to find the time.

The best way to do this is by scheduling time for them in advance. Literally schedule a time in your calendar. This can be your personal one or your professional one, it doesn’t matter which. What matters is that you’ve set aside the time to work on your goals – and you don’t let others take this time away from you!

It sounds easy enough – making time and working on the next step. But you’ll quickly realise it’s not always obvious what needs doing next. You need a way to stay on top of what you’ve done, what you need to do next, and what’s coming up after that. This is where you need to master the art of reviewing.

Review Your Goals

Once your goals are underway, you can’t just forget about them and live in the moment. Both your goals and your ‘whys’ need to be constantly refreshed in your mind. The best way to do this also happens to the best way of figuring out your next steps. It’s to perform regular reviews. Hyatt recommends performing daily, weekly, and quarterly reviews of your goals.

Daily Review

When you have large goals that span months or even years, it’s easy to stumble and fall. This is true for both people and companies. It’s because the goal itself doesn’t directly translate to daily actions that can be taken to progress it forward. This is where daily reviews come into play.

Each morning, sit down and look over your list of goals. Ask yourself “what can I do today to move me closer to my goal?”. Your answers will then form your daily task list.

Similar to how you should only aim for 2-3 major goals a quarter, try to aim for 2-3 major tasks a day. It’s possible you’ll come up with more than 2 or 3 when performing your review – and you should definitely capture all of these. But it’s unlikely you’ll manage to complete everything in a single day. If your intention was to get them all done, then failing to do so will only leave you feeling dejected. Instead, prioritise the tasks and focus on the main 3. If you have time to do additional tasks, great. If you don’t, then you’ve still progressed the most important tasks.

Weekly Review

These should take place at the end of your work week and will be more in-depth than the daily reviews. A weekly review has 3 key parts.

The first is to review your rationale behind your goals week-in, week-out. This helps internalize both your goals, and the reasons behind them, in your mind. It also helps you stay both intellectually and emotionally connected to your goals.

Second, perform a mini after-action review for your last week. What progress did you make? Did you have any wins? Were there any shortcomings? What could have been done better? And so on. As with a full after-action review, the intent here is to learn from your mistakes and find ways to improve for your upcoming week.

Finally, you need to get a sense of what needs to be accomplished in the upcoming week. Look at your goals and try to decide what needs to be done next. Come up with some mini milestones that will need to be broken down further as part of your daily reviews. As with your daily task list, try to limit yourself to 3 major weekly tasks. Once you have these, you can use them throughout the week to inform your daily big 3.

Quarterly Review

As mentioned previously, your goals should already be spaced out so that you’ve only working on 2-3 big goals a quarter. The main purpose of this review is to look back at the previous quarter and assess how you did. Then, look at the upcoming quarter to see what’s next for you. There are 5 different segments to a quarterly review – rejoice, recommit, revise, remove, and replace.

1. Rejoice:
   • You’ve completed one or more of your goals from the previous quarter. Take the time to celebrate your success and reflect upon how your journey went.
2. Recommit:
   • Maybe your commitment to one of your goals has been waning. You can address this by reviewing both your progress and the goal itself to figure out exactly what you need to do to recommit. This doesn’t just hold true to for goals from the prior quarter. It could be that your commitment to an upcoming goal is lacking and needs to be improved too. The key is figuring out why you feel less committed and figuring out what needs to change so you can recommit. Of course, sometimes you won’t want to recommit which is where option 3 comes in.
3. Revise:
   • If you’re no longer committed to a goal, it may need to be revised. Perhaps the goal was set in the delusions zone or maybe you have new information that means this goal is no longer the right fit for you. Whatever the reason, revise the goal so that it fits your current circumstances.
4. Removal:
   • After options 2 and 3, maybe you feel that revising and recommitting just isn’t going to cut it. Perhaps the goal isn’t the right one for you anymore. In this case, it’s time to remove that goal.
5. Replace:
   • If you’ve removed a goal, you now have room to work on something else. It’s time to figure out what to work on instead. Maybe you want to bring a future goal forward a quarter, or maybe you want to pick something entirely new. Whatever your decision, look to replace the goal you’ve removed.

With this, you should have enough techniques to help you tackle your goals going forward.

Dreaming big is one thing, but acting on your dreams is another. The best time to act is now. The longer you delay, the less likely you’ll be to do it. So take action now and start working towards your dreams today.