A 2-Step Process for Achieving Your Intended Goals

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For many professionals in highly demanding roles, the sheer volume of work and responsibility you carry can make you feel more and more overwhelmed, exhausted, and frustrated with each passing day. When you were in school, you were at the top of your class, and now, you’re surrounded by a multitude of high achievers who have accomplished just as much as you have, if not more. You have all succeeded in highly competitive environments to get to where you are now.

Here’s the catch: when you suddenly find yourself struggling, you feel hesitant to share your feelings with others for fear of being judged as weak or incapable in some way. You have been conditioned to persevere and push through somehow, and you’ve successfully done so again and again in the past and perhaps without ever openly sharing your challenges. While inside you may feel like you’re drowning at times, the outside world thinks you’re a superstar. Over time, this constant pressure becomes unsustainable and can negatively impact your health and well-being.

When you're feeling overwhelmed and stressed, it can be difficult to see a clear path towards your goals. This two-step process can reliably offer clarity: applying the ADMIT framework to help assess your stress, and then the SMART goal method to help direct your action plan.

1. Identify Your Challenges With ADMIT

The first step in achieving your goals is to assess challenges that may be blocking your path and causing negative stress. This is true in any circumstance — managing change, dealing with conflict, or asking for support, as examples. Imagine you are feeling hesitant to share that you are struggling as I mentioned above. Your goal may be to feel comfortable with sharing and to reach out to others for support. Knowing your goal is important, but before you can achieve it, you still need to know what, exactly, is holding you back.

The ADMIT framework can help reveal those hidden challenges. ADMIT is an easy-to-remember acronym that stands for five phases of experience that are common sources of stress:

1. Adapting requires you to change your mindset to accept something new.
2. Doing pertains to your day-to-day operations and how you do things.
3. Measuring refers to how you define and assess your success.
4. Introspection requires time for mindfulness and active reflection.
5. Transformation calls for increasing self-awareness and change.

In learning to feel comfortable with sharing difficult moments, you may be struggling with any of these five phases of experience. Your challenge may be adapting to a non-competitive mindset since you’re used to the many competitive situations you have had to “win” along the way. Perhaps the challenge is in doing. You want to speak, but in the moment, you're afraid to be vulnerable. Perhaps you’re having difficulty measuring your progress, and you haven’t defined what success in this instance looks like to you. Perhaps you don’t have the time to be introspective to understand the emotions you feel when you are hesitant to share, and why. Or, perhaps your challenge is transformation, and you’re struggling to integrate your new understanding to help you feel comfortable with sharing and seeking support.

Once you’ve considered the phases of experience of the ADMIT framework, you have more clarity on what you might address in the situation. You can then establish concrete steps to accomplish your goal, taking the challenges you have identified into account. This is where SMART goals come in.

2. Address Your Challenges Within Your SMART Goals

The consultant G.T. Foran coined the acronym SMART to describe truly effective goals. To accomplish your objectives, your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

For the example mentioned above, if you wanted to develop a less competitive mindset so that you are more willing to share and seek support, here’s what your SMART goal might look like:

• Instead of saying, “I want to be less competitive,” it’s more specific to say, “My goal is to learn to appreciate my own progress while celebrating the success of others, by consciously recognizing my own achievements and challenges, without feeling competitive.”
• Then establish tasks you can use to measure your progress toward that specific goal. For example, “I will take 10 minutes to speak with a colleague from work, to acknowledge and celebrate his or her accomplishments, without feeling competitive.”
• Create a set of guidelines to ensure that your incremental goals are achievable. For instance, “If I do not have the opportunity to speak with a colleague during the workweek, I will call a colleague Saturday morning at 10 a.m. to catch up, share my goal, and invite them to share an accomplishment or challenge of their own, big or small, if they feel comfortable.”
• The most successful goals are also relevant, so understand your reasons for wanting to achieve this goal: “I feel motivated to feel more united with my colleagues by celebrating others’ successes and being supportive during challenges, without feeling competitive.”
• Finally, the goal must be time-bound. Set a deadline for yourself so you’ll be more motivated to accomplish it and gauge your progress along the way.

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When you’ve achieved your SMART goal, you can always return back to ADMIT and set a new goal that takes into account the progress you’ve made.

Your Growth Can Inspire Others

One of the hardest aspects of achieving goals is determining the best way to approach them. With these two frameworks—ADMIT and SMART—you have a comprehensive method for considering new ideas, assessing their value, and achieving your desired outcome. While ADMIT helps you consider the psychological elements of a goal, SMART gives you guidance on how to act.

Of course, things don’t always turn out as we envision them, so there's no guarantee that this process will help you achieve every goal. However, if you approach this plan with strong motivation and a flexible attitude, at the very least you will experience incredible personal growth.

Learning from obstacles and feeling comfortable with challenges allows you to be more open, willing to share, and seek support. By doing so in a way that is true and authentic, you may inspire others to do the same.

Copyright Dr. Nina Ahuja MD