Goal-setting strategies to achieve your Career ambitions (that actually work!)

Want to hear something cool?

Quiet people are great at setting goals.

Why? Because we tend to be introspective and thoughtful, which often leads to thinking about the future and planning ahead.

Setting goals just comes naturally to us.

But it’s still important to make sure that you’re setting goals that are right for you (and don’t just sound impressive) and working towards them in a way that you’ll actually achieve.

STart from the end and work backwards

It’s a little cliché, but if you could catapult yourself into your life five years (or however long you like, I’m not the boss of you) into the future, what would you want to see?

Is there a specific job or position you have in mind, a type of work you'd like to be doing, or a career that works around the lifestyle you envision for yourself? Maybe you’re working yourself to the bone right now, but you plan on starting a family in the next couple of years and know that this needs to change. Maybe you want to move cities, or even countries.

There might be multiple goals to achieve within your ideal future, and we want to work backwards to figure out what kind of action you can start taking now.

For example, let’s say you’re currently working a corporate job in Manchester, and you’d like to make the leap into freelancing in a creative career and move to London.

You’ve got a couple of goals within the very vague situation I’ve just described:

• Move into a new industry

• Become self-employed

• Move to a new city

If we focus on becoming self-employed, working backwards from that goal you would probably want to create a portfolio, build up a client-base, market yourself and have some savings as a cushion for any quieter months.

And just like that, you’ve already got some goals you can start taking action on now:

• Start building your portfolio

• Start posting your portfolio online to market yourself and attract clients

• Figure out how much you want in your rainy day fund and start saving up

Break it down

Okay, so now we have some goals. But they’re pretty big, and pretty vague.

So you want to break them down into mini-goals.

Take building your portfolio, for example. That’s a huge undertaking, so it isn’t something you can just do. It’s made up of lots of little steps.

So to break it down into a mini-goal, what are the first steps you’d need to take, and how can you measure them?

Maybe the first step is to start creating work to add to your portfolio. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll pretend you’re a brand designer. Your mini-goal could be to design a new logo every week for three months.

It’s a SMART goals - specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound - and, importantly, it’s within your control.

Make sure your mini-goals all work towards your wider vision, and keep it realistic!

Consider what you don’t want

Listen, we all get caught up in setting big, shiny goals that we think will make us happy when they actually appeal to our ego or will prove someone who doubted us wrong (hellooo me starting a Masters degree just to prove I could get accepted on to a scientific course at a prestigious university).

Or, you might have things in your current life that you just aren’t vibing with. Maybe you’re feeling really burnt out at work, or you hate your job.

Could you set some anti-goals - things you actively working away from, instead of towards?

Because, just as it takes lots of baby steps to achieve our big goals, it takes the same to remove the things we don’t want from our life.

Stay on track, your way

So, you’ve got your big vision, broken down into goals, further broken down into mini-goals.

One thing is for sure: this is going to take time.

And humans? Well, most of us are incredibly impatient. So how are you going to stay motivated along the way?

We need to know what keep us on track in the long-term.

For some of us, it’s accountability. Telling someone about your goals and knowing that they’ll ask you for updates and encourage you might be how you stay motivated.

Maybe you find the gamification of a habit-style app or a spreadsheet where you can tick off the progress you’ve made towards your goals extremely satisfying.

Perhaps you need to work your goals into part of your daily routine to ensure you keep chipping away at them.

Me? I’m motivated by my big vision. I have a Pinterest board of what I want my life to look like and I set it as a widget on my homescreen so I’m frequently reminded of it, but it’s not as in my face as having it as my lockscreen. When I’m feeling tired or demotivated, that keeps me going.

Balancing ambition with well-being

Now, you’re working towards your goals, chipping away at them day by day.

Except…it’s starting to feel like a slog. You’re constantly working, and if you’re not working, you’re thinking about what you need to do next.

It’s a recipe for burnout, and it happens so easily to those of us who are career-driven.

Make sure that you’re taking time to look after yourself, whatever that feels like for you. Self-care is not just a face mask and a bubble bath, it’s getting enough sleep, eating properly and everything else you need to stay happy and healthy.

Remember, you can’t achieve your goals if you’re running on empty.