The Role of Learning and Behavior Goals in Your Journey to Success
Posted on May 26, 2015 by Bonnie Marano, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
Setting learning and behavior goals can strengthen your ability to excel at your performance goals. Originally posted at BASEcoaching.net.
When you think about your goals, what comes to mind? For most people, the answer is often a list comprised exclusively of their performance goals. These are the ultimate end results we expect to achieve. The things that can clearly be demonstrated to other people, and the standards by which many of us measure whether or not we consider ourselves successful.
If we are to achieve our performance goals, however, it can be extremely beneficial for us to focus on more than just our end results. Broadening your perspective to also include learning and behavior goals can actually strengthen your ability to excel at your performance goals. This approach to goal setting allows you to recognize the achievement of all of your successes, big and small, and keeps you motivated and confident in your progress as you work toward your long-term goals.
Learning goals acknowledge all of things you will know and be able to do as a result of working toward your performance goals. If, for example, your performance goal is to own your own business, you might have learning goals that include “advance my knowledge and understanding of specific business processes” or “develop the habits and personality traits of a successful entrepreneur”. All of these pieces are important to helping you achieve your more comprehensive, long-term goal, and celebrating the knowledge, skills, and experience you are gaining along the way can inspire you to keep working toward your ultimate end goal. Learning goals help you look at the big picture and consider your life as a whole. From this perspective, you can appreciate the benefits of your efforts more broadly.
Learning goals can also help you gauge your readiness to fully excel at your performance goals. There are times when our work on our performance goals can actually backfire if we are overexerting ourselves. Learning goals can help cushion us from this burnout by ensuring we aren’t putting the cart before the horse. They help us focus on our overall development rather than pushing ourselves too far all at once or cutting corners just to get to a specific endpoint. Through our learning goals, we can appreciate that achieving a performance goal is a process with many parts, each of which can be connected to other things in life. By taking each experience for all it has to offer, you begin to realize that you might be achieving more than you think.
Another useful way to break down your performance goals is to set behavior goals. These are the smaller transitional goals that you can measure as you progress toward your more extensive long-term goal. Behavior goals are designed to continue to propel you toward your long-term goal by providing positive reinforcement for your smaller achievements over time.
Think of all of the New Year’s resolutions that are given up on before January is even over. Often this happens because we can become overwhelmed by focusing exclusively on a single end goal, which can seem distant and unattainable. Success is far more likely when performance goals can be broken down into smaller, more achievable components that facilitate evaluation of progress and reinforcement of success on a regular basis. When broader goals are broken down into a sequence of behavior goals, you will naturally want to keep working toward your end goal because you are getting a taste of success at every step along the way.
Consider how setting a general performance goal such as “lose weight” can often feel totally overwhelming. You will be much more likely to succeed if you first consider the specific behaviors you need to change to ultimately be able to achieve this goal. Think about these behaviors in explicit, quantifiable terms. It is not enough to say you will “exercise” and “eat healthier”. It is far more effective to aim to “go to the gym three times a week” or “consume under 2000 calories a day” until your target weight is reached.
Remember that most of us will not stay on course 100% of the time. There will be moments when you cheat on your diet, forget a homework assignment, or neglect to return a phone call from a potential client. These little slips do not have to derail you entirely from achieving your goal. If you’ve been using your learning and behavior goals to plan your course and celebrate your more modest successes along the way, it will be easier for you to accept that a small misstep does not have to equal failure, and you can get yourself right back on track.
When working on your goals you must be patient and invest your resources wisely. Picking up new skills and knowledge requires time and effort. It may take a while to see progress, and permanent changes take time, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t achieving success. Supplementing your performance goals with learning and behavior goals can help remind you of this and will ultimately strengthen your capacity to excel. Remember that success is a journey, not a destination, so make sure you are appreciating the ride!
