Goal Setting Through State Naming

I used to write down New Year's resolutions. I did it every year and every year discovered that writing them was certainly easier than keeping them. As 2008 rolled around, I barely bothered to look at the meaningless promises I made back in 2007. In fact most of them were now completely irrelevant (it was a period of major changes in our lives). Clearly, I needed some help with setting goals for myself.

This past January, the Internet was buzzing with a backlash against resolutions. All the cool kids were doing "personal manifestos" or "incremental changes" or "escaping the cult of achievement plans." Certainly, my experience was that my resolutions didn't seem to help anything happen for me. So why bother with them except out of habit?

Well, we know that goals are good. Without some kind of long-term plan it's easy to spend too much time doing all the wrong things to try to get to a place that you never wanted to go in the first place. Simply promising to do something new wasn't going to cut it.

But there was something else that did work and manifest for me. It's my own cool kid technique and one that I will continue using. And since all cool tools need nifty handles, I will call mine State Naming. In state naming, you don't say what you will or will not do. Instead you describe your "state" at some point in the future with the intent of manifesting that state.

OK, here's how it goes. Back before our move to Oregon, I was working at the world's most boring job and spending a lot of hours gazing out my office window and trying to kill time. One thing that interested me was Getting Things Done and various related tools for productivity and planning (this is an amusing thing about me: when I'm bored I tend to over plan and focus on that kind of stuff... when I'm busy, I don't have time for it and don't miss it). In any case, one of the things I decided to try was a top down planning approach, starting with my major life goals and working toward doable actions related to those goals. Makes sense, right? Because transferring "be healthy" into something you could actually, you know, accomplish is a useful exercise.

However I got completely stuck on writing down my goals. I simply couldn't make myself be clear. I mean, don't we all want to be healthy, wealthy, happy, and good -- however we define those things? Finally, I discovered a technique that worked well for me.

What I did was open up a document and type, "In ten years I will be 44, (husband) will be 48, and (daughter) will be 13."

Then I started writing, in prose, what I want to have/do/etc at that time in various areas of my life (no headings or real organization, just prose). Things like "I want to live..." with a description of my ideal housing situation and "I want to work..." with information on my perfect job. I kept it to a high level -- not house at (address) or even house in (neighborhood), but more like house with large yard, good schools, etc. I also included things I don't want.

Then I skipped down and wrote, "In five years I will be 39..." and so on.

Then I retyped the original things that still applied, but adjusted them for the time frame. So in 10 years I want to be working for myself on a path that aligns with my life purpose. In five years I will settle for working for myself (since I don't know my life purpose). And in three years, I want a good paying job with lots of flexibility and no travel or major commute.

I did one for 10, 5, 3, and 1 years out.

This exercise had two results. First, it helped me tie my longer-term goals to things that I could do now. This was, as I said, the original point and it did work to a degree. But once we decided to look at moving and things got very busy, all my planning stuff got shoved aside. And in fact, most of those individual steps became as irrelevant as my resolutions. So while the process was interesting and diverting, the results ended up being completely ignored and forgotten for about six or seven months.

Second, and more interestingly, almost all of the things I wanted at my one year mark manifested themselves into my life without me actually thinking about it. When I went back to my computer and dug up the file (months after our move and more months after the state naming) I was shocked to see that almost everything I'd written had come to be. And not just because I'd made it that way.

Remember, I didn't get into specifics. If I wrote "I will have a job in Portland" no one would be surprised that I'm now living here. But I wrote things like "I will have a job without a major commute" (something moving wouldn't necessarily solve). Yet, now I have that as well as just about everything else I'd described. Of course these were my goals I was describing, so surely I was a part of them manifesting. Still, it happened without conscious effort or awareness on my part.

The project and task planning, the resolution setting, the detailed analysis of HOW to do stuff ended up unused and unuseful. Things changed too much and too rapidly in the interim.

Even more fascinating are those items in my state naming that did NOT manifest. I can definitely see there are a couple areas where I need to do internal work (as opposed to external, todo-list work) and sort stuff out for myself. Because while the areas I'm comfortable and at peace with flow better and manifest themselves more easily, the ones where I struggle do not. And naturally, it's in those areas that I would like more manifestation because those areas are lacking. It shouldn't surprise you that prosperity is one of those areas.

And that, above all, was a real revelation that came from this state naming exercise. Like most people, I'd struggled with some areas of my life. And frustratingly, those areas seemed the least amenable to change. But now I know, definitively, what those areas are. And that hints at fixing them and then state naming them into what I want instead.

I'm still trying to figure out how to use this technique on a more frequent basis. Part of the process might rely on giving it the time and distance to work. I can't see, for example doing it every week. But it definitely worked for me as a way of both codifying my longer term goals as well as identifying the areas where I need to put the most effort.