Episode 221: Smarty Pants Goals
221
[00:00:00] You are listening to Live Free Creative, an intentional podcast with practical tips for living your life on purpose. I’m your host Miranda Anderson, and I believe in creativity, adventure, curiosity. And the magic of small moments. I hope that every time you listen, you feel empowered and free to live the life that you want.
Hey there. Welcome back. I’m your host Miranda Anderson. You’re listening to episode 221 of the Live Free Creative podcast. Today we’re gonna be talking about Smarty Pants goals, which is just a fun way to talk about smart goals. Yes, we. Me through January and I’m still gonna talk about goals, partly because I think it’s entirely unrealistic to believe [00:01:00] that our whole life is gonna change on January 1st, especially cuz it’s the middle of the cold, dark winter if you’re in the Northern hemisphere and one of the least likely times to make big changes.
While I appreciate and really. actually enjoy the new year. I think it is a, it’s a fun time. It’s, holidays and it feels like a good turning over of the page. For many people, it isn’t the ideal time to think about big goals and dreams. Last week I talked about stop steady systematize and start, and I usually do that around the beginning of the year.
There’s some things logistically that make sense to. , have a calendar year. Our actual physical calendars being one. I have this big extended calendar that I, I think the first time I got it was probably in 2014. It’s been a long time and I fell in love with it. It’s a huge calendar that was [00:02:00]designed for the Museum of Modern Art and then has since become ubiquitous in modern design.
They’re, only about 50 or $60 and they’re big four foot by three. You’ve seen it for sure. The big black and white calendar, that’s called a stend dig, and that only happens by calendar year. So you know you buy it like in October, November, it comes and you hang it up on the wall and you have it for 12 months.
Calendars run by the calendar year. Your body, your own world might operate. From birthday to birthday, or if you have a fiscal year in a company that you work for that isn’t January to December, you may be operating on a different schedule. If you have kids in school or you yourself are in school, September to May seems to feel like a whole new year.
My point is there’s a lot of different times to turn over that page and to start a new chapter. And our [00:03:00] own clocks might not line up with the universal clock. That’s okay. . Now mid-January is a great time to talk about goals just as it is in June and in September and around your birthday and any day.
Today I’m gonna talk you through the smart goals, which I’m just affectionately calling Smarty Pants goals, and I’ll tell you a little bit of the history and then walk through some of the. Reasons why this system makes a lot of sense, but doesn’t always make sense. And hopefully by the end of this episode, you will have a new understanding or a deeper understanding if you’ve heard about smart goals before, of how to set yourself up for success when you’re looking forward to new accomplishments.
To begin today’s episode, I want to invite you to enjoy a new segment with me that I’m calling a mindfulness moment. [00:04:00] This is gonna be like a 60 to 92nd breathing exercise that we do together because you’re already here, you’ve already got this podcast on, and mindfulness and meditation will benefit you in more ways than so take a minute and breathe with me right now before we head into the show. You can do this exercise anywhere. If you’re driving, keep your eyes open, but you can steady your heart and your breathing along with the sound of my voice. If you’re walking, it’s a great time. If whatever you’re doing can be set down for just a minute, find a seat and allow your body to come to stillness.
Take a deep breath in, fill your lungs as full as they can go, and then breathe it out. [00:05:00] If you can close your eyes safely, allow them to just gently fall closed.
We’re gonna focus on our breath. The way it feels coming in through our nostrils as we breathe through our nose with our mouth gently closed, and we’re gonna breathe out through our nostrils as well. Here we go. Breathe in with me
and out.
Focus on the way that breath feels coming in and out as you breathe. Big, deep, slow breaths.
Again.[00:06:00]
Feel the slowing of your heart. As you breathe into stillness,
allow your muscles to relax, sink into your receipt. One more.
Gently open your eyes, wake up your body, wiggle a little bit.
You can open your mouth and feel a little bit more ready to continue on with your day and listen to this show.
Doesn’t that feel good? [00:07:00] I am growing to love a very simple, mindful moment. I also love longer meditations and shared in a happy class episode a few weeks ago how that is one of the things that I’m really excited to dive deeper into This year. I’m taking a meditation certification course and. can already feel the effects of being able to find that stillness inside myself that I sometimes look for in the world around me.
It’s very seldom that we find it in the world around us. , especially if you like me, have a gaggle of children and pets and responsibilities and relationships. That stillness is something you can always come back to inside yourself and always return. With something as simple as focusing on your breath, so thank you for sharing that mindfulness moment with me.
I look forward to many more opportunities to breathe with you in the months and [00:08:00] years ahead. I’m gonna take a moment and share some of the sponsors that make this podcast possible. I’m so grateful for incredible companies whose products can improve our lives and make ’em a little bit better, and whose values always.
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Let’s talk about Smarty pants goals, shall we? I like just calling ’em Smarty pants goals because it’s more fun than smart goals. We’ve all heard about smart goals. Have you? I think this is something they teach in schools now. It’s a really great. Simple system for making sure that our goals are actionable.
They have plans, they have some real oomph behind them. I’ve heard about smart goals my whole life. I grew up in a very goal-oriented family with a very goal-oriented father who would sit us down annually at usually the [00:12:00] beginning of the school year. And we set goals for ourselves for the upcoming year.
We always used the smart goal system, and it isn’t until getting ready for this episode that I looked up where it even started. So here’s a little history snippet for you. The SMART goals were developed in 1981 by a man named George Doran. This article was written specifically for managers of organizations.
These were business people. George explained in this article that many managers don’t know how to set objectives for their team, and so they just go around in circles. They don’t make any forward progress. He came up with the acronym SMART and talked through in very brief, mention why each of these five characteristics would make an objective better from a management perspective.
[00:13:00] This original smart goal system has been altered and adjusted and flexed over time and adapted to different circumstances, and of course, more often I hear about smart goals. Now in the context of personal goal setting than managerial situations, I guess I don’t work. For a corporation, so I, I don’t hear a lot about managerial situations.
It is interesting some of the changes that have been made over time, and also I found it fascinating, this explanation that George made about the difference between goals and objectives. And even though this is called smart goals. really. I think George is talking a lot about objectives here, by the way.
He defines them both. So he talks about goals as being long, ongoing overview sort of direction. I would think about the way he talks about goals. I think about it as like mission your long-term mission or purpose as a company or as an individual. [00:14:00] What is the overarching. I guess there it is of what you’re trying to do and objectives he defines as the short steps that guide you on your pathway as your pursuing this overarching long-term goal.
I appreciate the difference between goal and objective in this particular explanation and the acronym of smart. Really talks more about the steps, talks more about the objectives. I think about these smarty pants goals as actually being. Smarty Pants plans. These are the technical details of how we’re going to get to where we want to go.
They start with a goal, though. They start with the overarching end point. As Stephen Covey has said in his seven habits of highly effective people, begin with the [00:15:00] end in mind. If you know where you want to go, you’re more likely to be able to get there having a goal. Is helpful, can be helpful in your pursuit of a life worth living.
How are you going to accomplish that goal? Or how are you going to continue in progress along the way that you’d like to head? That’s where the SMART acronym comes in. Taking a big overarching goal and breaking it down into. components that make it manageable for your brain to actually know what step to take.
I’m gonna break down the acronym. If you are familiar with smart goals, then you can follow along. If you aren’t, then this will be a simple and exciting new bit of information for you. As originally written. George Duran had the acronym as specific me. assignable. Relevant and [00:16:00] time related. And like I said, this was written for managers.
So assignable doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as a personal goal because you would assume that you are the person doing the thing that you’re planning on doing, maybe not. But in a corporate setting, it makes a lot of sense to ensure that tasks are assignable, that one person isn’t being burdened down with everything.
So that’s an interesting twist that I had never heard of before. I’m gonna talk about the acronym as it relates to more personal. Goal setting or planning, and the first one is gonna stay the same, so the S will stand for specific. Specific. Why do you think a goal or plan benefits from being specific? . In fact, the more specific the better.
I like to take a goal and break it down into a specific component and then break that down even further and even further until I get to the very first step that [00:17:00] doesn’t feel overwhelming , and that’s when I know that I have my starting place. A specific goal means that you have a real clarity around what it is that you’re hoping to achieve, and I think it’s important to note that general goals have lots of different meaningful targets.
For example, you could have a general goal of living a healthier lifestyle. That’s a great general goal. It is a worthy pursuit to live a more healthy lifestyle. . The reason that it isn’t specific is because there are dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of ways to live a healthier lifestyle. So what specifically about your lifestyle do you wanna adjust first?
Maybe there’s lots of things, but you can’t do lots of things all at the same time. So logically breaking it down to a target area that you can hit with one arrow at a time. Will make you more likely to be able to [00:18:00] begin. If you have the general goal of living a healthier lifestyle and you never narrow it down to a specific target, it’s a lot less likely that you will have any actionable movement and therefore not a lot of progress.
So while it’s great to have big overarching goals, if you want to be a little more SmartyAnts about it, you’ll turn your big overarching goals into specific plans so that you are more likely to accomplish them. The M in SMART is measurable. It’s almost always measurable. There’s a lot of different adjustments, like I said, to this acronym, but measurable seems pretty consistent.
This. So that you know when you’ve made it, this is how you know that you can stop or slow down or renew. If you don’t ever define the end [00:19:00] point, you may never feel like you’ve accomplished anything. A great example that I like to use with measurable is something that I do with my retreat attendees. When you sign up for Creative Camp, you get a welcome survey with all sorts of different questions on it, designed to help you prepare for camp also to get your food preferences and things like that.
One of the questions asks about what success would look like for your creative camp experience, and I ask the participants to clarify and define for the. What success, what a successful live free creative camp experience would look like for them? This simple question creates a measurable outcome for my attendees.
When they have clarified and defined what it is they’re hoping to get out of camp, they subconsciously have now clarified for [00:20:00] themselves what they need to put into. In general success, that word we use a lot, it’s thrown around a lot and the definition is entirely subjective. What success looks like for you in any area of your life depends on how you define it for yourself.
Isn’t that wild? Success can be a lot of different things. Achieving a goal can be a lot of different things. This is why measurable goals mean more. You’ve clarified and defined how you’re going to know when you’ve gotten there, and that clarity greatly influences how you get there. One of the reasons that our family embarked on our practical minimalism challenge of 2017, our no shopping year, was that I felt like I was on a consumer hamster [00:21:00] wheel.
That there was always something new. There was always something better. There was always something more. Without defining and deciding what enough looks like, there is no such thing. Enough is not an amount. It’s something that you get to decide by deciding what enough is for you, what that measurable status or definition looks like for you in your life.
Measurement is really important when it comes to these smarty pants goals. Another thing I wanna mention about Measurable, there is a technique that I learned from the Brook Snow Podcast where you create a goal that has a measurable floor and a measurable ceiling. For example, I have decided this year, 2023, I’m going to go on a walk every single day.
That’s a really specific goal. I wanted it to be measurable. Every day is measurable, but also what about the [00:22:00] timing? And so I decided the floor, the baseline bottom line for me is going to be a five minute walk. That’s like a walk around my block. And I also wanted to have a ceiling so that I didn’t always feel like more was better.
So an hour is my ceiling. I’m sure I’ll go on hikes and things like that. That will be more than an hour. But for my daily walk. Five minutes is the lower end and 60 minutes is the upper end. So that either way on the bottom or on the top, the floor or the ceiling, I know when I’ve gotten there. For some of you, having a measurable ceiling on a goal will be even more important than having a measurable floor because you’ll get involved in something and you wanna just never stop.
It’s a good reminder that more is not always better, even in good. . Let’s move on to the A, which has a lot of different words that go. Like I mentioned, George Duran called it assignable. I often hear about it as [00:23:00] achievable or even actionable. I think both of those are really great A words. Today I’m gonna talk about actionable action invite.
This progress, being able to do something to go somewhere to move in a certain way. The overarching goal points you in the direction, and then you break it down into specific, measurable, and actionable. This is the what. What am I gonna do? How am I gonna move forward? Making sure that your goal is actionable, that there is actually something to do, makes it smart.
I have to throw in here too, that there’s a chance that you are setting. Unwinding goals. Even in that case where your overarching goal is to do less, the way that you do less is by adding in space to do less. What is that space going to be filled with? If it’s not busyness, this is where you actually add an actionable leisure.
Go on [00:24:00] a walk, take a nap. Sit on the couch, bird watch, sit by the pool. All of those things that if you’re doing sort of an unwinding of the hustle and you want to do less and be more gentle on yourself, if you leave open space, there’s a real high likelihood it will be filled. So intentionally actionably, incorporating rest and relaxation in a purposeful way in your schedule and in your smarty pants goals means that you’re more likely to achieve them like at the beginning of this episode.
I inserted a minute of meditation. It was a thing that we did to not do for 60 seconds. I know it’s backwards, , and here we are. The action sometimes will be inaction. It still matters to think about it in a positive term. , the next one, the R of SMART [00:25:00] might be realistic. It might be relatable. It might be relevant.
Reasonable. Sometimes I think that a and R get redundant if you use achievable and reasonable. That’s saying the same thing, so I like using actionable and then reasonable or realistic. , are you living on planet Earth when you make this specific goal? You don’t need to be on planet Earth for your big overarching goals or your big dreams.
I want you to be up in the clouds for those. This process of turning a big dream or a big overarching goal into objectives, how George talked about them as objectives or steps. This is turning a goal into a plan. This is making stuff happen. Are the things that you’re making happen on paper, realistic or reasonable in the actual world?
It is fantastic to be an optimist. It’s great to have [00:26:00] big, impossible dreams, and there’s always a first step. Even the impossible is accomplished through small, simple actions. What is the first step for you on your big dream? What is the reasonable place to begin with resources that are available to you today?
I often tell coaching clients if there’s something big and out there that they wanna do, it can always come back to a Google search or a phone call or a talk to a friend. There’s always some small thing that. Readily available to you, whether it’s gathering information, making connections journaling or clarifying or writing a list, those are things that you can put as a reasonable goal.
Maybe that’s, you’ve broken your big goal down into really tiny pieces. That’s the right place to make that first little tiny step that then moves you in the right direction to be able to take off bigger [00:27:00] and bigger chunks of that big overarching. And the T in smart almost always talks about time timely, time sensitive timeline.
This one also is really important because like the measurable piece, this one gives you some constraint and there is such power in constraint when it comes to goals. Your brain will like a goal that can be started and finished today more than a goal that’s gonna take 30 years. It just is hard for us to think about things with a totally open timeline.
I think that’s a good practice as humans to have some big dreams and ideas with no expectation of when they’re gonna happen, especially when we have no control over those things. We’re assuming with these smart goals that these are things within our control with our own resources and. It doesn’t do a lot of good to make goals for other people or goals about other [00:28:00] people.
Like I have a New Year’s resolution that my husband is going to stop watching sports. Not very helpful. Likely reasonable, useful. What are things. Available to you as resources and time and energy that can be broken down into specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time sensitive steps. That’s the real question.
How much time do you have? How much do you want to spend on this thing? I like my smart goals, especially within a year to. within a year and even break that down. If you have a goal that’s gonna take the whole year, what is the quarterly segment of that goal? What is that broken down into month? What has it broken down into what you can do today or this week?
Having that end in mind and then applying this smart system to each step or each layer of that big dream is the [00:29:00] conversion from idea to. , it’s taking something out there that doesn’t exist yet in the world and bringing it to life. I’m gonna review these criteria to evaluate your own personal goals and plans against, to see where you can tweak and tighten them a little bit to make them more likely.
To happen First specific, what are you trying to do? Who’s gonna be part of your team? Where is it gonna take place? Be specific and provide a clear picture. Measurable, how will you measure what you’re doing? How will you assess the achievement? What is your definition of success? Actionable? What is the action?
What are you going to do? How do you write it in your calendar? realistic. Can you actually meet this goal with the resources you have available right now? If it’s too big for that, break it down to [00:30:00] where your resources match the challenge and timely. What is your timeline? Work backwards. Start with the big goal, and then create an outline so that you know what to do today or tomorrow or this week to put you on the pathway for.
even if you’re not ready to start a bunch of new goals at the beginning of this year, it’s a great time to evaluate some of the processes that you use for progress in your life. And this Smarty Pants system is pretty dang great for taking a nebulous idea and turning it into concrete action steps. I love a concrete list.
I love a timeline, knowing with clarity, what I’m aiming at. Gives me this enthusiasm for actually going for it much more than if I just know there’s some something out there somewhere that someday I might want to take care of. Be a smarty pants. When it comes to what you want in your life, [00:31:00]smarty pants goals are intentional.
They invite clarity into your life and help you to live your. Literally that’s what we’re doing. We’re taking something from your mind that you dreamed up, that you like or love and are excited about, and we are bringing it to life As a total tangent and aside, I just have to mention that when I was in sixth grade, I wanted to be smarty pants for Halloween, and I came up with safety pinning smarties candies in the wrapper.
All over a pair of pants, . And I remember walking in the school parade around Howard r Driggs Elementary School in Holiday, Utah with my Smarties flapping all over as they wiggled, as I walked in my Smarty Pants costume. Use this smart criteria the next time that you’re setting a goal that you really wanna.
And see how it changes [00:32:00] the action that you take. I’m so glad that you joined me here today to learn about Smarty Pants goals on the podcast. I really appreciate your attention and the time that you dedicate to listening. I like being a friend in your ear and I hope that you enjoyed the show. If you like this or other episodes of Live Free Creative, there are a couple ways that you can support the.
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The second way is to leave a rating and a written review on iTunes. It means a whole lot. It doesn’t take a whole lot of time, and I really love reading your thoughts, so thank you for sharing those with me. Thank you for tuning in. I will catch you again next week. Same time, same place. Bye-bye.[00:33:00]
