When I think of a goal, I always tend to think of the ball first. In sports, the goal really doesn’t matter until you have the ball. I remember when I played basketball in grade school, my coach would always say, “a good offense is a good defense.” While that may be true, something else that is true is that you can’t win a game if you don’t make a few goals.

But having the ball can be overwhelming. I remember the first time I saw a football field; I was amazed by how big it was. I remember also walking by the field goal and thinking, “how could someone miss that.” Funny how goals can look so easy up-close, but the farther we get, the more intimidated we feel. Thinking of the goal when you are far away can be very overwhelming, especially when thinking about all the things required: skills, time, effort, opportunity, luck, timing, and so on. So how do you not get overwhelmed and stay focused on the goal?

There are two ways to reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed while increasing your progress with one or many goals.

1. Keep your eye on the ball. This is helpful when you need to get the ball. Sometimes this means learning new skills, delegating, or being patient
2. Keep your eye on the goal. This is helpful when you have the ball. Have you ever thrown a baseball when looking at someone not intended to receive it. Or what about driving. People tend to drift when not focused with eyes ahead.
3. There actually are 3 things and that is knowing when to use either of these methods. We tend to be focused on the goal so much that we forget we don’t even have the ball, and vis-a-versa.

It is now March and like many of you reading this, I have many goals this year. Whether professional or personal, Tony Robbins said it best, that we greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, but greatly underestimate what we can do in a decade. I love this quote because it made me take a different perspective to setting goals each year. Now at the start of each year, I create a theme. This theme is typically one word that drives everything I do that year. In previous years I have used the words Grateful, Independence, and Growth.

Here is a list of words that can help you get started with the same.

When you begin to theme your year, your goals begin to take on a different meaning; they almost begin to mold around the same idea and start to become a little fuzzy, almost like you can’t tell them apart. This can be a good thing, but it also can cause confusion around prioritization. To combat this you can use goal stacking.

Goal Stack Planning is a planning algorithm that is designed to handle problems having compound goals. This is used in A.I., but can be a great method to how we approach goals. This represents how things are, not how we think they are. We look at what we need to do as if they are steps when in reality, there are no steps. We are so worried about creating a sense of order that we fail to realize that it is the people who created chaos that become the most successful.

Here are a few questions that will help you determine what you can do to be more efficient when taking actions toward multiple goals.

1. What could you combine, in your day-to-day, that would allow you to accomplish similar goals with the same amount of effort?
2. What things are you doing that are causing you to take additional steps?
3. If you were to place all of your goals into different buckets, what goals would be left out?

Here are some tips to remember.:

• You can’t score if you don’t have the ball.
• You don’t have to have the ball to make a move.

Goal stacking allows you to think strategically on how to optimize for time and performance. If you can align your goals in such a way that you can build momentum as you complete each new goal, while also not losing any traction when one is not completed, you can reduce the amount of time and effort needed.

If you would like to continue the conversation about how to apply this concept in your business or life, please reach out. I would love to connect.

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