How to set career goals

A strategy to set career goals and get better

Here's a strategy that will help you set your career goals when you feel overwhelmed or that you're not enough!

In our everyday life and especially at work, we focus on being good at what we do.

But, what if we focus on getting better, day by day?

Setting goals means setting ourselves up for success. We give ourselves room to grow and improve.

So, next time you don’t feel good enough or you feel overwhelmed by your position, follow this strategy and sets goals for your future and career!

HBR says ”Setting goals in times of uncertainty and burnout can feel pointless, but it isn’t. Research shows that to engage our motivational systems and direct our brain’s energy to the right actions (both consciously and below our awareness), we need to have a clear sense of where we are, where we’re going, and whether we’re closing the gap between the two at the right rate”

1. Use growth-mindset trigger words to frame your goals.

Describe the goal or task using certain words that evoke the idea of getting better rather than being good: improve, develop, over time, progress, become, and of course, grow.

These words serve as both explicit and implicit “primes” to your thinking. In other words, they shift the very meaning of the goal to being about developing, and they shift your mindset along with it.

Example:

“Be an effective communicator” can be “become an effective communicator,” and “increase sales by 5%” is “develop our network of leads to improve our sales by 5%.”

2. Establish progress and pivot points.

It can be all too easy to lose track of your goals, or not think much about them until you get closer to the time you expected to reach them. So, it is important to establish progress and pivot points on a timeline and monitor both your rate of progress and the need to shift in light of new information along the way.

When you approach goal-setting through the lens of a growth mindset, you become more comfortable with uncertainty and more willing to entertain the idea of longer-term goals.

This is about getting better as opposed to just being good.