How To Set Short-Term Career Goals That Are Future Focused
Climb Mount Everest. Create the next hot start-up. Help build peace and end racial inequality. These are some of the most aspirational and exciting long-term goals someone can dream up. They keep you believing in your highest potential. And whenever someone asks you where you see yourself in five or ten years, any one of these is a spectacular answer.
But how do these goals come into play in your day-to-day life?
The truth is, long-term goals are thrilling, but the short-term goals and everyday initiatives necessary to accomplish them are not. Long-term goals live in a distant future where you've already done the work, and short-term goals exist in your current circumstances.
However, if you can learn how to use short-term goals effectively, you can accomplish anything.
12 Ways To Set Future Focused Short-Term Career Goals
The old saying about how you eat an elephant wasn't intended for goal-setting, but it applies very well. You don't eat an elephant whole. You eat an elephant one bite at a time. In this case, the elephant is a big, hairy, audacious goal like moving to France to work at your dream startup. It's thrilling, and it inspires you.
That huge goal consists of a lot of little bites. You need to get hired at that company and find an affordable place to live. You need to continue to work at a job that you're not crazy about while you go through the application process. You need to brush up on your French and go through the long logistical red tape of securing a visa.
All of these little short-term goals are critical to achieving your dreams, and with our tips, you can learn how to use them to go after what you want.
1. Create An Inspired Vision
Before you can set short-term goals, you need to get a sense of your vivid vision. The vivid vision is an overarching view of what you aspire to accomplish in your life. You want to document this vision and use it to guide your thinking when mapping out short-term and long-term career goals.
You can create your vision with a few creative steps, such as:
Creating A Mind Map - A mind map starts with one central idea or vision. From that one vision, you create branches with more specific, actionable steps.
Journal - If you need more time to think, journaling can be a great way to capture raw ideas and emotions.
Tell Your Story - Find a quiet space and record yourself talking. Record how, in an ideal scenario, your life would go from here.
Vision Board - Cut out pictures from magazines, collect clippings, or grab some markers and make a vision board with words, phrases, quotes, and images that represent what you’re trying to do.
As a best practice, your first vivid vision should be a three-year outlook.
2. Identify Your BHAG
Before you can identify your short-term goals, you need to look at the bigger picture. After you have your vivid vision in mind, look for patterns and clues that point to an interest that inspires you. This particular interest, which can range from building an incredible startup to becoming a doctor can unleash your BHAG, or big, hairy, audacious goal.
Your BHAG will be the North Star of your vivid vision. Once you have that BHAG, work backward to where you are now. What significant things will you need to accomplish? Do you want to get a promotion? Do you want to reach the C-Suite?
If you can identify these greater objectives, they can help you determine your short-term goals, which will get you incrementally closer to your bigger goal.
3. Take Your Personal Pulse
Your personal pulse is your current progress, as it relates to your BHAG or future goals. You want to be honest about where you are at and how long it will take you to accomplish your objectives. For example, if you're going to run a marathon in three months, but you can’t run a mile without getting winded, you may need to start training sooner or attend a different event.
You want to create a personal pulse for each goal and get very specific about how you intend to grow. For the running example, determine how often you run now and how long you run. An example of the right baseline is that you run twice a week for two miles within 20 minutes each.
From there, you can map out how much more you will need to run and slowly expand the distance over a period.
The process is the same for career-oriented goals. If you want a promotion, how many levels away are you? What are the qualifications or skill sets that people with that job typically have? Out of those qualifications, how many do you currently have? What will it take to obtain the ones you don't have yet?
These insights can help you set more realistic short-term goals for more long-term success. Jennifer Wong from HasOffers puts it this way:
“Goals created from thin air are probably not very realistic and won’t set you up for success. Goals developed from baseline metrics will help you set a more realistic expectation.”
4. Embrace The Challenge
A lot of people say they want to be a CEO or reach the C-Suite. But are you willing to make sacrifices to achieve those goals? In the short-term, this type of success may require 60-80 hour work weeks, late nights, and time spent away from family and friends. At the moment, you need to embrace the pain and use it to fuel you towards success.
When you embrace the challenge, you take on a Warrior Ethos. The Warrior Ethos is accepting that pain is part of the journey. When you feel that pain, that means that you're moving forward towards accomplishing your mission. It's your job to continue taking those steps, despite any discomfort, to get the conclusion you want.
Author Mark Manson points out that often, it's more beneficial to decide what kind of pain or sacrifice you're willing to put up with to reach your goals.
“If I ask you, ‘What do you want out of life?’ and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.”
“A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.”
5. Create A Narrative
When you're in the middle of a workout or working through the weekend, it's easy to fixate on the pain you're experiencing. However, if you develop go-to narratives and stories to help you through these rough patches, you'll keep the right perspective. You can remind yourself of how your actions and behaviors are leading you to accomplish your major umbrella goals.
For instance, after you’ve knocked off all of these short-term goals, what next? Will you be working side-by-side with Mark Cuban? Will you be on The New York Times Best Seller list? When it comes to developing these motivational narratives, the sky is the limit.
When you get stuck at work, imagine having a conversation with Oprah about your success. When you want to watch another episode of Narcos instead of getting started on your next project, imagine yourself giving a TEDTalk. If you can create these future narratives, you can use them through difficult times to remind yourself where you're going.
6. Find A Way To Track and Measure Results
At work, you wouldn't start a project or run a report without a way to accurately plan, measure, and track your success. It’s the same for career goals. You want a method to document your progress. That way, you can keep track of when you hit milestones and remember your wins.
The result is a feedback loop of wins that will significantly increase your chances of success. You can use a spreadsheet in Google Drive or apps like Momentum to keep track of how well you’re doing. If you prefer writing things by hand, you can also use a gratitude journal.
With a gratitude journal, you can record what you're thankful for and good at, to help combat any negative self-talk like "I'm not doing well enough," or "I'm not capable of meeting my goals."
When you monitor what you have accomplished, you can maintain your confidence and keep the momentum going.
7. Work With A Mentor (And Let Them Guide You)
To succeed, you need support. When you keep your goals to yourself, there is no one to hold you accountable. You can easily slip up, get busy, or forget what you're trying to accomplish. When you have someone by your side, they can guide you and help you see your blind spots.
However, if you want to work with a mentor, you need to let them help you. You can't expect them to babysit you or do the work for you. Ryan Holiday, a self-help author, warns that a mentor can only bring you so far.
“This mentor is not now solely responsible for your education, well-being or success. You better be out there reading, experimenting and connecting with other people–so you can bring that perspective to your mentor and bounce it off them and learn how to make use of it.”
“The mentor cannot want this for you more than you want this for yourself. You better show up every day hungry and dedicated and eager to learn.”
8. Find Your Rhythm
Balancing your goals with day-to-day responsibilities can be overwhelming. In any given day, you can work for eight hours, take care of your family, commute to and from work and still not find any time for yourself. And when you do have time, many short-term goals don't seem as exciting or important as your long-term objectives; it's easy to prioritize other things over them.
If you're having difficulty sticking to your short-term goals, look at how you typically accomplish things and use it to your advantage. For instance, if you tend to work in sprints at work, replicate that for your short-term goals.
If you loved staying up late writing papers in college, for example, consider using that procrastination to your benefit. You can use it to push through short-term goals in a limited period.
9. Build Up Momentum
When you're working towards short-term goals, it's similar to paying off a large debt. You take small actions that build up to a greater goal. Dave Ramsey, the author of “The Money Game,” has a great hack for paying off debt that utilizes momentum to get to the goalpost sooner.
It's called the debt snowball, which focuses on paying the smallest debts first. Eventually, you will make your way to more substantial sums.
That way, you build up steam and show yourself that you're capable of moving forward. And this mindset can also apply to your career goals. Take all of your bigger goals and the smaller action items beneath them, then rank them from the easiest to the most difficult.
You can start knocking them off in a way that gives you the most energy and motivation. As a result, you will direct your energy towards success.
“A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.”
10. Schedule Time For Your Goals (And Keep Going)
In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it's easy to distract yourself with time-wasting activities. Before long, you realize you haven't made enough progress on your goals, and you throw in the towel. If you want to accomplish the initiatives that you're setting, you need to book time with yourself.
For at least an hour each day, you need to reserve time to work on your short-term goals. The hour a day formula guides you to treat appointments as seriously as a client meeting or a checkup with your doctor.
Anticipate distractions and disruptions - that’s life. If you let circumstances guide you away from accomplishing what you want, you will never be successful.
As Tim Ferriss, the best-selling author of The Four-Hour Work Week says, the timing of your goals will never seem to line up.
“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align, and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either.”
“Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually,’ just do it and correct course along the way.”
11. Identify Your Roadblocks
You know yourself better than anyone else. What prevents you from reaching a goal? Is it laziness? Do you have too much difficulty finding the time? Do you sit down and binge Netflix shows for hours at a time? If you can figure out who (and what) is standing in the way of success, you can make a plan to work through or around those challenges.
Otherwise, you won't break your bad habits. You won't move forward. If you want to accomplish things in the long-term, you need to do everything you can to make sure you're always progressing. Like Tony Robbins, self-help guru, says, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
12. Get Visual
Out of sight, out of mind. You don't want this to happen with your short-term goals. To keep your goals front-of-mind, keep a visual representation of your objectives somewhere you can always see it. You can write lists on a whiteboard or corkboard, keep motivational material on your desk, or even make a poster to have at home.
If you like crafts, create a vision board. Print out your goals and tape them up in your bedroom, bathroom, living room, and office. Do whatever you need to do to see your goals visually. Make it so you cannot avoid them.
Identifying Your Short-Term Goals
When you put the work in, you can use short-term goals to move you towards success. However, if you're feeling doubts about the long-term goals and initiatives you have in place now, you may need to step back and gain more perspective and clarity about what you want.
That's why we offer the Career Clarity Assessment. The assessment only takes five to ten minutes to complete and provides a fulfillment score to help you understand how you should move forward. From there, you can determine the next best steps for your career.
