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GOALS AND HABITS:�THEY AREN’T THE SAME! �(ONE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE OTHER)

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GOALS AND HABITS

In this module, you will learn how to set achievable goals and form habits that will help you accomplish the goals you set. These skills can be applied to any area of life but, here, the obvious context, is your first year of college.

This year is one of transition. Finding community at Farmingdale and achieving academic success, will require you to examine and shift priorities, and it will require you to identify and eliminate (or at least mitigate) habits that hinder success.

This module will help you to do that!

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VERSUS

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GOALS

Goals are things we want to do. Simple.

They are the things we daydream about. They are the things that motivate us. They are the things that scare us. Maybe they are why we go to college, or maybe college is a place to discover what our goals are.
The goals we had ten years ago are probably not the goals we have now, and the goals we have now are probably not the goals we will have in ten years, ten months, or 10 weeks.

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SMART GOALS

S	SPECIFIC	Goal language is concrete and defined.
M	MEASURABLE	Achievement can be measured through a quantifiable benchmark
A	ATTAINABLE	Goal is within your means and ability to achieve
R	RELEVANT	Goal is aligned with the big picture, long-term goal
T	TIME-BOUND	Specific time frame to achieve the goal

SMART Method:

Specific: If you do not specify what your goal is, and what it is not, you won’t know what to do. For example, the goal of “Lift weights three mornings a week” is more specific, and a far better goal, than “I will gain muscle this winter.” Specificity gives you direction.

Measurable: Progress needs to be measurable, and we need to actually measure it. Otherwise, we do not know if we are heading in the right direction. For example, Jerry Seinfeld has a goal of writing one new joke a day, and he marks his progress on a calendar. At the end of a week or year, he can look back and see how many days he wrote a joke.

Achievable (or Ambitious): There is a balance to be struck between a goal being merely achievable without much effort and too ambitious. In other words, a goal should challenge you, but there are limits. For example, the author of this wants desperately to work for Starfleet and would be good at it, but Starfleet does not exist.

Relevant: This can also be thought of as “Realistic” or “Reasonable.” This criterion places the goal in the larger context of your life. Is this goal important to you, and why? What about everything else in your life? Goals cannot be achieved, and life’s commitments cannot be balanced, in isolation from other goals and commitments. Do you work? Do you have family obligations? Are you getting involved in campus life? All these things are important too, and no goal is worth pursuing to the detriment of everything else in your life.

Time-bound: What makes SMART goals “smart” is that they define a when, forcing us to stop saying “Someday, I will…” and instead give ourselves a particular date to work backwards from. For example, if your goal is to ace your Chemistry final, you can work backwards from the date of the final, and divide the work based on the number of weeks between then and now.

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GOALS ARE GREAT, BUT…

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GOALS 🡪 HABITS

Goals ensures alignment between your big picture priorities and daily actions.

For example, professional goals:

Long Term Goal

What career do you want to have?

Medium Term Goal

What major should you choose?

What activities should you be involved in?

Short Term Goal

What grades do you need?

What role in those activities do you want?

Habits

What habits (repeated actions) are needed to get that grade?

What habits will lead to attaining that role?

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NOT ALL HABITS ARE CREATED EQUAL

WE CAN USE OUR BAD HABITS TO UNDERSTAND HABIT FORMATION AND HOW TO ESTABLISH GOOD HABITS

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LET’S TALK ABOUT A (BAD) HABIT WE ALL SHARE…

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PAIR, PAIR, AND SHARE

Pair up. What goal and habit did you draft? How can you make it better?
Pair up with someone else. Same questions.
Who wants to share a SMART goal they want to achieve?
Who wants to share a habit they want to form?
Brainstorm session

How can we track progress?
What pitfalls might we expect? How can we overcome them?

Record your improved goal, habit, and strategies.