5 steps to get what you want

Alice, a busy magazine executive I know, recently decided to learn to play the guitar. "At first I got hung up on the fact that I don't have seven hours a week to devote to practice," she explained, "and would therefore never be as great as I wanted to be. But I decided not to worry about that and decided to take weekly one-hour lesson for six months and practice fifteen minutes a day. I'm really enjoying it!"

Alice understands intuitively the best thing I ever learned about helping individuals and organizations change: you must create goals that are that are Smart: Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Without these five elements, success can be very elusive.

1. Be specific
Specific refers to choosing something that you can pin down. "Learning the guitar" is specific; you know what you need to do to. "Becoming a better person" is not. What do you mean by that? How will you know if you've done it? When we create a vague goal, we set ourselves up for failure. Because we're never quite sure when we've crossed the finish line. So be sure to create something as specific as possible -- for instance, "Learn how to say no" rather than "get better boundaries" or "Take one weekend day every month to myself" rather than "make time for myself."

2. Ensure your goal can be measured
Measurable means just that -- capable of being measured. People come to me all the time wanting "more": "more patience," "more time with my kids," "more happiness." I always say in response, "as measured by what?" Measurement is crucial because it makes our progress visible to us. Without it, it's easy to feel like you haven't gotten anywhere or to exaggerate in your own mind how far you've come. If your goal is to stop smoking, or lose twenty pounds, that's easy to measure. But it is possible to create a measurement for anything. I've just worked with a client to create a measure for finding a new relationship. He's going to track the number of conversations with new women per week.

In thinking about measurement, it helps to understand that it can be external (pounds, dollars, days, lower blood pressure, etc.) or internal (a sense of inner ease or peace, greater energy or excitement). The numbers for the first category are obvious. When you're measuring something internal, you need to put it on a scale, for instance -5 to +5, with -5 being the worst you ever felt and +5 being the best.

Let me give you an example. Imagine that you want to be able to be more tolerant of your in-laws. First you'd notice what your exasperation number is right now, before you learn anything new. Maybe it's a lot, say -4. You decide that your measure of success will be getting that number to a +3, feeling much more calm in your body. That way you'll know when you can declare success -- when you've gotten to +3 when around your in-laws.

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Excerpted from This Year I Will... by M.J. Ryan. Copyright 2006 by M.J. Ryan. Excerpted by permission of Broadway. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.