2025 April 8 Being relevant with your goals

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Hi. This is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk more about SMART goals. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, send me a message.

Welcome back to our continuing discussion about SMART goals. We've been working our way through each letter of the SMART acronym and talking about what each part means and how it gives you a template for creating goals that really work for you—things that are truly important to you.

Let's review what we've already covered. We started with the S in SMART, which stands for specific—making sure your goals are clearly defined rather than vague. Then we covered the M for measurable—creating ways to track your progress so you can see how far you've come.

Last week, we talked about A for Achievable or Actionable—making sure your goals are realistic so it's something you can actually achieve, and also something that's actionable—something tangible that you really can do.

Tonight we're going to be talking about the R of SMART, which stands for Relevant goals or Reach goals. Those are two aspects that complement each other in important ways. A relevant goal is something that matters to you personally. It aligns with your broader life vision, your values, and your current circumstances. It's not just something that sounds good or something someone else told you was good. It's something that genuinely fits into your own life vision.

When you reimagine your life, relevance becomes incredibly important because this is about intentionality and mindfulness. It's about making conscious choices rather than just drifting along or following someone else's ideas and trying to apply that to yourself.

It just reminds me of something I used to talk about—being in business for myself or starting in business. Every time you say, Oh yeah, I work for myself, everyone always has a great idea. You know what you should do to make a bunch of money? You should do this, or that, or whatever. Of course, the natural question back to that is, If it’s so great, why aren’t you doing it? People are always very quick to give advice to other people. If you're not doing the work, anything seems very easy.

So when you're doing your own goals, remember it's really important that the goal has to be relevant to the vision of your life. It's an important piece to keep in mind. You might wonder, how do you know that a goal is truly relevant? It’s kind of simple—but it can sneak by. There are a couple of questions you can ask yourself.

First, does the goal align with your values and the things that matter to you? For instance, if one of the things you really value is family connections—if that's the most important thing in your life—and you're also thinking of starting a business, but you know it’s going to require 60- to 80-hour work weeks for a few months, maybe even a year, well... maybe the goal of starting a business isn’t really aligned with the goal of having a strong family life. Maybe you have to work it around a little bit and find a better way to get those two goals to align.

If you’re a creative person but your goal is really focused on financial gain… I know a number of people who work in the arts. Some of them are successful, but I wouldn’t say they’re all millionaires.

If you're going to be a millionaire, that really turns more into the business side of things. If you want to go into the creative side because you don’t like business, but you also want to be very wealthy—there’s kind of a disconnect there between those two goals. Some people manage to merge it, but it’s very difficult because it takes both sides of your mind to make those things work together. Your goals have to work together to be successful in moving you toward your bigger goals and your life vision.

The second thing is that your goals really have to support all your other goals. If you have goals that conflict—you want to be good at business, but you don’t want to be a businessperson or an independent contractor—those are conflicting goals. You have to find some way to merge them so they can live happily together.

Otherwise you end up with conflicting ideas. When I do project work, I get in this situation quite often. Somebody will want something done in a particular fashion, and they want it done very quickly. But on the other hand, they also want it done with painstaking detail. Those are conflicting goals. You need it done by tomorrow, but you also want all this painstaking detail, which takes time. So you have to learn how to balance goals. That includes even your own personal goals.

Third, the goal has to be appropriate for your current life stage. I know we talk a lot about retirement and what you do in retirement, and the things that are relevant to you in your 30s, 40s, and 50s are different than when you get into your 60s and 70s and start looking more toward retirement.

It's fun to travel when you're younger, but you're usually traveling with a different purpose and a different view of the world. As you get older, things that you might have thought were boring or uninteresting suddenly become very interesting.

I was actually laughing at myself the other day because, where I'm located, there's a little park around the corner, right on the edge of a lake. It's very pretty, but there's a little cemetery there. I'm not a huge one for historical things, but it turns out the park is named after the family that founded that whole section of town. It was interesting looking back and reading through the different people who were involved and the timeframes—in the late 1700s, early 1800s—when they were active in the area. They even had a little map of where the gravestones were and stuff.

I thought about twenty years ago—I remember being in different circumstances, going to cemeteries for various reasons, and seeing people in cemeteries looking at things. At the time, I didn’t appreciate the historical perspective you get by looking back a hundred or two hundred years. When you look at these older cemeteries, one thing that stands out is the average lifespan was extremely short. Another thing is that families tended to be much larger, and the groupings of the families were different. The whole thing was fascinating. It made me laugh at how much my perspective has changed over the past 20 years.

So the goal has to be relevant to where you are at your current age—or at least your current interest level—in order to be a relevant goal to you. The other piece of it is, that doesn’t mean as you get older you shouldn’t go after a goal that you found interesting when you were younger. Or, if you’re younger now, that you shouldn’t be interested in something you think is something old people do. 

The real thing is that you are your own person. You have to set goals that are relevant to yourself. If that doesn’t match what society expects of you, so be it. If you want to be 25 and interested in history and historical things, that’s fantastic. If your friends aren’t, then you probably have other decisions to make—but you have to follow your own life and focus on the things that matter to you first. Otherwise, your goals won’t motivate you.

So relevance in your life shifts for a lot of reasons. Part of it is age, part of it is life stage, part of it is where you live. All these things have an impact on the relevance of a goal. That’s why it’s very personal—and why it’s so important that you work to develop goals that matter directly to you, not what society says should be your goal.

You see a lot of people on social media talking about going to Disney World. That’s great for them. There’s nothing wrong with that. More power to them. Disney loves them. But if that’s not what you're interested in, and if that’s not what you want for your family or your grandkids, don’t think you have to change your goals to match society’s expectations. Your goals are your goals. You're your own person. You're exactly who you're supposed to be.

The other aspect of the R in SMART goals is reach. This one’s kind of interesting. You want your goals to be something that matters to you—that’s the relevant part—but you also want your goals to be a little bit hard to actually attain. If they’re trivial to attain, you may think, Well, my goal is to walk over to the refrigerator and get a cookie. Fine goal. Nothing wrong with it. But it's short-term. When you're done doing that, it's not like you say, Wow, I can't believe I walked to the refrigerator and got a cookie.

But if your goal is—this just happened to me this past weekend—to walk up to a bunch of people you don’t know in a new church you've never been in before, speaking fairly poor Spanish, and explain to them that you would like to sing with their choir, which looks to be very well-rehearsed and professional… Then explaining that you recognize the fact that it’s probably even more appropriate for you not to sing with them, and you thank them very much for even entertaining the idea and struggling through listening to you. I was in a guest church because I'm traveling. 

A few years ago, there’s zero chance I would’ve ever thought of doing that. My Spanish is not good because I don’t practice enough. It's something that takes you out of your comfort zone to do. I know that if I don’t try practicing with people, getting the words right, learning how to present myself, I’m never going to get better.

That’s a real stretch goal. My goal is still to learn Spanish. It seems like an impossible goal—but there are little steps along the way. Learn some grammar, learn how the language works, learn pronunciation. And by doing that repeatedly, you can incrementally get to the goal you want, a little bit at a time.

The goal has to be achievable. You might say, Well, learning a language isn’t achievable. And I’d say, Well, could you learn the alphabet? You’d probably say, Yeah, I can probably learn the alphabet. And can you learn how to say a couple of things in the present tense? Hi, this is my name. Yeah, I could probably learn to say stuff like that. So then you start putting all those little pieces together and realize—Hmm, all those little goals do stack up to something pretty significant.

But the big goal is still the reach goal. It’s not a trivial goal. When you reach any one of those little milestones, your brain says, Hey, we’re getting a little closer to the big goal. That gives you a sense of achievement. That gives you motivation. That’s what keeps you going on your journey.

Because now, even though the goal seemed insurmountable before, you see that you have made progress. And that’s super exciting to your brain. Because your brain wants to keep you safe and keep you happy.

And one of the ways you are happy is not by trying to find happiness or chasing it, but by achieving things. There have been studies that show the people who are happiest aren’t the ones trying to buy happiness or doing things they think will make them happy. It’s the people who actually do things that lead to achievement.

That happiness lasts much longer than the short-term happiness from things like taking a trip somewhere. They were happy on the trip, but after the trip, they didn’t feel particularly happy—compared to having the achievement of getting yourself to a financial position where you could take a trip. The achievement was what made them most happy. The trip, at that point, was almost secondary.

The goal should be achievable, but it shouldn’t be too easy. Because if it’s too easy, you don’t get that sense of satisfaction that comes with real achievement. You want to think of it as that sweet spot—where the goal is just challenging enough to be exciting, because it's exciting to your brain when you accomplish things—it makes it happy—but it shouldn’t be so difficult that it becomes overwhelming. If you're too anxious about something, then it becomes something negative, and you don’t want the goal to be negative—you want it to be something positive and motivating.

You may have to break it down into smaller steps, or you may need to modify your goal a little—take a slightly different approach to it—so that the reach part of the goal isn’t overwhelming. That reach part is kind of a tricky one, in a sense. You do want it to be a stretch goal—because that’s what really keeps you motivated and keeps you going—but if it’s too big, then you start thinking, Oh, I’ll never do this. The negative self-talk starts, and you talk yourself out of doing it. 

That’s probably the most difficult one of all the goals—balancing that reach part with the relevant part. It has to be something that’s relevant, but if what’s relevant is impossible, then you’re not going to get the results you need anyway. So it’s a balancing act, and it takes a little practice to get there.

It’s not that it’s hard, but we tend to talk ourselves into really big goals. You know, the classic New Year’s resolution problem—you make all these goals, and they’re humongous. You’re going to lose a thousand pounds, you’re gonna learn how to speak six languages, you’re never going to be late for work. And your brain, in the background, is going, There’s no way we can do this. So you lose your motivation. That’s why they have to be attainable.

When we grow, we stretch ourselves. That’s just part of life. It works the same way in goal-setting. We need to reach for something just beyond our current capabilities. That’s what gives us a sense of satisfaction. That growth process, in and of itself, is very rewarding for our brain, and when our brain is happy, we’re happy. 

That’s the power of setting goals with the right amount of both reach to stretch you a little bit and relevance to tie into your big, long-term life vision. As you grow into this, you start to do something that once seemed impossible. You do it by little steps, and you work on it for a while. And all of a sudden, you realize—Wow. I’ve been doing this for a year now.

I forgot that it was ever difficult for me. It really does happen. That’s the wonder of goal setting and consistently working toward your goals—things that you thought were impossible, maybe even just months earlier, suddenly become routine.

I’m gonna try and get up before seven o’clock. At first, you get up at 7:01 and it kind of sucks. But you keep doing it, and all of a sudden, one day you’re out walking the dog at six in the morning. You see one of your neighbors. You’re talking to them, and you realize, Man, I’ve been doing this... I don’t even think about getting up at six o’clock now. It’s just how you start your day. Things become a habit when they’re part of a goal that’s aligned with your vision of life.

We want a reach goal that’s relevant. The real magic happens when you balance those. You’re pushing yourself to grow, and you get to places you didn’t think you’d be able to reach before.

There are a few challenges that can arise. One of them is to beware of the “should” goals. “Should” goals are the goals other people think you should do—not what you should do. It could be societal pressure, family expectations, social media—all of those places where someone else is expecting something of you. But your heart really has to be in it to be successful. If you’re not interested, it’s not going to work out.

A lot of times, you’ll hear people say things like, I should learn to play golf. Or, I should volunteer. I should volunteer, because some of my friends are doing it. And then you talk to them about it, and —Are you interested in golf? Eh, not really. Do you want to volunteer?  No, I don’t even like being at the hospital. I just don’t like being there. So you’re setting goals for yourself that aren’t relevant to things that actually matter to you in your life.

Maybe the person who’s saying I should start golf—maybe they should start going for a walk every day with their friends. Oh, I love seeing my friends!  Well then, make that your goal.  Well, yeah, but everybody I know is playing golf. Well, good—let them play golf. But you have a bunch of friends who walk, so focus on that. You’ve got to make your goals relevant to yourself. Don’t let other people or situations tell you what you should be doing.

Secondly, make sure a goal isn’t too easy. That really boils down to something we’ve talked about a lot in the past: that’s your brain trying to keep you safe. It’s like, I want to learn a language—and your brain says, Why do you want to learn a language? English is fine!
And you’re like, I know, but I just want to learn a language. - Eh, but what if you forget English? And it starts coming up with all these reasons why you shouldn’t learn a language. What if you get an accent? That’s just your brain. Who knows that you're concerned about trying to learn a language? Your brain does. And it's trying to keep you safe. Remember, your brain doesn’t want you to fail—because it fears failure.

Back in our original state—way back when—if you failed, it could mean you didn’t eat, or you didn’t get away from the animal that was chasing you. So that part of your brain is super active all the time, trying to keep you safe. One of the offshoots of that is that you tend to make goals that are really easy. Your brain keeps talking you down a little bit—like, Well, instead of trying to walk a mile, how about you walk the stairs once? Try to overcome that. Appreciate that your brain is doing what it’s supposed to do—but also make a goal that’s relevant and a little bit of a reach.

Third, make sure your goals don’t have too much reach. We talked about this in terms of New Year’s goals. If you set goals that are so ambitious they become intimidating, or they reach way beyond your current capabilities, you’re just going to become discouraged. You’re going to feel disappointed, and then the negative self-talk starts up—I couldn’t do it. I never should have started this goal.

Just balance what you can do with what you want to do. That’s true throughout life, but sometimes we forget that when we say, Okay, I’m going to set a goal. And we set these humongous goals. Try to avoid doing that. Make little goals, and if you fail at the goal, that’s okay. It’s a learning lesson. Back up, look at the goal, and see how you need to modify it—change it into something that’s still challenging, but attainable. Now you’ve learned a lesson as well.

So start by clarifying what your values are and your vision for your life. That's the core of everything. Then, generate your goals to support that vision. Ask yourself: What kind of life do I want to be living in a year? Five years? Ten years? Fifty years? It doesn’t matter what your timeframe is. Look way down the line—look way into the future. See what you want to do, and then work backwards from there. What steps do you have to take to get to that vision in the future?

And for each goal you set, ask yourself: Does this goal really excite me? Does it align with what matters to me? Is it something that I think about when I wake up—like, Wow, I just had another idea related to that goal. It would be so cool if I did this or tried it that way. That’s a goal that has your real, internal, true attention. And that’s the kind of goal that will naturally help keep you motivated and moving forward. If that isn’t happening for you, check and make sure you’re not pursuing a goal you think you should be doing—one that isn’t actually relevant to you.

And lastly, if the goal makes you a little nervous—that’s okay. A little nervousness is good. It means you’re thinking, Oh boy, that’s kind of big. I wonder if I can do that. But you haven’t said no. What that really means is, in the background, your brain is already starting to figure out how to go through and implement that goal.

And when your brain gets stuck on something—when it gets a little nervous and starts overthinking—just go with it. Don’t let the nervousness stop you. Instead, think about what’s making you nervous and focus on that.

It’s like, Oh, I guess I’m really concerned because I don’t know how I’d ever get the money to fly out and surprise my friends in California. So maybe the first part of that goal is figuring out how to get some extra money together so I can fly out and see my friends. Then don’t fret on it. Your brain now has some direction. It’ll start working on what you can do.

Remember, there’s a lot of aspects to this—and at some point, it might seem like we’re nitpicking—but we’ve got one more to go next week, and then we’ll do a summary. What you’ll see, even though we’ve taken it in detail and it seems like there are a lot of steps, is that once you do it a couple of times, it becomes second nature. It’s like anything else—one of your goals can actually be learning how to form SMART goals.

There’s a name for those kinds of things—where the concept defines itself—but I don’t remember what it is right now. Still, the steps are important. Once they become familiar to you, it’s very easy. You just go through it, write a goal, and it’s effective. You know the traps, you’re aware of them, and if you start to fall into one—even though you know better—you can just back out and fix it. It’s actually pretty simple.

And remember, the whole point of SMART goals is to help you create goals that you want. Not goals that society says you should have. Not goals that social media says you should have. Not goals that your mother-in-law or father-in-law says you should have. It’s goals that you have defined for yourself—goals that really and truly matter to you and bring you into alignment with your vision of life.

It’s super important that you become comfortable with that. Because when something truly aligns with your vision of life and your own aspirations, it’ll resonate with you. You’ll be excited about it. And motivation won’t be a problem—because you’re doing what you want to do to make your life what you want it to become.

So many of our goals fail because they weren’t things that really interested us in the first place. For some reason, we got ourselves talked into them or caught up in going after them. The most important thing about SMART goals—or any goals—is they have to be consistent with your vision of life.

The other piece to remember is that each part of the SMART goal system plays an important role. Taken together, they give you a very simple framework where you can define the goal effectively, figure out if you’re making progress, and check if the goal really matters to you.

Next week, we'll cover how to give the goal some sort of endpoint. That’s really important. If you don’t have an endpoint, then it stops being a goal. It becomes more of a way of life. And that’s a whole different thing—that’s a habit. Habits are important too, but there are different techniques for habits. We’ll talk about that another time.

The ability to do something, attain something, and then say, That’s done, and reward yourself for it—that’s an important piece of any goal. To reward yourself at the end. That’s important because it closes the loop in your brain. Your brain started to do something, it did it, it accomplished what it set out to do, and now you have to tell it—with a reward—Yes. You did it. We did it. We reached our goal. Then the brain takes that and hardwires it in. It’s like, If we do this process, we’ll succeed. And it learns to do it automatically. That’s why it becomes easier.

The whole aspect of SMART goals includes: Specific, Measurable, Achievable. This week we did Relevant and Reach—that’s the R. Next week, we’re going to do Time-based. Taken together, those things give you a very simple and very robust framework for essentially turning your dreams into reality. Because everything starts with a dream. And at first, that dream can seem humongous—impossible to reach. But this framework walks you right through it, bit by bit.

That’s it! Your homework for this week is to take the goal you’ve been working on over the past two weeks. Pick a goal you want to work on and fit into the SMART framework—and now evaluate that goal for Relevance and Reach. Ask yourself: Does this goal really and truly align with my values and what matters to me? Not somebody else’s values. Not what you think you should do. But something that really matters to you. It may not be important to somebody else—but if it’s important to you, that’s what matters. Does it support your overall life vision?

Also extremely important: Is this goal challenging enough to be exciting, but not so huge that it's overwhelming? Those two things have to balance—right in that sweet spot. If you answer no to any of those questions, you probably want to go back, look at the goal, tweak it a little bit, and get it to the point where you can say yes to all those things. At that point, you probably have a pretty solid goal—something worth working toward that will move you closer to the life you truly want to live.

As always, thank you for joining us tonight. Please remember—there’s a lot of strife going on in the world right now, and it can feel overwhelming. I want to remind you about a couple of organizations doing important work. 

First, UKR7.com is a list of sites where you can support Ukraine in a variety of ways. There’s also the World Central Kitchen at wck.org. They respond to disasters around the world, primarily through food relief. One of the big things World Central Kitchen does differently is that they try to use local supplies when they respond to a disaster.

Most aid organizations just show up with everything they need—which is better than nothing, and I’m not criticizing that—but World Central Kitchen takes it a step further. Wherever they can, they use local resources. So not only are they feeding people (and  sometimes providing shelter or clothing), but they’re also supporting the local economy at the same time.

They're also buying goods locally when they can—from the local people. So even though things may be a mess, a lot of the businesses are still able to make some amount of money because World Central Kitchen is buying the produce from them, buying the gas they’re using to cook with the grills, things like that. It has a very strong impact on the local economy. Great organization.

There are a lot of ways to help people. Of course, the big national and international organizations are great, but there are also a lot of local organizations that are helping people right in your own community, and it’s great to get involved with them in any way that you can.

Obviously, you can't help everyone everywhere all the time, so pick a few things that are important to you and support them however you can. Even if you’re not in a position to make donations, it’s always easy to be kind to someone. Just be pleasant. Just say, Hi, how you doing? Hey, good morning.

Those little, tiny things—especially to someone who’s feeling very alone—can change their entire day. When you change someone’s outlook, maybe they were thinking Nobody cares about me, and you’re just standing there, waiting in line, and say, Hey, nice day, huh?

And that’s all you have to say. And suddenly, they think, Wow, they took the time to talk to me. I guess I matter enough to that stranger to say hello to me. And for some people, that can be a really life-changing moment.

So remember—one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. Because it takes your vision from inside yourself and sends you out into the world. And that shift in perspective can really change how you see life.

As always, thank you so much for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe, hit that like button, drop me a comment about what you’d like to hear. Have a great week, and remember to live the life that you dream of, because that’s the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.