In my SMARTER Goals system, “E” stands for “Enabled.”
Enabling a Goal Has Two Components
1) You will probably need to change something in your life to enable yourself to achieve this goal. Carve out specific time to work on the goal. Change an attitude about yourself. Be willing to try new things. Something new will be enabled.
2) You will need to share the goal with someone else who will hold you accountable if you want to enable yourself to reach the goal. This will enable you to take action – so you can report in to this person with forward progress. It’s too embarrassing not to move forward when you’ve got an accountability partner.
This second component of Enabling your goal matches two of the steps in the FAST Goals system. The “F for Frequent” idea is to have frequent conversations about the goal. and the “T for Transparent” in FAST Goals means to be open and public about the goal. With an accountability partner, you can set up scheduled conversations as well as have someone to turn to when the going gets tough. With every meaningful goal, the going will get tough. So be ready for that!
What Happens if You Don’t Enable a Goal
As a performance coach, here’s what I’ve seen far too many times:
A person decides on a meaningful goal. (Check.) They envision what it will be like to attain the goal. (Check.) They think through the steps needed to attain the goal. (Check.)
Everything looks good.
Then, they make no forward momentum toward the goal for one very simple reason: They have failed to carve out time in their life to take the steps toward the goal.
This is what the first component of Enabling a goal is all about. You must make time to achieve something important!
Every new goal means you’re adding something new to your already busy life. To make time for this new process, you’re going to need to do less of other activities you’re currently doing or eliminate one or two of these activities altogether.
Cutting back on what you’re already doing in your life is extremely challenging. I encourage you to be realistic about this challenge and rise to this challenge. Make a decision about where in your life you’ll make the time to achieve your new goal.
This is a crucial step and one of the main reasons I created SMARTER Goals from the SMART system. SMART is great for setting the goal. SMARTER helps you actually take the steps to achieve the goal!
