Design & Achieve Your Goals with Creative Thinking
Step 4: Question Your Goal
The problem with goals is we often misunderstand them. We believe we want one thing, but in truth we want something else all together.
For instance, a busy lawyer may think she wants to earn more money and strive to achieve that. But if you stop and question her for a while, you may find that she wants to earn more money in order to provide better lives for her children. But because she is working so hard to earn money for them, the lawyer actually spends little time with her children. In her case, her real goal is probably not to earn more money, but to provide better for her children. Once she recognises this, she may discover that what she really needs to do is to find a career that gives her more free time and a flexible schedule so she can spend more valuable time with her children – and she should even be willing to take a substantial salary cut in order to live such a life!
Once the lawyer understands this, she will need to reframe (reframe in this case means to change the wording and meaning of a statement) her goal.
So, how do you question your goal?
With questions of course!!
Action
I want you to ask yourself these questions. Put the answers in writing (or enter them into your computer). If you wish to share your answers with me, or discovered any special insights while answering these questions, please tell me. I would love to know your results!
Questions
Why do I wish to accomplish this goal?
After you have answered the question, ask yourself four more related questions:
- Why else do I wish to accomplish this goal?
- Why else do I wish to accomplish this goal?
- Why else do I wish to accomplish this goal?
- Why else do I wish to accomplish this goal?
This set of questions is called the five whys. It is a simple, but fantastic method for analysing problems.
Finally, ask yourself just two more questions:
- How will my life be better by accomplishing this goal?
- Are there other ways to achieve this feeling, besides my initial goal?
I will publish the 12 step Designer Goals process over the next few days. Here are the steps we will do together.
- Introduction (This page!)
- Acknowledge personal responsibility.
- Define your goal or ambition.
- Question your goal.
- Reframe your goal.
- Imagine achieving your goal.
- Identify subgoals you need to take to live that dream.
- Build ideas for achieving subgoals.
- Putting it all together
- Build to-do and don’t-do lists
- Using your imagination
- Get started!
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