From Goals To Taking Action
On how to take big, hairy, audacious goals and turn them into actions you can do.
This month we’ve been talking about getting focused and uncovering your values and what you prioritize before working towards the same arbitrary New Year's Resolutions as everyone else.
The clarity of knowing your starting point and understanding why you are there, to begin with, will take you further than you thought possible with your goals.
There is one habit that lives at the root of all continuous personal growth: being able to take big goals and break them down into the next actions to work on.
Everyone has dream goals and bigger things that they aspire to. Personal growth is essential to continue to experience meaning and fulfillment. The problem is that we aren’t all that great at breaking down the goals we dream about into manageable chunks to see them through to completion.
That’s where the GSPA Framework comes in.
Making this practice into a habit comes from repeatedly doing it for each new goal you set for yourself. You want to repeat it until your brain automatically thinks about doing this when you have a new goal you’ve set.
It looks like this and helps to do it visually for yourself as well.
Goals
Identify the big goal you have and write it down on paper or start a note in whatever app you like.
If the goal is long-term and going to take more than 3 months, try to break it down into separate smaller goals that will last roughly 3 months.
This can almost always be done. If you can’t figure out how, recruit a friend to help you brainstorm, or comment on this newsletter and we’ll start a discussion.
Skills
Our goals are formed in many ways from a desire for personal growth, so they are made up of skills you will need as you become the type of person who can accomplish the goal you identified.
This is the next level down from the goal to identify. In what ways will you need to become more competent to accomplish your goal?
Practice
Next comes practices. Practices are the habits and routines that allow you to call yourself skilled at anything you do. To get a little bit meta, this process we’re doing of breaking down goals is a practice and by doing it you are becoming more skilled at goal setting.
Figure out which practices are relevant to what you are working on for personal growth. For me, the habits and routines that contribute to continual growth are mostly related to physical and mental health. This is a good starting list for practices you might want to pick from in your journey.
regular exercise,
getting outside to walk,
doing mentally hard things (cold plunges, long sauna sessions, deep work)
training focus with meditation,
regulating emotions,
becoming better at having hard conversations,
eating well to fuel myself.
Action
The final step is to turn those practices into actions that you do daily. And only do one at a time. Doing one thing at a time is important here because people fail at this whole process mostly by trying to form too many new habits all at once. Pick one thing you can do daily that builds into a practice and stick with it.
How long it takes to become automatic depends but monitor and evaluate how it’s going each week until you feel confident you can add on another action for the same practice or a different practice that contributes to a skill you are building.
This is the process that if everyone followed down to choosing simple actions that may seem ridiculously easy but contribute to practices that develop new skills will snowball into continual personal growth and accomplishing big goals.
When you look at the exceptionally creative work of Masters, you must not ignore the years of practice, the endless routines, the hours of doubt, and the tenacious overcoming of obstacles these people endured. - Robert Greene, The Daily Laws
Take Action
Complete this framework right away for a goal that you currently have. Bonus points if it’s one that you envisioned after the destination postcard activity in last week’s newsletter.
Download this GSPA coaching handout for a fillable form version of the framework to help you out.
Supporting Books / Products I Use
Flow Coach App - helps me stay accountable and stick to working on one action at a time.
TickTick - My favourite task manager app that also has a great habit-tracking feature built in.
Reclaim.Ai - Uses AI to figure out the best time blocks in your calendar to work on your one action.