GAP Goals: A More Mindful Approach to Goal-Setting
Embarking on a journey towards a more mindful approach to goal-setting? Discover the transformative power of GAP goals. Unearth the potential of this strategy to enhance focus, foster growth, and ultimately, lead to the achievement of your most ambitious aspirations.
The point of a goal is to create and sustain a lifetime-change
The outcome isn’t the most important aspect of goals, progress is.
- It doesn’t matter whether or not you achieve your outcome; what matters is that you grow and expand in the process of working toward your goals.
Goals: The Three Pillars
Growth by Consistency: Growth happens through a series of small and consistent incremental steps
- Awareness by Metacognition: Attention to your outputs
- Progress by Tracking: Log your inputs and output to stay aware of your output and reflect on whether you are implementing the most effective strategies
Outcomes Become Milestones to Celebrate
What was once an outcome now becomes a milestone you will celebrate.
- For example, if your goal was to reach 10,000 followers on Medium, your new goal should be “I will write 2 hours per day and publish 5 articles per week.”
- You can’t control how many people follow you, but you can control the number of articles you publish, which will expose you to more readers on the platform.
The Traditional Approach: Outcome-Based Goals
The traditional approach to goal setting is measured by one thing: the outcome.
- This goal-setting approach is problematic for three reasons: It attaches our self-worth to the outcome of our goal
- It cultivates a harmful “if-then” happiness contingency-mindset that removes you from the present and fixates you onto a time in the future.
- It provides no system for measuring progress as you work toward your goal, thus falsely packaging the outcome as the sole measurement of progress
Focus on Progress to Create Lifetime Change
The point of a goal is to create and sustain a lifetime-change
- We don’t grow and expand the moment we reach the result, we grow in the process of working toward the result we want
- This mindful approach puts growth, awareness, and progress at the core of goal setting
- Turn the outcome into a milestone to celebrate rather than a futuristic point in time to arrive to
A More Mindful Approach: GAP (Input-Output) Goals
Mindfulness is nothing more than a mental state achieved by focusing our attention on the present moment
- When we move from an outcome-based approach to an input-output one, we create a distinction between the input of our actions and the outcome of the results
- The future outcome is something we can influence only through our present actions