Reverse Engineer Your Dream Life: A Goal-Setting Blueprint.

A Goal Setting Approach that works

Are you tired of feeling slightly hopeless about the future? You have high ambitions for the life you’d like to live but can’t quite get a plan together for making those steps? Whether it is your career, personal finances, weight loss or school work. You don’t know the steps to be taken prior to achieving your goals and feel slightly stuck

The two-prong approach for goal setting that works everytime.

You know what you want from yourself, life moves at lightning speed and before you know it. Years have passed and you haven’t gotten around to doing all the things you said you would do. You know you are perfectly capable of achieving your goals but can’t quite get it right, finding yourself in a repetitive cycle and feeling more disheartened the longer time goes on. Sometimes you feel stagnant in life and lack a plan so you attempt goal-setting as it promises you that much-needed change and achievement, each new year you give it another go setting your SMART goals but can’t quite execute.

How do we set SMART goals effectively? How do we make goal-setting work for our individual circumstances?

The answer is Reverse Engineering. In Short, reverse engineering is the process of breaking down a finished product to see how it works. Why is this helpful for goal setting? For goal setting it is particularly powerful because it can allow you to identify the activities you need to complete in order to complete the overall goal.It is quite a powerful method for goal setting as it allows you to build an engineering mindset, which is repeatable in many areas of life, particularly problem-solving.It is applicable to jobs, business, fitness, finances and many other goal types. Reverse engineering adds an additional layer to the traditional goal-setting methodologies you’re probably familiar with. This article will untangle the minefield that is the goal-setting industry and give you actionable steps to achieve your SMART goals.

Get Personal

The main stumbling block in goal setting is that we often look towards other people and try to replicate their methods of success. Whilst their methods may be effective, it is leaving out a crucial part. Where you are starting. I will illustrate the importance of this by sharing my own career-switching journey. When pivoting into the cybersecurity industry from the banking industry, I chose to be strategic when entering the industry by evaluating my current skillset and knowledge base. I lacked the foundational knowledge that many incoming cyber security analysts had but I had risk management that I could leverage as a transferable skill, that incoming analysts probably didn’t have. Note how if I disregarded my personal circumstances and blindly followed advice found online I would have lost out considerably and spent more time (and probably lost motivation along the way).

This leads me to the following set of questions:

The purpose of these questions is to get an understanding of what your goals mean to you, your time scales and most importantly your blockers. When looking at your blockers, visualise them as obstacles to be jumped rather than things that prevent you from achieving your goal at all.

For example, for me, a key blocker was my lack of networking or computer knowledge since I had not held an IT Helpdesk position for 3–5 years. I had a number of different options for overcoming this, getting a helpdesk position for 3–5 years or choosing the self-study route which had a steeper learning curve but could be achieved in a shorter period of time.

Identify Tasks that lead to Goal achievement

Now that you’re clear on what your goals are and you have personalised them to your personal circumstances, you’re now in a position to create a plan for achieving your goals with extra tasks included to counteract your blockers identified.

It’s super simple, you do not need any fancy journals or equipment as such. Simply a pen and paper or anything you want to capture the next step. Create a table with two columns, on the left overall goals and on the right tasks, it can be as many or as few as you like. But the point is to list the goals and then the mini-tasks that need to be completed to enable you to reach your goal. At this point, you can start applying advanced techniques like SMART Goal setting to add some specificity and timescales, they are not necessary but might give you the extra push you need to start executing.

See below for examples of Goals with tasks listed:

Move from a banking job role to cyber security role

• Speak to recruiters to understand the type of roles available in the market

• Enroll for an online course on computer networking

• Review CV to identify transferable skills

This process is designed to allow you to get clarity on your goals and put you back in the driver’s seat of your life, re-attempt goal setting, taking particular attention to your personal circumstances and break it down into manageable chunks. You’ve got this!