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Four Simple Steps to Reset Your Goals Based on Your Ultimate Future

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn about the science-backed practice that has not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

Hey there, friends! Can you believe it? Another year has passed, and it’s time to prepare for a fresh start. Congratulations on all you’ve accomplished in 2024! If you’re like most, you’re now ready to hit the reset button and dive into the next year with clarity and inspiration.

In this episode, I’m sharing a simple and intentional approach to resetting your goals that are emotionally connected to your picture of the ultimate future. This method is specifically designed to eliminate the stress and resistance often attached to goal setting while also ensuring you identify goals that inspire and motivate you. Listen here for your simple step-by-step guide to create a future and plan that excites and inspires you.

The Problem with Traditional Goal Setting

Goal-setting often comes with its fair share of stress and resistance. Perhaps you’ve been putting off creating your personal and professional goals. Or maybe you’ve identified yours and wonder if they are good in theory but not so irresistible that you’ll follow through when you start to struggle.

How do we avoid this common pitfall from traditional goal setting? The key is not use your goals as the place where you declare your destination. What do I mean? Any good resetting of goals begins by defining your ultimate future. The vision and destination of who you want to be and where you want to go. Your ultimate future acts as your street address and your goals the directions guiding you toward it. When you take this approach, you’ll find that your goals become the roadmap that is motivating, inspiring, and aligned with your true desires.

But before we dive into the tactical ways to come up with your ultimate future vision and your goals to get there, let’s start by fueling your journey with a few mindset shifts.

Mindset Shifts Before Resetting Goal Setting

Redesign Your Life at Any Time

Your life and goals are always up for redesign.

Lighten Up

Don’t be so darn hard on yourself. Goals don’t have to be stressful or a source of self-criticism. Make an agreement to stop being hard on yourself. For many of us that is a work in practice. Instead, embrace creativity and flow, let go of the pressure to be perfect, and replace the inner critic with a reassuring voice that motivates you.

Enjoy This Version of You

You’re only going to get this version of you once, so why not enjoy. You’re not the same person you were last year. You won’t be the same version at the end. Celebrate this phase of your life and honor the unique opportunities it brings. Think fresh. Think new. You’re never going to get this version of you again. So, enjoy it.

Attract, Don’t Chase

Stop chasing goals with desperation. Be an attractor of your ultimate future vision in the new year. Attract them by operating from a place of gratitude, trust, and belief that your desire already exists and you are simply going to claim it.

Identify Your Ultimate Future

Now that you have adjusted your mindset, it is time to create your ultimate future from the 50,000-foot view. Paint a picture of yourself that answers questions like: What kind of person are you in the future? What experiences do you want to have? How do you feel on a daily basis?

Think about your family, your health, your career, and your personal growth. Consider the trips you want to take, the impact you want to have, and the people you want to be surrounded by. See your environment, your relationships, and the energy you bring into each day. This ultimate future should excite you and feel irresistible. I encourage you to have fun designing it, knowing that you can always change it. You can always redesign it.

The Four Steps to Goal-Setting

With your ultimate future in mind, you can now set goals that act as a directional may by following these steps:

Step 1: Know How You Want To Feel

Identify the primary three emotions you want to feel regularly throughout your journey. This could be calm, freedom, joy, peace, or any other state. It’s more important how you feel as you travel than when you do at your destination. Research has shown that joy is in the anticipation – not the destination.

Step 2: List Annual Goals

List 8 to 12 annual goals that contribute to your ultimate future. Ensure these goals align with the emotions and experiences you want to cultivate. Detail them enough to know when you’ve achieved them.

Step 3: Select Quarterly Goals

To make your annual goals more manageable, break them down into quarterly goals. Choose 1 to 3 goals to focus on each quarter. Remember, you can’t work on all your goals at once. Focus on the most important and achievable goals in the upcoming quarter, and create specific actions for each goal.

Step 4: Define Next Actions

For each of your quarterly goals, identify 5 to 7 actionable steps you can start working on immediately. These specific tasks and actions will move you closer to your desired outcome.

Cultivating a Positive Relationship with Your Goals

A key to maintaining motivation is to remember your goals are neutral. Don’t make them personal. Don’t make them mean something they don’t. They are not a measure of your worth but tools that guide you toward your ultimate future. Regularly refreshing and realigning with your goals helps sustain this positive dynamic.

Goal setting doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to be painful.

It can be a fun, creative process that points you towards your desired future and enhances your journey there. It’s our mindset around it and how we approach it that makes it so.

As you prepare for the new year, take the time to reflect on and design your ultimate future thoughtfully and with intention. You will know you’ve hit if, if it feels irresistible.

My team has prepared a downloadable worksheet to help you complete the steps above. Use it to follow along and start crafting your empowered, passion-driven goals today.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to:

Create goals that are in flow with this current version of you
Incorporate the necessary mindset shifts to eliminate the resistance, stress, and critical nature associated with traditional goal setting.
View your goals as your shotgun rider, simply helping you navigate as you drive

Resources and related episodes:

Grab the Four Simple Steps to Reset Your Goals Based On Your Ultimate Future
Tune in to the previous episode, The Year End Review
Book a connection call with Rita
If you’d like to be notified of when new podcast episodes are released, you can do so here: Playing Full Out
Learn more about the Inside Out Method
Connect with Rita on LinkedIn

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

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About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Inside Out Method, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

Mastering the Pre-Mortem: Boost Your Team’s Success and Your Personal Goals With This Simple Exercise

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn about the science-backed practice that has not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

Planning is often seen as the cornerstone of success. Yet, even the most meticulously crafted plans can encounter unforeseen obstacles. So, how can we better prepare for these inevitable bumps in the road?

In this episode, I’ll share an exercise called the pre-mortem, which can help you flip the script and plan for potential pitfalls so you can avoid them altogether. Whether you’re leading a team of 100 — or just yourself — this powerful exercise can dramatically increase your chances of success!

What is a Pre-Mortem?

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of internal strategists at a company. These strategists are crucial in driving their organization’s strategic goals, often juggling multiple stakeholders with varying priorities and skill sets.

It can be a challenging environment, and they wanted to know if there was a way to establish ownership and commitment early on to boost their chances of success.

The answer was yes— the pre-mortem.

A pre-mortem is essentially the opposite of a post-mortem. In a medical setting, a post-mortem analyzes what caused a person to die. Similarly in a business setting a post-mortem looks at what has caused a project to fail after it has already failed. A pre-mortem involves imagining that the project has failed before it even begins and then identifying the reasons for this hypothetical failure.

This proactive approach allows teams and individuals to foresee and address potential issues in advance, thereby improving the chances of success.

Implementing a Pre-Mortem in Team Settings

When leading a team or multiple groups with different priorities, conducting a pre-mortem can quickly establish ownership and commitment among team members. Here’s a couple of effective methods to implement it:

The Checklist Method: If you have an experienced team, you likely already know common reasons for project failures, and you can create a checklist from them. Before starting any new project, review this comprehensive checklist with your team and allow each member to assess potential problems against known issues.

The Brainstorming Method: For a more organic approach, begin by informing team members that the project has hypothetically failed. Give everyone a few minutes to write down all possible reasons for this failure. This method can bring unnoticed but critical issues to light because it encourages fresh perspectives. This leads to a list of potential pitfalls and allows you to address them upfront, strengthening your project plan from the get-go.

For example, someone in operations might highlight technical limitations, while someone in sales might point out market risks. By foreseeing these issues early, you can plan around them, enhancing the project’s chances of success.

Applying the Pre-Mortem to Personal Goals

The beauty of the pre-mortem exercise is that it’s not limited to team projects; it’s also beneficial for personal goal setting. Here’s how you can use it for your own aspirations:

Career Transition: Imagine you have a goal to transition to a more fulfilling career by the end of the year. Instead of starting with enthusiasm and risking a loss of momentum, presuppose that you’ve failed to make the transition. Ask yourself why. Common reasons might include doubting your capabilities, not reaching out for support, or letting other priorities interfere.

By identifying these potential pitfalls at the outset, you can create a stronger, more realistic plan to overcome them. For instance, if imposter syndrome is a concern, you might seek mentorship or professional development opportunities to build your confidence.

Enjoying Your Summer: If your goal is to have a memorable summer, imagine it’s the end of summer, and you feel unfulfilled. Why? Perhaps you didn’t plan activities, prioritize family time, or make spontaneous decisions. By identifying these regrets and the reasons for them in advance, you can proactively plan and schedule activities to ensure a fun and fulfilling summer.

Why use a Pre-Mortem?

With a pre-mortem, you aren’t left to deal with the aftermath of failure; instead, you proactively anticipate and address obstacles. This exercise leads to multiple benefits:

Improves Efficiency and Prioritization: By identifying potential problems early, the team (and you) can address them before they become actual issues, saving time and resources.
Enhances Focus and Commitment: Team members feel valued for their input and are more committed to the project’s success.
Encourages Honest Communication: Team members are more likely to voice concerns and identify issues that might otherwise go unmentioned.
Reduces Post-Launch Surprises: Spotting and addressing problems before they arise minimizes last-minute chaos and enhances overall project stability.

Try a Pre-Mortem on Your Next Project!

Choose a project or goal you have right now, conduct a pre-mortem, and see how it transforms your planning and execution. Here’s some tips to help you get started:

Start Small: Practice the pre-mortem exercise with smaller projects or goals to get comfortable with the process.
Be Honest: Encourage honesty and openness during the brainstorming session to uncover all potential issues.
Use the Findings: Act on the identified issues by incorporating solutions into your project plan, ensuring they are addressed from the start.

The pre-mortem exercise is a powerful tool that can significantly improve your chances of success in both professional and personal pursuits.

By anticipating failure and addressing potential issues early, you set yourself and your team up for success.

Whether you’re leading a large project or pursuing a personal goal, give the pre-mortem a try. You’ll find it transforms the way you plan and execute, helping you avoid pitfalls and achieve your aspirations with greater ease and confidence.

Don’t forget to share your experiences and results—I can’t wait to see what you create!

In this episode:

Understand the importance of “failure planning” to help create realistic plans and avoid common pitfalls.
Learn the ways to address potential issues before they arise, increasing the likelihood of project success.
Develop and encourage team members to voice their concerns and take ownership of fostering a collaborative and committed environment.