Understanding Reverse Goal Setting Techniques

On May 26th, 2019, I left my job as a medical doctor. I felt dissatisfied and unhappy with life, dreading Sunday evenings, knowing that I'd have to wake up the next day for work. But just one year later, I became the most fulfilled and energized version of myself I'd ever been. And I achieved this transformation through a powerful method I call reverse goal setting. And now, as a learning coach for the past 13 years, Reverse goal setting is the method that I teach to thousands of students and professionals worldwide to help them plan and build out their dream lives. In this video, I'm going to explain what the biggest problems with normal or conventional goal setting are and how you can fix those problems with the five steps of reverse goal setting. Let's get started. More often than not, normal goal setting can be a complete waste of time. That's why most people who set goals... don't really achieve them, especially for goals that are even slightly more difficult. You end up getting stuck in the spiral of setting a goal, trying to achieve it, failing, getting derailed, feeling demotivated, wondering what's wrong with me? Why can't I keep achieving these goals? It's like this spiral that gets worse and worse with every goal you set. But I really think this is because of the way we set our goals, not because of who we are. So back when I was in my first year of university, this is me. I had this goal of entering into medical school and so I knew that I wanted to do everything possible to achieve that goal. And so I thought, what can I do to get into medical school? Study more, study harder, read all the textbooks, be a good diligent student. And so my plan on a daily basis revolved around how can I make sure I do these activities day in day out. And that's what normal goal setting kind of looks like. You have this... overall intention where you want to end up. And then you think, well, what can I do that gets me closer to it? And then you think, how can I fit that into my schedule? How can I be diligent? And you use that to anchor your activities every single day. And for a simple enough goal, this works fine. And actually, if I think back to my success of entering into medical school, I technically reached my goal, but I think really I just got lucky because there were also a lot of other people around me working just as hard. doing kind of the same things, but they weren't as successful. Some of them very intelligent, very capable people. And this is really the problem with normal goal setting is that it focuses on the what to achieve, but not the how. If you set a goal, the path of actually achieving that is very unclear. So you have to spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. Not only is that a waste of time and a waste of energy, but sometimes you never even make it to the end because you burn out. You lost your way, you ran out of time. And I really think that at a certain point in life, normal goal setting becomes a waste of time. Because for most complicated goals, you don't know how you're meant to actually achieve it. It's the uncertainty that makes it hard in the first place. A good example is if I fast forwarded nine years, I've already graduated medical school, I've become a doctor, I've been working as a doctor, and now, ironically, I'm trying to create a goal to leave medicine. I want to explore entrepreneurship and education full-time. So I've set that as my goal. I want to become an entrepreneur and educator full-time. So what? Like, what am I actually meant to do? You can see how setting the goal doesn't give me any more clarity on how to achieve that. And this is where reverse goal setting comes in to fix this problem, is that it starts with the goal that you want to achieve, and then it works its way backwards to give you a very clear path of action. that you know will inevitably lead to you achieving your goal. So now let me show you what the five steps of reverse goal setting are and how you can use that to achieve your goals with more clarity and confidence. Step one, identify your long-term goal. You can't plan for an outcome if you don't know what outcome you want. On the other hand, Just because you know what outcome you want doesn't mean you can create a plan to achieve it. There's this awesome analogy that I heard from this legendary marketer called Seth Godin. He said, if you want to hang a painting on the wall, like a really nice painting that you love right into your bedroom, and you go to the hardware store to pick up a drill and a drill bit, your goal there is not to buy a drill and a drill bit. Your goal is to have a hole in the wall so that you can put a screw through that to hang your painting on it. But your goal is not to have a hole in the wall. Your goal is to have the painting on the wall. But your goal is also not to have the painting on the wall. Your goal is to have a certain feeling that you think you will have when you see that painting. on the wall. That's your real goal. Your goal is the feeling you think that that will give you. And I think this applies a lot for the life goals that we set. When I was 15 thinking I want to be a doctor, that was a goal that I had in mind. But it's not that I wanted to be a doctor. There were all these other criteria in my mind that I was checking off that I attached to that goal. A level of... Financial stability, a level of fulfillment in my life, a type of work that I thought I would enjoy and be good at. And 10 years later, after having achieved that goal, what I realized is that it didn't tick some of those boxes as much as I would have wanted. It didn't provide me as much fulfillment and satisfaction as I thought it would give me. The work was not what I had anticipated it to be. And the moral of the story here is not to... go back in time, slap my 15 year old, 16 year old self and say, think harder about your goal. It's that when you look so far ahead, there are so many levels of uncertainty. There's so much you don't know about yourself, your life situation, about the goal itself, that it becomes almost meaningless to anchor that in as a goal. And so as a general principle, I think what's incredibly useful for goal setting is don't set goals too far into the future. Because your plan is almost definitely going to change and you want to stay flexible and adaptable and open to new information and new circumstances. You don't want to get locked down into a certain pathway because you said, this is the goal I've chosen for myself. And even though information keeps coming in saying, hey, what you really want is this thing and what you thought was the goal is not going to get you there. You want to be able to pivot on that. So here's a little activity for you. Just get a piece of paper out and write down What your long-term vision or direction is. This is like your 5 to 10 year vision. Try to keep this one relatively broad. Underneath that, write why. What do you think this is going to achieve for you? What type of feeling, what kind of situation will this help you achieve? And make a clear decision mentally that if you realize at some point that this what... the goal you've set now is no longer seeming like it's going to tick off the why, the reason for setting the goal in the first place, give yourself permission to re-evaluate, pivot. Once you've done that, break that goal down into something that's a little bit more medium term, at most three years in advance. And you can actually bring this as short as you want. Like you could do this exact same process for a month away. If your goal is, I want to get to the supermarket tomorrow morning, You don't need to do this whole process. Just go to the supermarket. But if it's further than three years, your plan starts becoming very risky. If one part of the plan breaks, it affects everything else for the rest of that plan. It's much better to just plan for shorter sprints and then just constantly reevaluate that as you go. Now in step number four, we wanna actually specify what is required to achieve this goal. Like what is the actual requirements that you need to achieve? So for example, for me, if it was entering into medical school, For me to achieve that there was a certain grade boundary, there were these other examinations that I had to have, set clearer, more specific targets. Now when you do this activity, especially if it's a goal that you're not very certain about, there's an important answer that you may arrive at, which is incredibly important for you to write down. Which is, you may realize that when you try to specify, you don't know. You have a goal you want to reach, but you don't actually know what the requirements are. This is important because it Highlights a gap in your planning. Your immediate next step becomes figure that out. Go learn about it. Talk to someone. Get that information so you know. You can actually specify it accurately. Now, up until this point, this all falls within the same purview of just normal goal setting. This step two is where we really go into reverse goal setting. Step two is to define your future self. Imagine your goal is to have a million dollars and you find a magic lamp and you can rub the lamp and a genie comes out and says, hey, I will grant you, you know, your one wish. And then you say, I wish I could win lotto and have a million dollars. That would not be a great wish. And in fact, actually, when you look at a lot of lotto winners, they don't end up continuing to be wealthy. A lot of people that win these great sums of money just eventually lose all that money again. Why is that? It's because they have the outcome, but they didn't have the skills, the habits, the perspectives, the attributes necessary to keep or grow that wealth. And a better wish would be, give me the skills and attributes and habits that will let me make a million dollars. And this is what we're doing with step number two, is that we're looking at the medium-term goal that you have. And you can draw some inspiration from your long-term five to 10 year one as well. And we're going to create what I call a meta goal. And the meta goal is the person for whom it will be easy to achieve this goal. If we think about the goal as an outcome and we realize that outcomes cannot be controlled, outcomes are symptoms of the process that we control, then what becomes important is the process and the person engaging in the process. A person. who's not capable of engaging in the process, who's not capable of even knowing what the right process is, is very unlikely to achieve the outcome, aka the goal. Imagine someone who you think is like a complete genius. And let's say your goal is to get a great result in a certain exam. This person has great time management, never procrastinates, focuses amazingly well, their memory seems infallible. Now imagine that they failed this goal. How surprised would you be? It could happen, you know, something could happen, like, who knows, but that would be shocking. On the flip side, think about someone who has terrible time management, procrastinates all the time, always gets distracted, never studying, their memory is full of holes, they've never trained it, their study skills are all over the place, they don't know what they're doing. Now imagine this person gets the top result in an exam. That's wild. You wouldn't expect that. So, we can see already, intuitively, we understand. that observing the process someone uses tells us how likely they are to achieve the outcome. And this seems obvious. But when a goal feels really important, we become blind to this fact. We start obsessing over the outcome. And when we try to engage in the process, we're so worried about the outcome that even the time we do spend is not spent effectively because we're so distracted. And so while it is normal to worry about a goal that you really care about, we need to channel that. worry into something more productive, which is to evaluate our processes, evaluate our skills, and think, what can we control that will influence the outcome? Worrying about an outcome doesn't do anything for us. And so with this meta goal, we're thinking about who is the person that would find achieving this goal easy? And then what are the skills and attributes and habits and also opportunities that this person has or has access to that allows this goal to be easy for them. And you want to be detailed here. You want to be specific. Think about time management skills, task management and prioritization, focus and concentration, procrastination, learning ability. These are five core areas that I would recommend that you start thinking through. to begin with. And by the way, if you want to fast track your improvement in these five areas, then you may want to check out my free weekly newsletter. I basically took my 13 years of coaching experience, pulled out what I thought were the most important nuggets of information, and I put them into these free weekly newsletters that only take a few minutes to read, but aim to save you 10 plus hours a week. If you want to join, there's a link for you in the description below. And now let's get back to the idea of setting our meta goal. And so this meta goal becomes our primary number one goal. Our number one priority. is to become that person who would find achieving this goal much easier than who we are right now. Step three of reverse goal setting is to define your current self. So we know who we need to become. So where are we now in relation to that? What we do is for each of the skills and attributes and habits and opportunities that we have identified so far, we can rate the requirement for it out of 10. So let's say that if you want to do really well in a certain exam, you think that your learning ability needs to be a 9 out of 10. Your time management needs to be a 7 out of 10, let's say. For example, that's your goal. So where are you right now? Right now, maybe you are only a 3 out of 10 for both of these things. Then the gap you have to fill becomes your plan. And when you do step 2 and step 3, the same thing as before in step 1 can happen. which is that you may arrive at the answer of, I don't know. And again, this is very important to recognize. If you don't even know what the skills and the attributes and the habits and the processes are that will lead to you being successful at your goal, that's a problem. Because now you're relying on luck to get you there. If we don't know, that becomes the easiest plan of all. Because again, step one becomes, how can you know? Talk to people, learn about things, do some reading, watch some videos, understand what the requirements are, not of the goal, but of the person. Likewise, if you're trying to evaluate your current ability and you don't know, that's a problem. It means that you don't have that self-awareness and that's nothing to be embarrassed about. Most people have absolutely no self-awareness. until you start directing your attention at it. And I can promise you, you probably did not have less self-awareness than I did when I first started out. So if you're looking at your current learning ability and you're like, I actually have no idea what my learning, I don't even know how to rank that. I don't even know how to think about that. Scoring it out of 10. That's your first step. You have to know where your current ability is. And actually during that process of figuring it out, it's gonna give you a lot of very targeted ways to improve it. And as you improve on each of those ways, you get closer and closer to becoming the person who can reach the goal. And therefore, you become closer to your goal. The most underrated activity that you can do to begin with is to observe and reflect. Observe yourself. Be objective, be honest. What do you do? What type of person do you see yourself as? Reflect on it. And once you know where your current status is, you see that gap for what it is. I was talking to one of my previous employees the other day and she has ADHD. She's a very high-functioning, super intelligent person but has always struggled with just sitting down and getting through a lot of work. She's in a really good position at a new company. She's got lots of pressure going on and so she's feeling this struggle. There's so much work she has to do but she struggles with sitting down and really being focused and concentrating. And she's talking about All of these different things that she's sort of struggling with and trying to do. And she's running into that problem. She's setting a goal to try to study this many hours, to work this many hours, to dedicate that much time. And it's failing every single day. Why is she failing? Because she's not actually addressing the underlying root cause for it, which is her ability to stay focused and to not get distracted. And for her, I had already told her long ago the things she can do to improve concentration and just to train that ability. Take it from a 3 out of 10. to a five out of 10. And it had never been a priority for her because it wasn't getting more work done. And so you can see the paradox. She's so obsessed about achieving the goal and so motivated to get that work done, but doesn't realize that the real gap is that the person she is right now is not someone who will find it easy to achieve that goal. And so the best step is to work on these things that get you closer to the person you need to be. And now you don't need all of these other things to help you because it's just easier. So once we've defined our current self, we move on to step four, which is to do a force field analysis. A force field analysis is a technique where you take your current self, which we've just defined, we look at our goal, which is our meta goal, the future self we want to become. And on a piece of paper, you draw it like this, with this arcing line in between. On one side of this are barriers and obstacles. What are the things that prevent you from being able to achieve your meta goal? On the other side of this line, We have drivers. What are the things that help us to succeed, can push that through? These may be our existing skills and habits and attributes. And we also write, what is our network and resources to help us achieve this? And so we're actually mapping out what are the things that we can employ to overcome these barriers? And what are the things we have access to that can help us overcome these barriers to eventually move us along? and achieve this goal. This is a powerful exercise that I recommend that you do every few months anytime you feel like you're not sure exactly how to keep progressing. This technique is called a force field analysis because we're examining the forces that are keeping you from or pushing you towards your goal. So if I use my example, who was the person that I needed to be in order to achieve my goal of leaving medicine and going full-time into entrepreneurship and education? I realized that my time management would have to be really, really good. My prioritization skills would have to be really, really good. I would have to have access to opportunities relating to business and certain experiences to make that transition easier. And I realized that my current self was lacking in some of those areas. My time management skills were pretty good, but my prioritization skills weren't so good. I had some experiences in business and I've been doing a lot of learning coaching already, but I'd never really stepped fully into the role of entrepreneurship. I lacked a lot of those experiences and opportunities that would make that transition easy for me. Later, when I did my force field analysis, I realized that I have a lot of people within my network. I have access to a lot of these resources that can enable me to do this. And so for around nine to ten months, I started dabbling a little bit more and gaining some of those experiences in business. One of the things that sounds kind of funny for someone that was... wanting to do entrepreneurship full-time is that even though I'd been running a education and learning coaching business for six and a half years at that point, I had never really paid myself from it because most of it was actually done through a non-profit. Like I'd set up a charity for education. And so I'd never actually paid myself a salary. And so in the last couple of years, I started actually just... Paying myself a salary and then seeing if I could manage the finances of my business when I was paying myself a living wage. And so this process, what I'm explaining of how I use my insights from this process to create my plan is step five, building your plan. In this final step, we know where we need to get to. We have our goal. We have our meta goal. We know where we currently stand and we know the things that can push and pull us towards that goal. Now all that's left is to figure out what to start focusing on first as a priority, when to start doing it, and how. If you realize the thing that's lagging behind the most that you think is going to take the longest time for you to fix is your learning skills, then that becomes the what to focus on. When, let's say, immediately is the best time to start working on it. And then how. Figure that out. If you don't know how, again, that becomes an obvious next step. Learn about how. You know you need to work on it. You know it's important. You know it's a priority. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't change the fact that it needs to be worked on. Sometimes the what, when, and how is not what you expect. I worked with a student a number of years ago who was struggling at university and she had lots of things to work on in her learning skills. No doubt. The gap between where she needed to get and her current self was wide and it was going to be a high priority for her to fill that gap. And so we tried to fill that gap. And then after trying for a few weeks, I realized that she's not very consistent or diligent. I realized that I'm setting her tasks and saying, hey, this is what you need to do to train your skills. And then a week later, she'd come back and have practiced almost none of it. She was stagnant. After digging a little bit deeper and having some more conversations, I realized that she's actually being terribly abused at home by her parents. That home environment was toxic. And so the priorities changed. You can't work on learning skills when you don't have that foundation of stability and safety. And so we actually changed the plan completely. The number one priority became how can we support her and get her out of the house? What was the barrier to that? She didn't have a job. So we figured out what kind of job can we get her to just make enough money to move out of the house because the time spent working a part-time job, yes, it takes away from study, but in the grand scheme of things, it makes so many other things easier that that was going to be the bottleneck that we had to solve. A month later, she moved out, got a job, moved out, found a place to flat. It wasn't the nicest place, but that was a life-changing move for her. And when she had a little bit more mental space to think about that learning skill stuff again, we jumped on that train again. A couple of years later, she was thriving. She was doing a master's of health science and it was a challenging road for her, but she was able to make it through that because of understanding what to focus on, when to focus on it, how to focus on it and being flexible, understanding that the thing you think you may need to do to achieve your goal. may not be if you just take a step back and evaluate the situation holistically. In a less extreme example, one thing that I see very, very commonly is that people think that they need to improve their learning skills, but actually, the thing that holds them back the most is actually the fact that they procrastinate all the time, or they're not willing to try something new. And so you can see that is actually a fundamental blocker. And in this final step where we're building the plan, that will become the what. Working on our experimentation ability, working on our procrastination, and this stuff is what enters into your calendar at the end of the day. Every day there is something that you know is a high priority for you to develop your skills and your attributes and your processes and your habits and your access to opportunities and resources that you know gets you towards your goal and you schedule that into your day, into your evenings, into your weekends. That becomes your plan. And as you grow as a person, the outcomes you naturally are able to achieve grow with it. Now, there is one thing that I have to mention, which is that changing your skills and your habits is not a quick or easy thing. It takes time. It takes diligence. It probably takes you longer than you expect it to. And the more things you try to improve at the same time, the harder it gets to improve any of them. So when you are plotting your timeline, make sure it's a realistic. timeline. Be conservative with how long you think it will take to develop and grow your skills, especially if they're habits that you have had for years. It's going to take a little bit of time to change that. For me, transitioning away from medicine during that period of time, I would only focus on one, maybe two things on any given month. And even though I knew there were 10 other things to work on, I deliberately stopped myself from working on it to make sure I gave myself the best chance of success. And after that... roughly a year, 10, 9, 10 months, I was able to transition out of medicine relatively smoothly. And the thing is, all these, like all my friends, people that I went to uni with, started messaging me saying, hey, Justin, how did you do that? Like, I've also been thinking about quitting being a doctor or quitting being a pharmacist. You're so, this is what they said, is that they said, you're so lucky that you had that business to fall back on. And If that's what luck is, then it seems to be a lot more controllable than you think. So this is reverse goal setting, and if you've never set goals like this before, then it's very different. But if you've struggled with normal goal setting before, then you owe it to yourself to at least give this a chance. And I will say this, I now almost never use normal goal setting for anything anymore. If it's important and complicated enough for me to go through and set a goal, I use reverse goal setting. I hope this helps. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.

And I achieved this transformation through a powerful method I call reverse goal setting. And now, as a learning coach for the past 13 years, Reverse goal setting is the method that I teach to thousands of students and professionals worldwide to help them plan and build out their dream lives. In this video, I'm going to explain what the biggest problems with normal or conventional goal setting are and how you can fix those problems with the five steps of reverse goal setting. Let's get started. More often than not, normal goal setting can be a complete waste of time.

That's why most people who set goals... don't really achieve them, especially for goals that are even slightly more difficult. You end up getting stuck in the spiral of setting a goal, trying to achieve it, failing, getting derailed, feeling demotivated, wondering what's wrong with me? Why can't I keep achieving these goals?

It's like this spiral that gets worse and worse with every goal you set. But I really think this is because of the way we set our goals, not because of who we are. So back when I was in my first year of university, this is me.

I had this goal of entering into medical school and so I knew that I wanted to do everything possible to achieve that goal. And so I thought, what can I do to get into medical school? Study more, study harder, read all the textbooks, be a good diligent student. And so my plan on a daily basis revolved around how can I make sure I do these activities day in day out.

And that's what normal goal setting kind of looks like. You have this... overall intention where you want to end up. And then you think, well, what can I do that gets me closer to it?

And then you think, how can I fit that into my schedule? How can I be diligent? And you use that to anchor your activities every single day. And for a simple enough goal, this works fine.

And actually, if I think back to my success of entering into medical school, I technically reached my goal, but I think really I just got lucky because there were also a lot of other people around me working just as hard. doing kind of the same things, but they weren't as successful. Some of them very intelligent, very capable people. And this is really the problem with normal goal setting is that it focuses on the what to achieve, but not the how. If you set a goal, the path of actually achieving that is very unclear.

So you have to spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. Not only is that a waste of time and a waste of energy, but sometimes you never even make it to the end because you burn out. You lost your way, you ran out of time. And I really think that at a certain point in life, normal goal setting becomes a waste of time.

Because for most complicated goals, you don't know how you're meant to actually achieve it. It's the uncertainty that makes it hard in the first place. A good example is if I fast forwarded nine years, I've already graduated medical school, I've become a doctor, I've been working as a doctor, and now, ironically, I'm trying to create a goal to leave medicine.

I want to explore entrepreneurship and education full-time. So I've set that as my goal. I want to become an entrepreneur and educator full-time.

So what? Like, what am I actually meant to do? You can see how setting the goal doesn't give me any more clarity on how to achieve that. And this is where reverse goal setting comes in to fix this problem, is that it starts with the goal that you want to achieve, and then it works its way backwards to give you a very clear path of action.

that you know will inevitably lead to you achieving your goal. So now let me show you what the five steps of reverse goal setting are and how you can use that to achieve your goals with more clarity and confidence. Step one, identify your long-term goal.

You can't plan for an outcome if you don't know what outcome you want. On the other hand, Just because you know what outcome you want doesn't mean you can create a plan to achieve it. There's this awesome analogy that I heard from this legendary marketer called Seth Godin. He said, if you want to hang a painting on the wall, like a really nice painting that you love right into your bedroom, and you go to the hardware store to pick up a drill and a drill bit, your goal there is not to buy a drill and a drill bit. Your goal is to have a hole in the wall so that you can put a screw through that to hang your painting on it.

But your goal is not to have a hole in the wall. Your goal is to have the painting on the wall. But your goal is also not to have the painting on the wall.

Your goal is to have a certain feeling that you think you will have when you see that painting. on the wall. That's your real goal.

Your goal is the feeling you think that that will give you. And I think this applies a lot for the life goals that we set. When I was 15 thinking I want to be a doctor, that was a goal that I had in mind.

But it's not that I wanted to be a doctor. There were all these other criteria in my mind that I was checking off that I attached to that goal. A level of... Financial stability, a level of fulfillment in my life, a type of work that I thought I would enjoy and be good at. And 10 years later, after having achieved that goal, what I realized is that it didn't tick some of those boxes as much as I would have wanted.

It didn't provide me as much fulfillment and satisfaction as I thought it would give me. The work was not what I had anticipated it to be. And the moral of the story here is not to... go back in time, slap my 15 year old, 16 year old self and say, think harder about your goal.

It's that when you look so far ahead, there are so many levels of uncertainty. There's so much you don't know about yourself, your life situation, about the goal itself, that it becomes almost meaningless to anchor that in as a goal. And so as a general principle, I think what's incredibly useful for goal setting is don't set goals too far into the future. Because your plan is almost definitely going to change and you want to stay flexible and adaptable and open to new information and new circumstances.

You don't want to get locked down into a certain pathway because you said, this is the goal I've chosen for myself. And even though information keeps coming in saying, hey, what you really want is this thing and what you thought was the goal is not going to get you there. You want to be able to pivot on that. So here's a little activity for you.

Just get a piece of paper out and write down What your long-term vision or direction is. This is like your 5 to 10 year vision. Try to keep this one relatively broad.

Underneath that, write why. What do you think this is going to achieve for you? What type of feeling, what kind of situation will this help you achieve?

And make a clear decision mentally that if you realize at some point that this what... the goal you've set now is no longer seeming like it's going to tick off the why, the reason for setting the goal in the first place, give yourself permission to re-evaluate, pivot. Once you've done that, break that goal down into something that's a little bit more medium term, at most three years in advance.

And you can actually bring this as short as you want. Like you could do this exact same process for a month away. If your goal is, I want to get to the supermarket tomorrow morning, You don't need to do this whole process.

Just go to the supermarket. But if it's further than three years, your plan starts becoming very risky. If one part of the plan breaks, it affects everything else for the rest of that plan. It's much better to just plan for shorter sprints and then just constantly reevaluate that as you go. Now in step number four, we wanna actually specify what is required to achieve this goal.

Like what is the actual requirements that you need to achieve? So for example, for me, if it was entering into medical school, For me to achieve that there was a certain grade boundary, there were these other examinations that I had to have, set clearer, more specific targets. Now when you do this activity, especially if it's a goal that you're not very certain about, there's an important answer that you may arrive at, which is incredibly important for you to write down. Which is, you may realize that when you try to specify, you don't know. You have a goal you want to reach, but you don't actually know what the requirements are.

This is important because it Highlights a gap in your planning. Your immediate next step becomes figure that out. Go learn about it. Talk to someone. Get that information so you know.

You can actually specify it accurately. Now, up until this point, this all falls within the same purview of just normal goal setting. This step two is where we really go into reverse goal setting.

Step two is to define your future self. Imagine your goal is to have a million dollars and you find a magic lamp and you can rub the lamp and a genie comes out and says, hey, I will grant you, you know, your one wish. And then you say, I wish I could win lotto and have a million dollars.

That would not be a great wish. And in fact, actually, when you look at a lot of lotto winners, they don't end up continuing to be wealthy. A lot of people that win these great sums of money just eventually lose all that money again.

Why is that? It's because they have the outcome, but they didn't have the skills, the habits, the perspectives, the attributes necessary to keep or grow that wealth. And a better wish would be, give me the skills and attributes and habits that will let me make a million dollars.

And this is what we're doing with step number two, is that we're looking at the medium-term goal that you have. And you can draw some inspiration from your long-term five to 10 year one as well. And we're going to create what I call a meta goal. And the meta goal is the person for whom it will be easy to achieve this goal. If we think about the goal as an outcome and we realize that outcomes cannot be controlled, outcomes are symptoms of the process that we control, then what becomes important is the process and the person engaging in the process.

A person. who's not capable of engaging in the process, who's not capable of even knowing what the right process is, is very unlikely to achieve the outcome, aka the goal. Imagine someone who you think is like a complete genius.

And let's say your goal is to get a great result in a certain exam. This person has great time management, never procrastinates, focuses amazingly well, their memory seems infallible. Now imagine that they failed this goal. How surprised would you be? It could happen, you know, something could happen, like, who knows, but that would be shocking.

On the flip side, think about someone who has terrible time management, procrastinates all the time, always gets distracted, never studying, their memory is full of holes, they've never trained it, their study skills are all over the place, they don't know what they're doing. Now imagine this person gets the top result in an exam. That's wild.

You wouldn't expect that. So, we can see already, intuitively, we understand. that observing the process someone uses tells us how likely they are to achieve the outcome. And this seems obvious. But when a goal feels really important, we become blind to this fact.

We start obsessing over the outcome. And when we try to engage in the process, we're so worried about the outcome that even the time we do spend is not spent effectively because we're so distracted. And so while it is normal to worry about a goal that you really care about, we need to channel that. worry into something more productive, which is to evaluate our processes, evaluate our skills, and think, what can we control that will influence the outcome? Worrying about an outcome doesn't do anything for us.

And so with this meta goal, we're thinking about who is the person that would find achieving this goal easy? And then what are the skills and attributes and habits and also opportunities that this person has or has access to that allows this goal to be easy for them. And you want to be detailed here. You want to be specific. Think about time management skills, task management and prioritization, focus and concentration, procrastination, learning ability.

These are five core areas that I would recommend that you start thinking through. to begin with. And by the way, if you want to fast track your improvement in these five areas, then you may want to check out my free weekly newsletter.

I basically took my 13 years of coaching experience, pulled out what I thought were the most important nuggets of information, and I put them into these free weekly newsletters that only take a few minutes to read, but aim to save you 10 plus hours a week. If you want to join, there's a link for you in the description below. And now let's get back to the idea of setting our meta goal.

And so this meta goal becomes our primary number one goal. Our number one priority. is to become that person who would find achieving this goal much easier than who we are right now.

Step three of reverse goal setting is to define your current self. So we know who we need to become. So where are we now in relation to that?

What we do is for each of the skills and attributes and habits and opportunities that we have identified so far, we can rate the requirement for it out of 10. So let's say that if you want to do really well in a certain exam, you think that your learning ability needs to be a 9 out of 10. Your time management needs to be a 7 out of 10, let's say. For example, that's your goal. So where are you right now? Right now, maybe you are only a 3 out of 10 for both of these things. Then the gap you have to fill becomes your plan.

And when you do step 2 and step 3, the same thing as before in step 1 can happen. which is that you may arrive at the answer of, I don't know. And again, this is very important to recognize.

If you don't even know what the skills and the attributes and the habits and the processes are that will lead to you being successful at your goal, that's a problem. Because now you're relying on luck to get you there. If we don't know, that becomes the easiest plan of all. Because again, step one becomes, how can you know? Talk to people, learn about things, do some reading, watch some videos, understand what the requirements are, not of the goal, but of the person.

Likewise, if you're trying to evaluate your current ability and you don't know, that's a problem. It means that you don't have that self-awareness and that's nothing to be embarrassed about. Most people have absolutely no self-awareness.

until you start directing your attention at it. And I can promise you, you probably did not have less self-awareness than I did when I first started out. So if you're looking at your current learning ability and you're like, I actually have no idea what my learning, I don't even know how to rank that.

I don't even know how to think about that. Scoring it out of 10. That's your first step. You have to know where your current ability is.

And actually during that process of figuring it out, it's gonna give you a lot of very targeted ways to improve it. And as you improve on each of those ways, you get closer and closer to becoming the person who can reach the goal. And therefore, you become closer to your goal.

The most underrated activity that you can do to begin with is to observe and reflect. Observe yourself. Be objective, be honest.

What do you do? What type of person do you see yourself as? Reflect on it. And once you know where your current status is, you see that gap for what it is.

I was talking to one of my previous employees the other day and she has ADHD. She's a very high-functioning, super intelligent person but has always struggled with just sitting down and getting through a lot of work. She's in a really good position at a new company.

She's got lots of pressure going on and so she's feeling this struggle. There's so much work she has to do but she struggles with sitting down and really being focused and concentrating. And she's talking about All of these different things that she's sort of struggling with and trying to do. And she's running into that problem. She's setting a goal to try to study this many hours, to work this many hours, to dedicate that much time.

And it's failing every single day. Why is she failing? Because she's not actually addressing the underlying root cause for it, which is her ability to stay focused and to not get distracted.

And for her, I had already told her long ago the things she can do to improve concentration and just to train that ability. Take it from a 3 out of 10. to a five out of 10. And it had never been a priority for her because it wasn't getting more work done. And so you can see the paradox. She's so obsessed about achieving the goal and so motivated to get that work done, but doesn't realize that the real gap is that the person she is right now is not someone who will find it easy to achieve that goal.

And so the best step is to work on these things that get you closer to the person you need to be. And now you don't need all of these other things to help you because it's just easier. So once we've defined our current self, we move on to step four, which is to do a force field analysis.

A force field analysis is a technique where you take your current self, which we've just defined, we look at our goal, which is our meta goal, the future self we want to become. And on a piece of paper, you draw it like this, with this arcing line in between. On one side of this are barriers and obstacles.

What are the things that prevent you from being able to achieve your meta goal? On the other side of this line, We have drivers. What are the things that help us to succeed, can push that through? These may be our existing skills and habits and attributes.

And we also write, what is our network and resources to help us achieve this? And so we're actually mapping out what are the things that we can employ to overcome these barriers? And what are the things we have access to that can help us overcome these barriers to eventually move us along? and achieve this goal. This is a powerful exercise that I recommend that you do every few months anytime you feel like you're not sure exactly how to keep progressing.

This technique is called a force field analysis because we're examining the forces that are keeping you from or pushing you towards your goal. So if I use my example, who was the person that I needed to be in order to achieve my goal of leaving medicine and going full-time into entrepreneurship and education? I realized that my time management would have to be really, really good. My prioritization skills would have to be really, really good.

I would have to have access to opportunities relating to business and certain experiences to make that transition easier. And I realized that my current self was lacking in some of those areas. My time management skills were pretty good, but my prioritization skills weren't so good. I had some experiences in business and I've been doing a lot of learning coaching already, but I'd never really stepped fully into the role of entrepreneurship.

I lacked a lot of those experiences and opportunities that would make that transition easy for me. Later, when I did my force field analysis, I realized that I have a lot of people within my network. I have access to a lot of these resources that can enable me to do this.

And so for around nine to ten months, I started dabbling a little bit more and gaining some of those experiences in business. One of the things that sounds kind of funny for someone that was... wanting to do entrepreneurship full-time is that even though I'd been running a education and learning coaching business for six and a half years at that point, I had never really paid myself from it because most of it was actually done through a non-profit.

Like I'd set up a charity for education. And so I'd never actually paid myself a salary. And so in the last couple of years, I started actually just...

Paying myself a salary and then seeing if I could manage the finances of my business when I was paying myself a living wage. And so this process, what I'm explaining of how I use my insights from this process to create my plan is step five, building your plan. In this final step, we know where we need to get to. We have our goal. We have our meta goal.

We know where we currently stand and we know the things that can push and pull us towards that goal. Now all that's left is to figure out what to start focusing on first as a priority, when to start doing it, and how. If you realize the thing that's lagging behind the most that you think is going to take the longest time for you to fix is your learning skills, then that becomes the what to focus on.

When, let's say, immediately is the best time to start working on it. And then how. Figure that out.

If you don't know how, again, that becomes an obvious next step. Learn about how. You know you need to work on it.

You know it's important. You know it's a priority. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't change the fact that it needs to be worked on. Sometimes the what, when, and how is not what you expect. I worked with a student a number of years ago who was struggling at university and she had lots of things to work on in her learning skills.

No doubt. The gap between where she needed to get and her current self was wide and it was going to be a high priority for her to fill that gap. And so we tried to fill that gap. And then after trying for a few weeks, I realized that she's not very consistent or diligent. I realized that I'm setting her tasks and saying, hey, this is what you need to do to train your skills.

And then a week later, she'd come back and have practiced almost none of it. She was stagnant. After digging a little bit deeper and having some more conversations, I realized that she's actually being terribly abused at home by her parents. That home environment was toxic. And so the priorities changed.

You can't work on learning skills when you don't have that foundation of stability and safety. And so we actually changed the plan completely. The number one priority became how can we support her and get her out of the house?

What was the barrier to that? She didn't have a job. So we figured out what kind of job can we get her to just make enough money to move out of the house because the time spent working a part-time job, yes, it takes away from study, but in the grand scheme of things, it makes so many other things easier that that was going to be the bottleneck that we had to solve.

A month later, she moved out, got a job, moved out, found a place to flat. It wasn't the nicest place, but that was a life-changing move for her. And when she had a little bit more mental space to think about that learning skill stuff again, we jumped on that train again.

A couple of years later, she was thriving. She was doing a master's of health science and it was a challenging road for her, but she was able to make it through that because of understanding what to focus on, when to focus on it, how to focus on it and being flexible, understanding that the thing you think you may need to do to achieve your goal. may not be if you just take a step back and evaluate the situation holistically. In a less extreme example, one thing that I see very, very commonly is that people think that they need to improve their learning skills, but actually, the thing that holds them back the most is actually the fact that they procrastinate all the time, or they're not willing to try something new.

And so you can see that is actually a fundamental blocker. And in this final step where we're building the plan, that will become the what. Working on our experimentation ability, working on our procrastination, and this stuff is what enters into your calendar at the end of the day.

Every day there is something that you know is a high priority for you to develop your skills and your attributes and your processes and your habits and your access to opportunities and resources that you know gets you towards your goal and you schedule that into your day, into your evenings, into your weekends. That becomes your plan. And as you grow as a person, the outcomes you naturally are able to achieve grow with it. Now, there is one thing that I have to mention, which is that changing your skills and your habits is not a quick or easy thing.

It takes time. It takes diligence. It probably takes you longer than you expect it to. And the more things you try to improve at the same time, the harder it gets to improve any of them.

So when you are plotting your timeline, make sure it's a realistic. timeline. Be conservative with how long you think it will take to develop and grow your skills, especially if they're habits that you have had for years.

It's going to take a little bit of time to change that. For me, transitioning away from medicine during that period of time, I would only focus on one, maybe two things on any given month. And even though I knew there were 10 other things to work on, I deliberately stopped myself from working on it to make sure I gave myself the best chance of success. And after that...

roughly a year, 10, 9, 10 months, I was able to transition out of medicine relatively smoothly. And the thing is, all these, like all my friends, people that I went to uni with, started messaging me saying, hey, Justin, how did you do that? Like, I've also been thinking about quitting being a doctor or quitting being a pharmacist.

You're so, this is what they said, is that they said, you're so lucky that you had that business to fall back on. And If that's what luck is, then it seems to be a lot more controllable than you think. So this is reverse goal setting, and if you've never set goals like this before, then it's very different. But if you've struggled with normal goal setting before, then you owe it to yourself to at least give this a chance.

And I will say this, I now almost never use normal goal setting for anything anymore. If it's important and complicated enough for me to go through and set a goal, I use reverse goal setting. I hope this helps.

Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.

Transcript for:Understanding Reverse Goal Setting Techniques

Transcript for:
Understanding Reverse Goal Setting Techniques