What do you mean by Big Goals or Stretch Goals?

Stretch Goals or what I refer to simply as Big Goals are the ones that push you out of your comfort zone and make you work harder to get there.

You have to really stretch to reach them.

Sometimes our choice of word gets in our own way. Have you ever noticed that?

For me this year it has been the word “Big”. This might have been my “Big”gest mistake.

When I launched the Goal Evolution Group at the end of 2013. I wanted to make it appear “Big”, exciting, challenging.

And I learned an important lesson recently when a member left the group feeling her goals were not significant enough, that others had bigger or more significant goals than her.

Again this was my mistake not hers. Because, I did not spend enough time stressing that Maintenance Goals can be just as important, often times even more significant than a new goal.

What is a Maintenance Goal? Why is it different from a Stretch Goal?

Maintenance Goals  are goals you set so you keep doing what you are doing because it is good for you and it is working.

An example of one would be to exercise 5 days out of 7, another could be to meditate once a week. Another could be to keep making RRSP contributions or keep saving for a child’s education. Or, publish this newsletter every week, one of my favorites.

Maintenance Goals are there to keep you doing what you know you must be doing to keep your life in balance, and not let it slip back to a should be doing.

These goals often produce the “Big”gest positive results over a long period of time, because they are the accumulation of many little actions.

A mistake that can be made is to set a new goal that causes you to sacrifice one of your maintenance goals to achieve it. You may achieve that new goal, but find your life further out of balance when you get there.

In this persons case a maintenance goal is a big goal or a stretch goal because of her unique situation, in my case getting the newsletter out every week consistently is a big goal, because it would be easy to not do it.

That’s what makes it “Big”, the fact that it would be easy not to exercise, meditate, write, save a little bit, etc. and comfortable not doing it; until it catches up to you again.

So the “Big” lesson I learned from this is to stress that all of the goals are significant, new ones, long term (5-10 year), maintenance, some are just better enablers of others.

Setting stretch goals is a good way to make yourself uncomfortable if you are feeling comfortable, the key is to have them work together and bring you further into balance instead of pulling you further out of balance. That is “Big”.

Check out the goal setting worksheets and programs available from Goal Evolution Group.