Why SMART Goals Are Ruining Your Life

In this week's episode, Laurie is making the case that while SMART goals may be great for business goals, they are not serving you when it comes to your personal life. She talks about how SMART goals create an all-or-nothing, success or failure framework from which to judge whether we achieved the goals we've set...or not achieved them. While that works for business goals -- especially pertaining to sales numbers or customer service ratings -- that same approach hurts us when we try to apply it to our personal goals. Finally, she introduces you to "throwaway goals," and explains why those should be relegated to your "to do" list.

This is a must-listen episode for any woman who seems to start each year with the same set of SMART goals...just to end the year with not a lot to show for them.

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Transcript

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In this week's episode of the School of Midlife podcast, I'm discussing why SMART goals are ruining your life. Not your professional life, but certainly your personal life. The reasons may just surprise you and might just have you rethinking your relationship with setting SMART goals as they pertain to your personal life? Let's get started. Welcome to the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. This is the podcast for the midlife woman who starting to ask herself big life questions. Like, what do I want? Is it too late for me? And what's my legacy beyond my family and my work. Each week we're answering these questions and more. At the School of Midlife, we're learning all of the life lessons they didn't teach us in school and we're figuring out finally what it is we want to be when we grow up. Let's make midlife your best life Hey friends. Welcome back to the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. And I am thrilled to have you here this week. We are. Quickly approaching the end of the year. And I know that we're not even done with October yet, although this is the last week of October. But I don't know about you once we hit Halloween. Everything just goes so quickly. Next thing you know, it's Thanksgiving. And then of course, Christmas and the new years, and it just, it all goes by in the blink of an eye. Which has me thinking about Q four goals. And maybe not even Q4 goals, they could be goals that we have been working on for 2024. Well, in case you haven't looked lately, we are pretty quickly running out of time to complete those goals in 2024. So anything that you have been putting off thinking? Oh, I've I still have plenty of time. I'll make sure I get them done before the end of the year. Well, Good news, bad news. I don't know. The news is there are only so many weeks left in 2024 for you to complete the things that you said you were going to complete this year. When I started thinking about that. I wanted to talk with you about something that I talked to. All of my coaching clients about. We also talked about it at length at last week's Best Life Retreat. And the women there were. Gobsmacked, maybe isn't the word, but they were, they had never thought of. Goal setting. As it relates to their personal lives in the way that. We covered it at the retreat and it's the same way that. I coach it with my coaching clients. And that is based on the premise, that SMART goals are fantastic for business goals. When it comes to your personal life. I think SMART goals are ruining your personal life. And that's what this entire episode is going to be about. When I set out to record the episode, I had plenty of notes because I talk about this. I talk about this a lot and it really becomes, there are a couple of cornerstones to. My coaching for high-performing midlife women. Certainly you need to know what it is you actually want. You need to know how you define success. You need to know what your best life looks like. And then once you have those. Foundational pieces. Then you have to move into the action. Taking mode. And if action taking mode for you has always been about setting SMART goals. Then the w what you quickly come to find out is. If you continue to. Tri. Achieving SMART goals as it relates to your personal life. You're probably going to find that that's what you've been doing and that's why you don't have the fulfilling. Deeply satisfying, happy life that you have been hoping for. So while I could riff on. This episode. Because again, I talk about this all the time. What I decided to do instead is pull some audio from one of the coaching sessions that I recently did with the. Founding cohort of the Gap Year. And if you are new here, the Gap Year is the 12 month experiential. Signature course for the School of Midlife. So just like college grads take a gap year to figure out what it is they want to do with their life. There are no rules about when you can take a gap year. And since most of us, if you're listening to this podcast and you're in midlife, you probably did not take a gap year. When you graduated college, you got right to work because that's what was programmed into us. And. You've probably been working your ass off ever since whether that is in a. More traditional. Office setting or whether that's as CEO of your household. I mean, we've, we've been working pretty damn hard, our whole life. And the Gap Year is. 12 months to figure out what it is. You want to do with the rest of your life? What do you want to be when you grow up? If it sounds like the Gap Year is something that you would love to do in your own life. We will be onboarding a new cohort. Uh, in. I got to check the calendar, but I think it's in December, we will have a new incoming cohort. Well, we will do just kind of a toe dip of getting started in December, because I don't want to add more to your already busy. Holiday schedule. But we'll get started in earnest in January. I would love to have you join us for essentially 12 months of figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life. And it will be. Guaranteed the most impactful. 12 months you've probably spent in quite a long time. There is a clickable link in the show notes where you can get some more information, get on the list so that when, when the launch does happen, you'll be the first to. To get the information. Love to have you. So instead of recreating the wheel, what you will hear in this episode is coaching from the Gap Year. Related to the module. In which we discuss why SMART goals are ruining your personal life. This is just a portion of that module that talks about goal setting and SMART goals. And yes, of course there is an alternative to SMART goals that, that. I teach in the Gap Year. But that's, that's a whole nother subject for another podcast episode. For today's episode, we're just going to focus on making the case for y SMART goals are ruining your personal life. And. Get you thinking about. The need to approach. Dreaming and goal-setting differently. As it pertains to your personal life. With that intro, let's dive right in. We're going to start by talking about the difference between a dream and a goal because so many of us high performing women have been so focused on the goals, right? The to do lists, the did we do the thing, let's, let's state a goal, let's smash it, let's move on to the next. And since we've been so accustomed to doing that, a lot of us haven't really spent much time dreaming in a while. And I hope that you, you know what, I don't even hope, we're going to change that in this module. So let's start by talking about the difference between what is a dream? What is a goal? Let's start with what is a dream. A dream is an aspiration, an ambition, a hope. It is a long term vision or desire. My question for you as a high achieving midlife woman is how much time have you spent dreaming lately? And when I say lately, I mean in say the last I don't know, five years, the last 10 years, maybe even the last 20 years, you probably haven't done much since. You were a child, right? Um, because it's not something that we typically do as we get older. There is so much that we have to do, that we get so focused on the doing, that we put aside the dreaming. We just don't do it anymore. I know I was working with a business coach, Actually, I'm probably a life coach, not even a business coach. Let's see, I left the law in 2015, so it was probably 2017 maybe? And at that point, I was kind of ready to light my whole life on fire. Just, you know, press the reset button, start over, Move to a new city, maybe get a new spouse, I, I knew I needed a new job. I just, I felt like I was drifting. I didn't, I didn't have any focus. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And we, you know, we've already talked about that that's how the school midlife came to be, is that there weren't any resources for anybody like me. But going back to this coach, I remember her asking me. What did you dream about when you were little? And this is bananas. I, I remember telling her I didn't really dream about anything. Because get this, I thought that dreaming was childish. I had decided in fifth grade I was going to become an attorney. And so in my mind, I was just on the path to make that a reality. That was my goal. That was the dream life that I had made for myself. So why would I spend, if I knew what the goal was and I knew that there were ways to get there, why would I spend any time, needless time is what I thought, childish time, dreaming? Really taking a step back and figuring out if that's what I wanted. And I had this, this idea that only those who can't produce They're the dreamers. The ones who can't do, the ones who can't make it in the real world. The ones who don't actually know what they want to do in life. They can dream. Yeah, that's, that's, they're, they're a little more wishy washy. They're not as disciplined and focused and they're not get shit done people. They're just kind of, you know, they live in their head a little bit. And those were the dreamers. And that was not me. So when she asked me that, I didn't have anything to tell her. As it turns out, I had quit dreaming a very long time ago. And it wasn't until I got really comfortable with dreaming again and figuring out what my life could look like and what I wanted my life to look like that everything changed for me. I will say, knowing what I know now, I did myself a huge disservice chasing goals all those years without Actually taking a step back, asking myself why I was pursuing that goal. I'll get to that more in a minute. So, a dream. Ambition. Hope. Aspiration. Long term vision for the future. So when we talk about living our best life, you could probably also say that that is That is the dream life that we are trying to make a reality. So, what's a goal then? I think we all know what a goal is. We deal with goals all the time. But the definition is a desired result or outcome that requires effort. and commitment to obtain it. As high achieving midlife women, we are super familiar with goals, right? We've been chasing goals our whole life. And for most of us, our pattern has been state the goal, work our ass off to achieve it, smash the goal, maybe celebrate for a hot minute, and then we're on to the next. Can you relate to that? I mean, work your ass off, work hard, achieve the goal, and then once you achieve it, what's next? Right? We've all done that. I think we, we do it more than we like to think because we haven't ever really even thought about. We're gonna talk about it right now. When we are talking about goals, Usually we're talking about SMART goals, and we are very familiar with them in the business setting, right? Sales goals, team revenue goals, customer service goals, uh, customer service ratings, new customers onboarded. all sorts of different metrics. But when it comes to our personal goals, we don't really usually think in terms of SMART goals, do we? Let me walk you through how they can apply to personal goals. S is for specific, clear, well defined goal. So you can see the difference between, I want to be healthy, which is not specific to, I want to add strength training three times a week to my weekly exercise routine. Or instead of I want to be healthy, I will walk 12, 500 steps. per day, every day. So, specific. And then, of course, there's measurable, which means that there is a concrete criteria to measure the progress. Like, we will know if we achieve the goal or not, right? So, um, say your measurable goal is, I will read 24 books in 12 months. that's more measurable than I want to read more. And again, I know that these seem simple. I, you, you're familiar with SMART goals, but let's just walk through them to remind ourselves. A, achievable. So that means that the goals are realistic and attainable. An achievable goal could be, I will deposit 500 per month into my retirement account. That obviously is more realistic and attainable than, will double my net worth in one year. Maybe you are on the precipice of a huge stock buyout or, um, you know something, you know, you've got some insider trading secrets going on, but you can see that if we talk about An actual dollar amount that you're going to save each month. That's that's a lot more achievable and Realistic than I'm going to double my income in one year, my, my net worth. R is for relevant. So this goal aligns with, say, your broader life objectives and your values. If career growth is important to you might have a goal to say, earn a certification. The one maybe that you need for the next year. And so you decide that you are going to, earn that certification in the next six months. you're going to go to the classes, you're going to take the test, you're going to earn the designation in the next six months. That is achievable. That is relevant because it aligns with your broader goals. Another one could be more in the personal realm is You want to travel abroad, you want to be able to speak to the native speakers in the country where you're going to. So, learning a foreign language would be relevant to that goal. Maybe you start taking language classes. Maybe you download an app and you spend 10 or 15 minutes each day learning a new language. But that's relevant. And then the final T in SMART is time bound. So there's a clear timeline for achieving the goal. how that could look in your personal life is instead of saying, I want to start a nonprofit someday, maybe that T time bound goal becomes, I want to retire from my corporate job. and launch my nonprofit June 1st, 2025. Time bound there's a, there's a clear timeline for either finishing the goal or starting the goal, depending on what the goal is. So SMART goals, we super familiar with them, right? We, we've been here before. I think there's a, I think that there's a problem with SMART goals as they apply to your personal life, because. With SMART goals, they are really an all or nothing thing. Did you achieve the goal? Did you achieve that goal that was specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bound? And most of us were raised with this framework, this idea that there are two options here. Did you achieve the goal? So you succeeded. Or did you not achieve the goal, which means you failed and really there's nothing in between. So with that in mind, we get into this bind, which is, did we achieve the goal or didn't we? And, and it 100 percent relates to our definition of success and failure. The problem here though, is that doesn't take into account Any movement forward, any skills we've learned along the way, any lessons we've learned along the way, because I think we can all agree that there are goals that we are working on and the goodness isn't actually achieving the goal, which is nice. But it's all of the steps and all of the lessons and all of the learnings and all of the time and effort that we had to put in along the way to achieve that goal. So when I'm talking about the problem with SMART goals, my two issues with SMART goals in the personal life context Are the measurable and the time bound because again, if we're talking personal goals, so much of it is in the doing it's it's what's moving us from point A to point B. So does it matter that it takes us longer than we hope or we think to get point B? It shouldn't, right? We have still achieved the goal, but we have failed under the SMART goal method because we didn't get there. In the time that we have set for ourselves. So if we go back to some of the SMART goals that we were talking about, let's, let's go back to the health goal. If your goal was to add strength training three times a week into your workout plan and say you only did it twice. You, you figured out that it was much better, you saw better results, you were more efficient, you were more effective, you were more consistent if you tried for twice a week and you just stayed longer. So instead of going three times a week for 45 minutes, you went twice a week for an hour or an hour and a half, which means you failed at your SMART goal because your, your SMART goal was three times, measurable, three times a week. You actually got stronger along the way, your clothes fit better, you're able to move, like your hips don't hurt anymore, you can run with, with no joint pain, would you say that's a failure? I don't think so. I don't think so. Same thing if you, you know, if we go back to the retirement account where you're going to add 500 a month to your retirement account and there was an unexpected medical expense that you weren't thinking about, or one of your kids needed more money at college, or for some reason, instead of 500 a month, you're putting 450 each month into your retirement account. Is that a failure? If we, if we look at the SMART goals, yes, because you didn't reach the measurable metric that you were trying for, but you're still funding your retirement. I don't think that's a failure. If you get to the end of the year and you've read 23 books instead of the 24 that was your SMART goal, is that a failure? Again, I don't think so. What I'm trying to point out here is if you are trying to use SMART goals in your personal life, I think that you are doing yourself a disservice. They are great for you. For business goals, they are great for sales goals, but when it comes to your personal life, it's too black and white. It's too, did you achieve the goal? Did you not achieve the goal? And the goodness is what happens in between, especially in our personal lives. So, does that mean we should just give up on SMART goals for our personal life? I think so. My personal opinion is that SMART goals are ruining your life. Here's why. most of us have a typical pattern, and I talked about this briefly before, but it's state the goal, work super hard to achieve it, you know, head down, do the things you need to do, achieve the goal. And because we've achieved it, and most of them are SMART goals, we've just talked about this whole idea that, you know, it's black or white, meet the goal or don't meet the goal. The all or nothingness of SMART goals. So, that's a problem. Because there is so much that happens moving from point A to point B, that it shouldn't just be about getting to the goal. That's like the cherry on top. That's, that's almost like a nice to have. And I know that that is a different approach than most of us have taken, but the goal should not be the end game when it comes to our personal life. Living a personally fulfilled, enjoying the journey, having happiness and satisfaction along the way. That's where the gold is, right? It doesn't matter if we ultimately get to that goal. It's what did we do? Who did we become? How are we better? How are we different in the process? That is where the gold is when it comes to personal goals. Here's another reason they're ruining your life. Have you ever thought about why it is you move on so quickly to the next goal after you've achieved the goal that you were working on? Again, most of us, we set a goal with this idea that we will feel a certain way once we achieve it. And sure, there's, there's the actual outcome, which could be, especially if we're talking about our work, the new credentials earned, a promotion earned, sales goal obtained, a marathon run. So we did the thing, which is great, but we have to look at the motivation behind the goal. Why did we want to achieve that goal in the first place? Was it money? Maybe. Was it to get in shape? Sure. For many of us, It's, we want to feel something different, that we're capable, that we're worthy of applause, that deep down we want to be seen. And if we go way deep down, we want to be loved. We'll, we'll get into that more in a future model, but can you see where it, It was never, well, not never, but it's usually not about the goal. It's about doing the things. It's about wanting to feel something different than we're feeling. Which is why when we reach the goal and we don't feel that way, we immediately move on to the next thing. Right? We might reach the goal, we might celebrate for a hot minute, and then we are on to the next. We're looking for something bigger, something better, something different. Again, hoping that the next thing, whether that's a promotion at work, or losing the next 15 pounds, or the next marriage, or the early retirement, or whatever the next thing is, and we expect that we will feel something different, that we will finally, that that hole that we're feeling, that will finally be filled by the very next thing that we are doing. Which is why we are constantly in goal chasing mode. And because we're constantly in the goal chasing mode, and we're constantly chasing a feeling that we haven't gotten yet, How do we expect that the next thing is, is the one thing that is finally going to fill us up? I mean, think about it. If you have been doing this pattern your whole life, and most high performing midlife women have, so you are not alone. But if you look back on all of the things that you accomplished, and you still don't feel that sense of fulfillment, why do you think the next thing is what you need? So instead of chasing SMART goals for our personal life, what about if we changed the definition of goal as it relates to our personal life? To. A dream with a deadline. And that deadline could be someday. It's not that measurable and time bound like SMART goals are. It's just this dream that we will accomplish someday. We will make that dream a reality someday. How does that feel to you? Does that feel different than a SMART goal? And while you're thinking about that, let's keep going. Before we move on too far though, I want to talk about throwaway goals. Throwaway goals are the goals that you add to your list because You know you can accomplish. They are an ego boost. They really are more to do things than they are goals. They are things that should go on your to do list. They are things that, over time, you have added to your goal list, or your New Year's resolutions, or the things that you want to accomplish. Because you already know you can accomplish them. So, you feel like you're gonna get that dopamine hit, that, that boost of knowing that, you know, you can cross something off because you achieved it. But, if that was really going to bring you the life satisfaction, the fulfillment that you've been looking for, wouldn't you already have it? I mean, you make a lot of lists. If you're anything like me, You've got a list for everything. And sure, it feels good to check that box or cross it off or, or put a line through it. But it doesn't give the capital F fulfillment that we're looking for, does it? I mean, it's, it's a quick dopamine hit. It feels great. We, we can look at a list, see that everything's checked off, feel like we have been very productive, but it doesn't move the fulfillment needle in our life. So a couple examples of what a throwaway goal could look like in your life, and you might be already doing this. Maybe you make a goal to read 12 books this year, and you're already a book club that meets once a month. You know that you will be reading at least 12 books a year. So it's not really a stretch goal to say that you are going to read 12 books this year, is it? It's, it's a throwaway goal. Um, another one might be that you make a goal to walk a mile every day. But you already walk three miles every morning. I mean, more often than not. There are some days where the schedule doesn't work or the weather's crappy or you're traveling or whatever. But usually, more often than not, you walk three miles a day. So, why would you, why would you have a goal to walk a mile? Just so that you could say, I met my goal, look at that, I walked a one mile, 365 days a year. Big deal. That doesn't do anything to like fill any part of your tank. Maybe, maybe if you were giving yourself gold stars because you reached it, great. But other than that, that's a good to do. It's not a goal. It's a throwaway goal. Same with if, you know, we have talked about saving for retirement and One of your goals is to put 500 a month into your retirement account. Which, before when we were talking about it, seemed great. Now it feels like a throwaway goal because you have had automatic deposit from your paycheck. Like, you don't even touch that money. 500 has been automatically deposited every check for the last 10 years. It's a throw angle. You don't even think about it. It's not going to move the needle any further in your line. When you put throwaway goals on your list, what it tells me, and what it should tell you, is that you put a greater emphasis on achieving something for the sake of saying you achieved it instead of really growing personally. I'm gonna say that again because it might be kind of hard to hear, but I want you to actually ask yourself, am I doing this? If you have an entire list of things you want to do, of goals that you want to do, that are throwaway goals, Putting those throwaway goals on your list means that you put a greater emphasis on achieving something and being able to show somebody, maybe just yourself, but others, probably others as well, that you achieved the goal rather than growing personally. You want the dopamine hit. You want to be able to cross it off. You want to be able to look at the list, know you did it, cross it off. And that's fine if it's important to you. But the thing about goals, the thing about dreams, is you want them because they are different than you already have. Think about that. The fact that you are trying to achieve a goal necessarily means you that you don't have now what it is you think that that goal will give you. you want something different. You want to move in a different direction. It's something different than you have right now. It doesn't mean you have to blow up your life. It doesn't mean you have to, you're starting over from scratch, but the fact that you have a goal or a dream necessarily means that there is something else that you want that you don't have right now. So, My question then is, why then would you settle for throwaway goals? If the whole point of having a goal or a dream is to have something different than what you have right now, and you are essentially living the reality that you would have from a throwaway goal, why, why even put them on your list? That's not actually moving you forward at all. That's not getting you closer to where you want to be. It's not different than what you have right now. And I would say it's not worthy of your time. You shouldn't be spending time on throwaway goals. Those go on your to do list. Those are to dos. Those are things to do Saturday. They're things to do before the end of the day. They're things to do this week. They are not goals. They are not dreams. Thank you so much for listening to the School of Midlife podcast. It means so much to have you here each week. If you enjoyed this episode, could you do me the biggest favor and help us spread the word to other midlife women? There are a couple of easy ways for you to do that first. And most importantly, if you're not already following the show, would you please subscribe? That helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. Second, if you'd be so kind to leave us a five-star rating, that would be absolutely incredible. And finally, I personally read each and every one of your reviews. So if you take a minute and say some nice things about the podcast, well, that's just good karma. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you right back here. Next week when the School of Midlife is back in session until then take good care.