Goals and Goal-Setting

But today, also something you'll notice is that I I haven't, there's no sort of intro or anything. And that's because I I forgot my external hard drive as well, so it's it's a bit of a mess basically. But today I I'm gonna do something differently and something that I wanted to do for a while for the podcast. So I'm actually gonna read to you a post that I've written about goals and goal setting. And this post hasn't been published yet, so it's sort of a, you know, a sneak peek. And it's very timely, of course, because it's New Year's, everyone's setting goals and resolutions. And an important thing about language learning is that you have clear and and and and specific goals. I'm going to talk much more about that in a second.

So this new format of me reading some of the blog posts, some of the really popular blog posts, is something that I'm I've been thinking about doing for a while because I think that some of the older blog posts that I've written, some of the big ones where I've really taken a lot of time and effort to write some, in my opinion, really good content, of course. You you may disagree on that. But I would really like to sort of revive that in an audio format and maybe add it as a as a bonus. So just read some of the the great posts and put it out for you guys.

I'm not entirely sure whether it should be on the main channel, so the Actual Fluency Podcast will also get the audio blog entries, or if I should just create a new podcast, so to speak, called Actual Fluency Audio Blog, where you can then read or actually listen to the posts. I'm very interested in your opinion on that, so if you go to actualfluency.com/42, which is this episode, I'd be happy to read your comments in the comments box about whether I should include audio blog entries in the main podcast or make a new podcast for it.

And that's sort of it. I just wanted to, you know, wish you a a Merry a very happy New Year and Merry Christmas. If you celebrate Christmas and New Year, of course. The interesting part about this uh language learning community is that we're all over the world, and of course there are different cultural traditions. And um, it's it's cool to be sort of outside your own culture once in a while. You know, I was telling people Merry Christmas, and of course if you're in the country then you're pretty safe to say that. But you know, if I was sending out an email saying Merry Christmas, I was suddenly thinking, well, not everybody celebrates Christmas in the way that I do. So that's another cool part about being in the multilingual, multicultural world. And something that I appreciate a lot.

But anyway, without too much too much stalling, I I'd like to, you know, present my my post about goals and goal setting. And it's the the way I've done it is sort of distilled the wisdom about goal setting that I have learned in 2014, because I used to be absolutely terrible at goal setting. And I've studied it a lot this year, I've studied a lot of the great people who talk about goal setting, and you know, at the, if you go to actualfluency.com/42, I'm also going to give some resources to people you can you can study for uh goal setting. But one of the biggest influences I've seen is Michael Hyatt, who's who's really been talking about goals a lot. He also did it last year. He was interviewed on a lot of podcasts about goal setting, and he's done the same this year, and he he's even done a course that I was thinking about for a second about taking, but I I chose not to. But I would have if if I had unlimited funds.

But anyway, that's that's basically the premise of this post. And the premise is about goal setting and how it it pertains to language learning and how you can do it in the right way, because most people do it the incorrect way like I used to do.

Um, just a final thing before I get into the goal setting post, I just wanted to take, you know, a quick moment to reflect on on year 2014 for the podcast itself. It's been an absolutely incredible ride and, you know, coming up to about 50 episodes. And I have something special planned for that episode. It's it's just been incredible, and I just want to thank you for your support. And here's to 50 more, right? So um, 42 episodes in, more than 32,000 downloads, and it's something that I'm extremely proud of.

And something that makes me even more happy is when people send me emails saying they listen and like the show. And also, I'm very happy for people who take the time to write reviews on iTunes, rating or even sharing the show with their friends. And it's just it means the world to me and I'm I'm so grateful for it. And you know, Christmas and New Year for at least in in here in Denmark is a time of, I think, being grateful for for the things that you have in your life that enriches you. And you guys are definitely enriching my life, so I want to thank you for that.

And and uh see you in 2015, you know, it can only it can only get better. I'm going to keep providing great interviews with language learners and, you know, great these thematic episodes as well that talk about specific problems or ideas that you might have in language learning. Um, so stay tuned in 2015, I'm sure it's going to be an amazing year.

All right. Today's topic, uh goal setting. Goal setting is one of the easiest ways to accelerate growth in any field. I've heard it myself from several sources, but allow me to share this particular study with you. There was a fascinating study conducted on the 1979 Harvard MBA program, where graduate students were asked, have you set clear written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them? The result, only 3% had written goals and plans. 13% had goals, but they weren't in writing. And 80% had no goals at all. 10 years later, the same group was interviewed again, and the result was absolutely mind-blowing. The 13% of the class who had goals, but did not write them down, were earning twice the amount of the 84% who had no goals. The 3% who had written goals were earning on average 10 times as much as the other 97% of the class combined. Now, of course, this is a somewhat limited sample, but the statistics are usually quite universal. Only 3% of people have clear written down goal goals. That's ridiculously low.

What I've done about goal setting is that just writing them down, preferably by hand, and reviewing them regularly is a great way to stay motivated and on track to achieve those goals. One problem I was having in the beginning, and I'm sure I'm not alone with, is what and how do I actually write down? A lot of times people, myself included, write goals that are basically useless or just pipe dreams without real meaning. That is when I discovered the SMART system, which although I don't follow it religiously, has given me a way to evaluate and improve my goals using only a few simple criteria.

And here are the SMART criteria. S M A R T, and they stand for specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and timely. And they're fairly self-explanatory. Specific, of course, pertaining to, does it, can you from the goal itself infer what the purpose of the goal is? So if you can you hand your goal to somebody else, have them read it, and then they'll understand exactly what the goal is. That's probably a great a great way to test if your goal is specific enough. Measurable, fairly obvious as well, is there any kind of measurable statistic? And if you fail on finding any measurable statistic, you can just take time. Like for instance, I'm going to I'm going to study Swedish for 10 minutes a day. That's a measurable goal, because you know if you only did five minutes, you know that you should have done five minutes more. And conversely, if you've done an hour, you've done, you know, uh sort of much more than you you should have.

Assignable means it's it's a bit of a a fuzzy one for language learning because it it usually means who's supposed to be doing the goal. And usually that will be you. But in case you have a partner, or you have some kind of if you're working with other people on language learning, in groups or anything, then assignable means just that. Realistic is pretty obvious, and very important, I'm going to get back to that in a second. And timely is also important, it simply refers to the fact that each of your goals should have some sort of deadline, or they should be some time element, because if there isn't, then, you know, that's one of those universal rules that state assignments or tasks will grow to the size of whatever we allow them to. And the allowance is usually a deadline. And if we don't have a deadline, well, we can just not never do things. I mean, what's the point?

Let's use a specific example to test these SMART criteria. This is an example of a bad goal. I'd like to learn Swedish in 2015. While the goal the goal itself, like the purpose of the goal, is not is not bad, you know, if you want to learn Swedish, that's obviously how you would phrase it. But that that's a difference between sort of what you want to accomplish and a written down goal. And they serve different purposes. So, I'd like to learn Swedish is an example of the sort of grand, I would say, wants and desires.

So to turn that into a specific goal, we'd have to do a little bit of a change. We'd have to look at, you know, what does it mean to learn Swedish? And what does it mean to me? And then we'd have to specify exactly what part of Swedish we'd like to learn. So, if you look at I'd like to learn Swedish, you can see that the goal already fails at the first hurdle. Specific, it's not specific enough. What does it mean to learn Swedish? That's way too ambiguous. It also fails at the second, measurable, because there's no measurable thing in learning a language. You can measure vocabulary, you can measure how many time how many minutes you can speak. You can measure a lot of things in language learning, but there's no way to measure learning. I'd like to learn a language, you know, you can't say I'm 5% towards learning the language.

So, the rest of the criteria in this case are fine. You know, it's realistic. A whole year to learn Swedish? Yeah, I would say that's pretty realistic. It's not too difficult of a language, particularly if you have sort of experience in romance languages. So, and timely, we had the year 2015. And of course, you could specify again be a little bit more specific with the time and say not in 2015, but you're giving yourself 12 months to do it. Because if you say I'd like to learn Swedish in 2015, you could theoretically just say a week before 2016, you can just say, well, now I'm now I'm learning Swedish in 2015, because it's still 2015. So, you know, be more specific is is a good example.

All right, so if I had to improve this a little bit, I would probably do it something like this. In 2015, I would like to study my Swedish course 30 minutes a day. And the Swedish course refers to, you know, like a a Pimsleur or Michel Thomas, or any kind of book guide colloquial. Obviously, you need to know which one, but, you know, as I'm not studying Swedish, I didn't pick a name. But ideally, you would like to say exactly what is that you're studying as well. If it's memorized for vocabulary, you would say I'd like to study Swedish vocabulary for 30 minutes a day. And that's very measurable and it's it's very specific, it's saying exactly what you need to do, and you can give this goal to anyone and they'll understand it immediately. And I hope that that difference is kind of obvious. And uh it's also it's not too unrealistic either, you know, 30 minutes a day, anyone can do 30 minutes a day, I would say. If you can't, then it's a question about priorities and yeah, well, then you have bigger problems than goal setting, I feel like. Um, but anyway, back to the point.

Um, I recently did a mini challenge in Russian vocabulary, and my this is a real goal that I had, and I wrote it down so you can find it on the blog for evidence. And my goal was initially, I'm going to add 70 new Russian vocabulary every day as well as reviewing daily to make sure all items are reviewed. And what I'm missing here is that it also had an end. So this challenge was ending on 31st of December 2014, so it was also timely. But you can see that it's very specific, there's no question about what you're going to do, and there's no question about whether you you know, that there's no confusion. And it's easily measured, because memorize allows me to count how many words I did.

And I hope that this little sort of introduction to SMART goals will make you think a little bit about your goals that you're setting in the future. You know, because if we set bad goals, the effect are not going to be as profound as if you take the time to set some really proper goals. And that's something that I'm also working on, and I'll get back to that in a little bit. But before you dive into actually making your 2015 goals or any goals, depending on when you're listening to this, I would like to offer a few points and tell you about a few traps as well that I've discovered about goal setting.

The first one is realistic expectations. When I first started making goals, I thought that being overly ambitious was a good thing because then if it wouldn't be too easy to attain. And if it was too easy to attain, I wouldn't work harder. But what I realized also is that the R in SMART is for realistic for a reason. And it's very important that your goals are realistic because what often happens is that you have a goal that's unrealistic and then you burn out, and what actually happens is that you completely give up. So if you look in in a hindsight point of view, it's much better to just, you know, have a much easier goal and then build on it. You know, go ambitious, but don't start ambitious necessarily. So set realistic goals, attain them, and you know what, once you've reached a goal and you realize, well, that was easy, there's nothing stopping you from setting a new goal. It's not like you, oh yeah, I reached my goal, I can't do any more goals this year or something, you know. Goals are very flexible to fit your needs and wants. And it's very motivational to actually accomplish goals, and then you can build on that motivation to accomplish even more goals.

The second point is not writing the goals down and reviewing them regularly. And that's something that I've been terribly guilty of. And of course, running the Actual Fluency blog, I I have an excuse to write down my goals, and I do often review them actually weekly for my weekly goals anyway. And I think it's important and and actually quite underrated to put your goals on paper or digital paper, and review them regularly, you know, at least once a week. And I think this is a a point that a lot of the people that I've studied this year have made, is that if you're not if you don't know where you're going, then how can you get there? It's like being in the middle of an ocean on a boat and you don't have a map or any form of navigation. It's like you're just kind of drifting. Sure, your goal might be in your brain somewhere, and you might be you might be able to recall it, but you're not sort of living it, and that's why you need to write it down, review the goals and on a regular basis. And this is something I'll do next year as well, and I'm really looking forward to it.

The third point I want to make is not sticking to it. And this is a hard point because it's also it's also about motivation as well. You know, it's not just about sticking to a goal, it's about sticking to whatever the goal kind of leads to. And the problem I've seen a lot is that and I've also seen this in my own life a lot, is that people get started on something, they're initially excited about it. It's like, oh this is new and exciting, and it's cool. I'm going to do this forever. And then a few months later, I think, I don't know what the critical period is, but I think it's definitely less than three months. It's probably just two months. You just get kind of, I don't know, the feeling, it's like you get bored with it, you you burn out in a way, because you're not getting those new interesting feelings like when you just started a language. The honeymoon period some some some people call it. And I think it's totally true.

And I think it's important that when you start something as big as learning a new foreign language, which is the main point we're talking about here, although these goal settings could be applied to just about anything, you know, even if maybe you want to lose 50 pounds or something, you know, it's the same it's the same philosophy, no matter what your goal is. But the point is you have to stick to it. And success is a is a result of consistent efforts that just goes on and on. Like learning a language, at the end of the day, it's just learning some grammar rules, learning some vocabulary, learning some ways to pronounce it. And that's it. You can do that on day one. You can learn all of the you can't learn all of the words, but you can learn an example of the pieces on day one, but the only thing that's going to get you to your point where you can use the language and speak it, and read it, and write it, and watch movies in it, is consistent efforts, and it's just not quitting.

And a lot of people get bugged down about, oh, I'm I've been doing it for months and it's it's boring now, and I can't I need to study a new language. And a lot of people just jump between languages and never really get anywhere. And I I understand and I appreciate some people have this idea of language have different ideas about language learning. You know, I I'm a very practical person, so if I want to learn a language, it's I want to learn it to a level where I can actually use it. Whereas other people might learn because they enjoy the learning process. They enjoy looking up the grammar, they enjoy having the, you know, fingers in a lot of pies, proverbial pies anyway. And and that's fine too. If that's your goal, that's cool. But don't make it an excuse.

You know, don't be like, oh yeah, I'm I'm I'm I've lost my motivation for Spanish, and I'm going to go to French because that way I'm keeping my language learning interesting and stuff. You know, be be honest. If you want to learn Spanish, stick to it. Don't make an excuse and say, oh yeah, it's pretty cool to jump between languages to keep it interesting. I think in general, you should avoid that, and this is a very personal opinion, you know, remember. But I think that you should make your goals very clear in the beginning. So if your goal is to learn a language for three months and then move on to a new one, there's absolutely I have absolutely no problem with that. A lot of people do that and they enjoy themselves very much. But if your goal is to learn a language, meaning speaking or let's say thousands of words of vocabulary, then you need to stay consistent and you need to stick to it, you can't give up. And goals will help you with that. So if you review the goals every morning, I mean, that would be absolutely ideal. But if you review the goals on a weekly basis, your motivation is also going to be up. And it also helps to refer to exactly why did you why did you make that goal in the first in the first place.

Anyway, that was a little longer than it should have been, but let me move on to point number four. Point number four is about having different goals. A problem that I'm seeing in my own goal setting and in I've seen it in some other people as well, is that we have a tendency to set long-term goals. And that's fantastic. You know, if your long-term goal is like, I'd like to learn 5,000 Swedish words in 2015, that's kind of, you know, it's it's a halfway SMART goal, I would say. It doesn't really tell you that much about how and when, but it's it it's halfway there, I would say. It's not a bad goal. The thing is that it's a very big goal. So what I would advise is to have mini goals or smaller goals that sort of tells your mind and your brain, how am I actually going to get to 5,000 words? And if you then break it down, you know, it's some 17 words a day or something, if you did it every single day. But you have to allow yourself time to, you know, family, friends, emergencies, traveling. There's lots of times when you're probably not able to do it. So if you did like 25 words a day, you could probably reach 5,000. Maybe more. It's not that important, but the point is, you've taken a very big goal that seems very unrealistic, like 5,000 words. That's a lot of words. And you've said, well, okay, that translates to about 20 words a day. That's fine. Suddenly, the suddenly the goal is achievable, and you can you can measure it every single day. So try to have goals that are long-term, medium-term and short-term. So for the Swedish course, or the Swedish example here, you could say 5,000 words in a year, and then you can say 2 1/2 thousand words in six months. And then you can break that down to a monthly or you can break that down to a daily amount of words that I just did. You know, have a few different time perspectives so you can constantly follow your goals and hopefully make your yearly goals easier to achieve.

All right, that was my four points on on goal setting. I hope you find found any of them helpful, or all of them. Now I'd like to take a moment to just review my own language learning goals of 2014. And I can I can immediately say that my goals were awful. As I launched Actual Fluency, my goal was to reach conversational fluency in Russian in three months. And if we just ignore the complete unrealisticness of this statement to begin with and focus on the goal itself, yeah, it was timely. I had a year. That was good. It's also very big, you know.

The problem was it wasn't specific. You know, although I might have an idea in my head what conversational fluency means, it's not measurable and it's not specific. And thus, if you combine it with the unrealisticness of learning a very different foreign language in three months, it was a awful, awful goal. But that's okay, you know, I launched Actual Fluency as a way to grow, as a way to learn about language learning, and also self-development, which has been a big topic in the last few months. And one of the areas that I definitely am excited about improving is goal setting. So, although I've learned a fair amount of Russian in 10 months or so I've been doing it, I wouldn't call myself conversationally fluent just yet. I did revise my goal later to include the entire year. But once again, my goal lacked specific, actionable steps, as well as a way to actually measure it.

You know, because how can you measure progress if you don't have any measurable parameters in your goals? It it's like if you, for instance, if if you have any experience losing weight, sometimes the weight might not change, the number of kilos, although that is a measurable stat and you will usually change. But what you can do instead is you can use a tape measure and you can sort of run it around your arms, your legs. And you'll see even if your total mass stays the same, sometimes you lose centimeters. So if you didn't have the tape measure, you might be sort of bummed down about the fact that, oh, I'm not losing any weight. While what you're just doing is you're just you're re-allocating, basically you're turning fat into muscle, or you're getting rid of fat from some of the places where there's a lot of it and sort of redistributing it. And that's fine, and weight sort of fluctuates anyway. But how that relates to language learning is that when you're learning a language, it's very hard to know your own level. Like, I it's when I think about my 10 months of Russian, I know that I was very bad 10 months ago, and I know that I'm less bad now, but exactly what that means is super, super, super ambiguous.

So instead of focusing on anything to do with speaking or listening or, yeah, anything to do with actually using the language, then instead focusing on very measurable and very objective goals like vocabulary, number of vocabulary, uh grammar rules, um, you know, anything that can be objectively measured are way better material for goals than having say learn Russian, speak Russian. And even these goals about speak Russian for 10 minutes, it's not a goal that I'm a huge fan of, but in the event that it's the only goal you can set, I would set other goals as well, but I mean what I mean is if you can set that goal and achieve it, then it's fantastic. But I think you need other measurable goals with it. But it's very nice to have a goal of speaking say 10 minutes of the foreign language, you can record a conversation, and and and that's fine. I personally think that if you can speak 10 minutes in a language, you can probably do half an hour as well. So that's another reason why I don't I'm not a huge fan of that uh approach.

Uh, but anyway, for for 2015, I'll be sure to set goals according to these SMART criteria that I've talked about, and I'm looking forward to sharing these new goals with you on the blog just after New Year's. Uh, I can reveal already that 2015 will be a bit of a low-hanging fruit year for me, where I focus on languages related to my own. After learning a very difficult language, Russian, it'd be nice to work on a more similar language to my own. What those languages are and the specific goals I have for them, you'll have to wait and see until the blog post in the new year.

With all that said, I just want to thank you again for listening to the podcast in 2014. Your incredible support has really meant the world to me, like seriously, I'm I'm so grateful for you guys. And I'd just like to once again wish you a very happy New Year and I'm also looking forward to making more podcasts for you in 2015. If you've already made some goals for 2015, I'll be I'll be happy to hear them and actually all your experiences with goal setting. So you I'm looking forward to reading some of them on the show notes, which you can find at actualfluency.com/42.

And that's it for this time. And once again, I just want to apologize for the sort of ghetto episode this week. I I made a few mistakes, but I hope that the content on goal setting will be useful and helpful for you. And also let me know about that audio blog thing. Should it be in the main podcast, or should I make a new audio blog podcast for it? And let me know what you thought about this episode. I'll be happy to read all your comments on actualfluency.com/42. All right, take care.