If you are like most people you’ve tried to set goals before and roughly followed the method above. Instead let me explain how the feedback loop below can speed up your personal growth!
In the real world, your growth is not linear A->B->C so structuring your development like this does not make sense. Instead of aiming for results the real aim is to be able to plan and carry out a specific process to achieve your goals, and the best way to do that is by considering feedback (or reflection or mindfulness). Considering your growth as a cycle that you want to run through as quickly and effectively as possible like this will allow you to reach your goals faster and align them better to your interests. You also don’t need to feel guilty about not meeting all your goals (after all it just allows more feedback!). This feedback principle is key to the success of many other frameworks, such as mindfulness and bullet journalling or the Design-Build-Measure loop used in startups and has been key to me, so let me share the details with you!
To illustrate my point, a friend of a friend we can call Alice has shared some of her new year’s resolutions with me, and we can improve them together. Alice is in her mid 20s, working as a software engineer in Seattle after moving there 3 years ago. Work keeps her busy, but in her free time she enjoys hiking and cooking by meal-prepping on Sundays. These are her goals:
- Going out and meeting people more often
- Adopt a healthy lifestyle
- Spend less time on phone and try meeting friends and family in person
These are all pretty good goals to have! However, they could be more specific. What will Alice actually do to achieve her goals? Let’s add some information.
- Going out and meeting people more often
- Cook dinner with a friend at least once a week
- Get coffee with a new person at least once a month
- Adopt a healthy lifestyle
- Walk at least 7km each day
- Spend less time on phone and try meeting friends and family in person
- Use phone in grayscale mode.
- Limit screen time to less than 4 hours a day
Okay, this is looking a lot better already. So if Alice follows these routines every day for a year, she should be in a much better position by 2026! But what if Alice misses out on her routine or they don’t actually make a big impact on her goals? Does she need to wait until 2026 to actually make her goals more accurate or her planned methods more achievable? Of course not, this is where feedback comes in. But many people forget to explicitly include it when organising their goals. This mistake is common though -in fact the idea of using feedback for lean startups only was written down as the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop by Eric Ries in 2011.
Imagine it gets to March - Alice really enjoyed having someone round for dinner every week but she felt like it took a lot of energy and she was mainly spending time with the same couple of friends she’s always had. She’s also meeting her walking goal most days but still feels tired getting out of bed. Without reflecting in this way Alice would continue and either drop her methods since they weren’t useful or not reach her goals by having methods that aren’t realistic for her. However, she realised she needed to adjust either her methods or goals because some things were not working, so what she ended up doing is adjusting her meeting people/dinner goal to “Engage in more diverse social activities” and to go to local workshops and events. She also realised that her diet needed to improve because she was fit but still getting tired-it turns out she had some mineral deficiencies.
Making time for reflection and feedback is actually the most important part of this process, and without checking in with herself she would be much less likely to meet her goals. Instead of setting her goals and trying to stick to them as best as possible and “failing” if she doesn’t. Her focus is on getting to her review point, keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t. The more times you can spin this feedback wheel, the quicker you can learn.
Hopefully this article has inspired you to change how you think about goal setting. If you want to learn more about feedback in business, I would search into waterfall development, OODA and Build-Measure-Learn loops. If you want to learn about feedback for personal growth, I would look more into mindfulness and bullet journalling. For goal-setting look into SMART goals. And check out the rest of my blog!