Inverted Goals

 

"An inverted goal is essentially the goal that leads to the final predetermined outcome that you want to accomplish.” ~ Hal Elrod

Today is the last Friday of January. Contrary to previous experience, this January has flown way faster than expected and out of 365 days, you now have 27 less days to work on your goals. Are they set already? Are you working on them yet? First quarter is one third gone!

As the first month comes to an end, not only am I putting in place systems and habits to ensure I become the person who achieves the goals I have set for myself, but I am also re-calibrating and redefining my goals. Listening to Hal Elrod’s podcast episode 409, I learnt about Inverted Goals and I think you’ll enjoy one more trip to your goal list.

My dictionary defines ‘to invert’ as to turn upside down or to reverse the order of something. Hal defines inverted goals as those that focus on a predetermined process as opposed to focusing on a predetermined outcome. This goes contrary to how most of us to set goals. For example, an ordinary fitness goal might be to lose 15 Kilos in 3 months. Drilled down that might look like losing 5 kilos every month by running X Kms, Y times a week. However, if at the end of the 3 months you have only lost 4 kilos. . . failure stares at you as your outcome.

And that is why Hal has a different method of calibrating his goals. Using the inverted method, he chooses to focus on the habits, rituals and routines that he must perform in order to become the person that can achieve the goal of losing 15 kilos in 3 months. The goal above can now be inverted to ‘to run 5Km 5 days a week; to eat my meals in an 8-hour window daily; to fast for 24-hours every week. Those are 3 habits/routines/rituals that I must now develop and perform in a measurable time frame and on a consistent basis in order to set myself up to achieve the goal of losing 15 kilos in 3 months.

On a daily basis, I can measure my progress based on whether I ran today and or fasted for 16 hours. At the end of the week, did I log in 5 runs of 5Km each and fast one 24-hour session? This keeps me constantly evaluating my actions towards my goal achievement as opposed to dreading that day when I will step on the scale and look with one eye at where the needle rests. It also allows me to use the 7^th day in my week to rest, repair and celebrate my authentic showing up or to evaluate why I failed (if I did, and what corrective action I need to take if any.)

A huge benefit of this goal setting system is that it builds strong habits. Chief among them is the habit of showing up to what you profess to be important to you. If at the end of 3 months I will only have lost 8Kg with the above strategy, I will have run 325Km and fasted approximately 1,352 hours. Those are in themselves massive achievements that will allow me to not only celebrate them, but use the achievement to evaluate what additional action I need to take to achieve the remaining weight loss. Overall, it’s a win-win strategy that allows me to evolve both my actions as well as my goals on the go.

So I went back to my goals and looked at them with fresh eyes and a wad of sticky notes. What was previously ‘to read 2 books a month’ evolved to ‘show up for reading hour at 5-6am every morning.’ And that is how my alarm-snoozing habit is being killed every morning now – I have a date to keep and I cannot snooze anymore!

I end today with a quote from James Clear in Atomic Habits where he writes: “People often think it’s weird to get hyped about reading one page or meditating for one minute or making one sales call. But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.”