2025 April 1 Actional goals forachievable progress

You can view the original Facebook LIVE here.

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com—the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today as we continue talking about SMART goals. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, or send me a message.

Let’s talk a bit more about goals. As we’ve said before, we’re focusing on carefully designed goals—specifically what we call SMART goals, an acronym we’ll break down.

You might recall we’ve been discussing SMART goals for the past two episodes, and we’re working our way through the five characteristics that define them. Remember, SMART goals are Specific, Measurable—so you can actually track your progress—Achievable or Actionable (which is what we’ll be focusing on tonight), Relevant or Reachable, and Time-based, meaning they have a deadline.

In previous episodes, we covered Specific goals—those that lead to clear, particular outcomes. There's something very specific you're trying to accomplish. Last week, we talked about measurable goals—how they help you track your progress and see how close you're getting to your target. They also help keep you motivated, because it’s always more fun to do something when you can see it’s getting you somewhere you want to go.

Tonight, we’re going to focus on the A in SMART. That stands for Actionable or Achievable—whichever resonates more with you, depending on which aspect is more important in your situation.

But before we dive into that, I think it’s worth recapping a bit of what we talked about in the last two episodes. Specific goals are really focused on a particular outcome. For example, instead of saying, I want to save money, you say, I want to save $100. When a goal is specific, it gives your brain something solid to latch onto. Once your brain has a clear target to work toward, it’s incredibly good at figuring out solutions and helping you get to where you want to be.

Measurable goals are closely related to specific ones because when something is measurable, it gives you a clear way to track your progress, and we often underestimate how important that is. If you think about any large goal you've ever had, there’s usually a point where you feel like you're making progress, but there’s nothing concrete you can point to that confirms it.

That can be a bit deflating. You want to stay excited about what you're doing, but if you don't have a way to say, I’m 22% toward my goal, now I’m 24%, or maybe even 30%—but you’re not really sure where you stand—that uncertainty can take the wind out of your sails.

I’ll come back to this later when we get deeper into the actionable and achievable aspects of SMART goals, but having something measurable is a key part of staying motivated and continuing to move forward.

Now, let’s talk about that A in SMART goals—Actionable or Achievable. These are really important, too. If your goal is too nebulous or undefined, it becomes hard to stay motivated, just like with the other aspects we’ve discussed. Actionable and achievable are really two ways of looking at the same idea—kind of two sides of the same coin. Achievable means the goal is realistic.

It’s something you can actually accomplish within your current resources and constraints. Actionable means you can take concrete steps to start making progress on it—right now. And that starting right now part is really important. If a goal isn’t actionable, you might say, Wow, I should work on my goal tonight, but then realize you didn’t actually define any actionable steps. So nothing gets done.

But if you’ve written something specific down, then when you sit down to work on it, you can open your notebook or pull up a file on your computer and say, Oh, right—this is the next thing I can do. That makes a huge difference in keeping you motivated and actually moving forward.

Now, going back to that idea, a good example is saying, I want to run a marathon by next month. That’s part of the achievable piece. Achievable and actionable are very closely related—two sides of the same coin. Achievable means the goal is plausible for you. So if you say you want to run a marathon by next month, that’s a good goal in theory—it has a clear deadline and a specific outcome—but whether it’s truly achievable depends on where you are starting from.

In reality, if you've never run before, the chances of getting up to marathon level in a month are pretty slim. That’s probably not achievable. But if you said something like, By Thanksgiving—which is a few months away—I’m going to run a 5K, that’s a small race, and while it might still be challenging, it’s probably achievable.

That kind of goal pushes you without setting you up for failure. If you said, I’m going to run a marathon, you might start training, maybe even show up to the race—but the chances of actually finishing it are slim if you're starting from zero. But if you give yourself a few months to prepare and aim for a 5K—which is about four miles—that’s still a big accomplishment, especially if you haven’t been a runner before. It’s something difficult, it stretches you, but it’s within reach. That’s the balance you’re looking for with an achievable goal.

So how do you know if a goal is truly achievable? There are a few questions you can ask yourself. One of the first is: do you have the necessary resources? If your goal is to start running, you basically need a good pair of running shoes—pretty straightforward. But if your goal is something like learning to play the piano, then you need to ask: do you even have access to a piano or keyboard?

Because if you don’t, it’s probably going to be pretty hard to actually play the piano. You can practice on a desktop or pretend keyboard, but it doesn’t give you the same kind of feedback. You don’t know if you hit the right note when you’re just imagining where the keys are. So the question is, do you have the necessary resources to follow through on that goal?

And then, for other types of goals, it may not be about equipment at all. Maybe your goal is something like, I want to travel to Europe for six months. Okay—do you have the savings to do that? Or, do you have a plan to save enough money? Do you know how you’ll support yourself while you're there? These are the kinds of practical things to consider when evaluating whether a goal is truly achievable. So we’ve got to have our ducks in a row when it comes to whether we really have the resources to pursue a goal. 

Secondly, do you have the skills that are needed? We touched on this last week—using your skills and building on them. For example, you want to become a consultant in your retirement. Maybe it’s just something new to do, a way to stay engaged and help other people with complex projects. That’s great—but one of the key things you need are the actual skills to do what you're hoping to teach.

If you’re retiring from a job and can leverage the experience and skills from your career, then that’s a great fit. But if it’s something completely new and you don’t really have the background yet, then you have to step back and ask, How can I be a consultant in something I don’t know enough about?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that—but it means you’ll need to get some training, build your knowledge, and develop those skills. That has to be part of your planning. You need to factor that into your schedule and into your broader outlook for how you're going to achieve the goal.

And third, do you have control over the outcome? This one’s a bit more subtle, but it’s really important. A lot of times, we include goals that are actually based on things outside our control, and we forget that.

For example, if your goal is something like, I want my child or grandchild to get straight A’s in school, that’s understandable, but you don’t actually control that outcome. You can influence it, sure—but you can’t directly make it happen.

What you can do is set a goal that helps move things in that direction. So instead, you might say, I’ll help my child with their homework for 30 minutes every day. That’s something you control. It supports the desired outcome, but the goal itself is based on your own actions.

The key is to make your goal something you can control. You can’t guarantee a result, but you can commit to actions that make the result more likely. That’s how you stay empowered and keep your goal truly achievable.

You may want a specific outcome, but just wanting something doesn’t mean you control the factors that go into it. For example, if the child just isn’t interested in the course you’re trying to help them with, then realistically, they’re probably not going to get straight A’s—no matter how much you want it.

In that case, it’s not the outcome that’s wrong, it’s that the goal you set was based on someone else’s actions. And that’s where the problem lies. Your goals have to be based on your actions—on things you can control.

Even if you want a goal that’s really big—like I want peace in the Middle East, which is obviously a huge and important goal—you can’t control that outcome. But you can control the actions you take that might contribute to that outcome. Maybe it’s promoting understanding in your own community or learning more about conflict resolution. Those are things within your reach, and that’s where your goals should live.

That’s where you have to differentiate between those things. You have to focus on what you can influence—like teaching your grandchild how to do better at math—rather than trying to control something like their final math grade. And then, ask yourself: Is the timing realistic? We often underestimate how long things take.

I know I do that a lot. I do a lot of project work, and I have my own internal method. Usually, I start by making an estimate: best case, worst case, and likely outcome. Then I work backwards from that. I usually apply a pretty large multiplier because, from experience, I know I’ve already tried to think through all the factors I believe will affect the outcome.

But in reality, things just have a way of taking more time than you expect. Your goal shouldn’t be completely derailed by something small. You have to build in enough time to make sure your timing is realistic.

Take something like writing a family memoir. You might think, Oh, I should be able to knock that out in a couple of months—six at the most. But maybe instead, give yourself a year. Or at least, if you hit that six-month mark and you’re not done yet, appreciate the progress you’ve made. Say, Okay, I’m not quite where I wanted to be, but I’ve made progress. Now, what can I do to finish it from here? 

It’s really important that when life causes things to change, your goals are flexible enough that you can recover without beating yourself up. But that’s not to say your deadlines and timelines don’t matter—they do. It’s just that when things don’t go as planned, it should be something you learn from, not something you use to criticize yourself.

We’ve talked about this a lot—how you don’t want to talk down to yourself because that’s not motivating in any way. But it is a good opportunity to reflect. So maybe next time you set a goal, you think, Hmm, I believe this will take three months, but then you remember, Oh right, last time I forgot how long it took just to get things set up and rolling.

Learn from when things don’t go quite as expected, and be ready to adjust as you go. That doesn’t mean you should set super easy goals just so you always hit your timeline, but you do want to stretch yourself a little. You want to reach into that slightly difficult area that helps you grow—but not so far out of reach that you get discouraged and give up. Remember, the whole point is to move yourself forward on your goals and in your life. It’s not about beating yourself up. It’s about finding a way to move forward that works best for you.

So instead of saying, I’m going to write a bestselling book in six months, take a step back. Even if you have some of the skills—say you used to be a teacher and you’re used to writing all the time—but that writing was mostly short pieces, like lesson plans and things like that.

Now you're trying to do this whole big book—it's a different thing. So you have some of the experience that you would need, but you don’t have all the experience. Again, you want to set yourself a challenging goal, but it has to be realistic.

So let’s talk about actionable. Actionable is the other half of achievable. And an actionable goal—the big hallmark of an actionable goal, which we talked about a little bit before—is that it has some concrete step or some particular thing that you can do—something you can actually do as the next step to move forward toward your goal.

It's not big, it's not theoretical. It's not, Well, I'd like to lose weight, or I'd like to travel, or something like that. It's, I'm going to go out and buy nothing with sugar in it. It's, I'm going to sit down and look at plane fares and decide how much money I have to save so I can take a trip across the country.

Whatever it is, it's something that's very actionable. So when you've set aside time to work on your goal, you have something very specific you're trying to do. It's not some amorphous thing like, Oh, I should probably spend some time, and then you kind of wander around on Travelocity or Google Flights for a while and don't really make any progress on anything.

It's the very next step—that's an actionable goal. It's a very specific action or task. And remember, we talked about specific very early on, as the basis of SMART goals. It has to be something very specific, and what that does is lead directly into making actionable steps to reach your goal.

Another example might be something like, Well, I want to be more active in my community. I’d like to be more involved with the people around me. Totally vague goal. What does that even mean? It could be anything—from walking out your door, saying hi to somebody walking by, and boom—you’re done. Reached your goal. Done. Yay. All done.

But saying something like, I’ll volunteer at the food bank every Thursday for three months—that’s something where you know what you intend to do, you have a way to measure it, and you actually go on and do something very specific.

Again, the big part about actionable is that it’s something very specific, so you know exactly what it is you have to do next. I say the big test for whether a goal is actionable or not is can you answer the question, What is the very next step I need to take to move forward on that goal?

If you can’t answer that question pretty straightforwardly and immediately, your goal probably isn’t actionable enough—because you’re trying to figure it out as you go, and that’s not a great way to get things done.

So, let’s say you want to declutter your home. We all tend to accumulate stuff, some more than others. This one’s drawn from personal experience. The big goal can feel overwhelming.

Say you’ve lived in the same house for many years—decades, whatever. The kids were there, they moved out, and over time, you just accumulated stuff. Then one day you wake up and think, Holy cow, this place is just full of stuff. I mean, it’s full of stuff.

To make it actionable, you’ve got to break it down into little steps. So, you might say, I’ll clean one drawer. I’ll start with one drawer in the kitchen or whatever. After that, you move on to the next small step. Like I said, this is a real-world example from my own life. My house has become a series of little piles of papers that I’ll take care of tomorrow.

Just by nature of my work—both this work and my day job—I’m an engineer. I accumulate a lot of paper—and I mean a lot of paper. Plus, running my own business, you accumulate a lot of paper for that, too. There’s just a lot of things to keep track of, and everything is semi-neatly sorted into little piles—but there are a lot of little piles. Because if you're always going to clean it up tomorrow, eventually, after enough tomorrows come and go, you’ll find that pretty much everywhere you sit is just covered with papers.

So instead of having this huge, overwhelming cleaning goal—like, That’s it, I’m going to clean the entire house, the basement, garage, everything all at once—if you break things down into these little, nonjudgmental, small steps, progress becomes pretty much self-rewarding.

I found that when I did that, I was more likely to spend 10 minutes making a little bit of progress on something, because I never had to feel like I didn’t have enough time. If you set a big goal like, I’m going to clean the entire kitchen, and that includes clearing all the counters, washing the counters, cleaning the fronts of the cabinets—you can start to feel overwhelmed.

It's kind of like, Wow, that's like a weekend's worth of work. And then it's like, well, I don't have a weekend, 'cause I have other things to do. So you never get started on it. But if you walk by and say, that section of the counter has magazines I meant to read two months ago, and you clean up that section of the counter, then the next time you walk in, you go, you know, the place looks a little better.

Then you say, I'm gonna clean that little pile over there for five minutes. And maybe you don’t get through the whole pile, but you clean a little of it. Now you've made some more progress. Next time you have five minutes, you finish it. And then you're kind of like, Huh, now two sections of the counter look better. So I break things down like that.

The big bonus is it's kind of non-judgmental. It's not like, Oh, if I didn’t get the whole pile done, I failed. What you're looking for is incremental progress. And by doing things in little steps, you always get those little bits of incremental progress.

But the other really big bonus that came around—just totally kind of snuck up on me.

I don't know why, but the second big bonus is that sometimes—unexpectedly—I look around and go, Wow, all those little steps added up into something really significant that, beforehand, I thought was just this insurmountably large goal.

In this particular case, I had cleaned out some shelves in the kitchen and temporarily put everything in the hallway next to it. Then I cleaned out some stuff in the office and also put that in the hallway to sort. I did a bit of sorting the papers, bit by bit, took everything I had taken off the shelves in the kitchen, either discarded it or put it back in the shelves in an orderly way.

And the other day, I was walking down the hall and thought, huh, the hallway is completely empty. Suddenly, the poor dog walked in like, what, are we moving? What’s going on?

But I wasn’t even looking at the hallway as my goal. I mean, that was kind of the underlying goal, but if I’d said, it won’t count until I clean the whole hallway, it would’ve been a huge job. It would’ve been this slow trudge through it for days. And I’d be wondering, am I making progress on my goal?

But since my goal was just to clean little stacks of paper and clean up the stuff in the kitchen—discard some of it, recycle the bottles and things like that—I actually made real progress.

All those—each one of those—was a goal that I reached. Then I turned around and thought, Wow, suddenly the big goal happened, just because I kept pushing steadily and slowly on the same thing.

Be careful about non-specific goals. Non-specific goals are good intentions, but The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Wanting to be more involved with something is far different than actually setting a goal and saying, This is how I can be involved in something.

And like I said, don’t forget the S in SMART goals—the specific part. That has a huge impact on making things actionable.

Achievable and actionable, as we’ve kind of hinted at, they work together. A goal that’s achievable but not actionable just kind of stays this vague concept or dream. Because if there’s nothing you can actually do—no clear next step—then even if the goal seems like it should be achievable, you never make any progress on it.

The converse of that—if you have something that’s actionable but not achievable—well, that just kind of leads to frustration. Yes, you can go out and run a couple miles, but if you're thinking you're going to run a four-minute mile and that's just not something you're physically able to do, you're just going to get frustrated.

So the two of them really work hand in hand. You need both achievable and actionable—the proper balance—to allow you to make progress and lead you toward success.

But there are a couple of common mistakes that come around pretty often. One of them is what I like to call the New Year’s Resolution Syndrome. That’s when you get all excited, you’re going to make these goals, and then you set too many goals at once.

So you have all these goals you’re going to do—I’m going to change how I eat, I’m going to change how I exercise, I’m going to change how I save money—and you’ve got five or ten major things you want to tackle all at once. It’s just too much. You lose your focus. And if you don’t focus your energy in just a few areas, you’re probably going to get discouraged, because when you look at the whole picture, it’ll seem like you’re not making progress on anything. You are—you’re making tiny bits of progress on a bunch of things—but it doesn’t feel obvious, because you’re trying to do so much at once.

Second, avoid being too vague. I’ll eat healthier isn’t an actionable goal. You’ve got to break it down to the very next step. What’s it going to be? I’m going to eat three balanced meals this week. Okay, then the very next step is I have to buy the ingredients to make a balanced meal.

And part of that is, I’ll prepare three balanced meals and they’ll have a vegetable in them. So now you know, I have to buy some things, and I have to buy a vegetable. Totally actionable. You can go to the store, you can look up a recipe online—whatever it is, you know the next thing to do.

It can’t be vague. It has to be very specific and actionable. It gives you clear actions to take. Don’t set goals based on what other people think. It has to matter to you personally. It has to be something that really ignites your passion, something consistent with your vision and just your passion in life. It has to move you forward. It can’t be what somebody else said you should be involved in. They can say whatever they want, but if it’s not something that matters to you, you’re not going to be able to put in enough heart and effort to really make it succeed.

Finally, don’t be too binary. I know—for the longest time I suffered from this—and I’ve worked very hard to move away from it. But binary thinking is that all-or-nothing sort of mindset. It’s like, I’m going to do this, and if I don’t, it’s a total failure.

Going back to my hallway example—I’m going to clean the hallway, and a week later, the hallway isn’t clean, and there are still a couple of papers left there. So it’s like, that’s a failure. I might as well give up because I can’t make any progress. But if you take little teeny steps, then progress happens in each of those little steps, and that keeps you motivated. It’s not a binary thing.

It’s more like, Wow, I really thought I could put in 10 minutes today and I only got five. Then you’ve got a little subtask there: How can I set aside another five minutes tomorrow so I can make progress faster on my goals? Try to avoid that all-or-nothing syndrome, because if you don’t, it’s very easy to get discouraged.

By being a little more flexible in how you set your goals, it really helps keep you motivated and allows you to tackle much bigger tasks—because it’s the incremental progress that keeps you enthused about it.

So, that’s really what I wanted to cover tonight on the A part of SMART goals—the actionable and attainable part of it. A lot of us are reimagining our lives as we get older. Really, throughout our lives, we do this. We just tend to focus on it more as we age—that’s probably one of the big things we talk about. But in reality, even when you’re younger, you reach different points in your life.

You know, you’re in your early to mid-twenties, and you decide, This is something I really want to do, and you shift your focus a little. So we’re always reimagining what we want to do with our lives. I think it’s really important to remember that SMART goals work at any point in your life.

They’re helpful tools to turn your dreams into reality. It’s a simple framework—a simple methodology—that takes a lot of the mystery out of setting goals. Because a lot of people set goals—and just to go back real quick to that New Year’s Resolution Syndrome—most of the goals people set on New Year’s Eve are probably the worst goals in the world.

They’re too big, they’re not specific, there’s no way to measure if they succeeded or not. People set ten goals all at once—it’s just a total mess. And they quickly don’t reach the point they want to reach. Then they get discouraged with themselves, and the negative self-talk starts. You’ll never amount to anything. You’ll never do anything.

There are far better ways to approach that—ways that give you more power. More power to yourself, so that when difficult things arise in life, your whole world doesn’t fall apart. Maybe one aspect of your life gets pretty upset—but if you have a process in place, something that gives you momentum to get through it, then you realize it was a setback, not a total disaster.

You learn something from it. You learn how to get past it. And that’s one of the key things about SMART goals. It’s just a tool. There’s nothing magic about it. It doesn’t make things happen that couldn’t happen other ways—but it gives you a very simple framework to help you move forward toward the things that are important to you, that really play into your life vision, your passion, and help keep you motivated.

And like I said, the achievable and actionable parts really ensure that you’re being realistic and practical in your approach. It helps prevent you from getting into a situation where you set unrealistic goals and then end up disappointed in yourself—because that doesn’t really help you at all.

So when we combine all the other parts of SMART goals—specific and measurable, which we’ve already covered—and then relevant and time-based goals, which are coming up in the next couple of episodes, I think it gives you a really powerful framework for creating meaningful change in your life. It helps you move forward and really get to the point where you want to be.

Because remember, the whole point of this isn’t just to put up with things. It’s about making progress toward the things that matter to you.

SMART goals are one step in that. Envisioning your life is another whole topic we’ll talk about—that’s another specific piece. How to re-envision your life is something we’ll dive into. And there are tips and tricks to help you with that, to help your brain get on board. 

We're going to pull all of that together more clearly. And all these different elements we've been talking about—they’re just tools to help you get to the point where life feels more enjoyable, no matter what your circumstances are. You don’t have to be independently wealthy, trying to figure out how you’re going to spend all the extra money you're making every year, in order to be happy.

In fact, there are a lot of studies that show that things like wealth, by itself, or getting something special, by itself, doesn’t bring happiness. What really brings happiness is making a change in your life in a positive direction.

So, your homework this week is to take one goal that you’re working on—you know where this is going—and evaluate it. First: is it truly achievable given your current situation? And second: is it actionable? Can you identify the very next step you have to take?

Now, we’ve talked about this in pieces before, but I really want you to focus. Take a non-trivial goal you’ve been thinking about. It could be something related to your retirement, something related to your family—it could be anything at all. But non-trivial is the operative word here, because if it’s something that doesn’t get your attention, it’s unlikely you’ll ever actually do it.

If it’s something that’s really important to you, something that’s been on your mind for a while—that’s actually a really good goal to work on.

You’ve been thinking about it for a while, but you haven’t really made much progress on it. Take that goal—and hopefully you’ve already gone through the specific and measurable parts from the past two weeks—and now add the actionable steps to it.

First, make sure it’s achievable. And presuming that it is, set the actionable next steps you’d have to take. And remember, the next step doesn’t have to be some monstrous thing. Like we said—if you’re planning a trip in two years, the next step might be looking up plane fares, or checking when people say is the best time to buy tickets. Or maybe it’s figuring out where the most fun or most economical place to go is.

Whatever it is, just take the very next actionable step. Do those. Write them down. Keep track of it—we’re going to do more with that. And if you haven’t done the same thing for that same goal with the specific and measurable steps, go back and do that too. We’ll work it all out together.

So as always, please remember, there’s a lot going on in the world right now. We have a war in Europe. There’s unrest on basically every major continent right now.

There’s a lot going on. UKR7.com is our list of links to help people in Ukraine, which is one of the big areas we support. World Central Kitchen is another at WCK.org. They work all around the world, helping people after disasters. We've just had a couple big disasters in Asia with those earthquakes. It’s made a real mess of large areas—thankfully not a lot of deaths—but still devastating.

These two organizations bring a lot of good into the world. They help a lot of people. But as we always talk about, there are a lot of ways to help people. These are big national and international organizations, and that’s great. But there are also local organizations.

Around me, for example, there’s a food bank. Maybe you’re just not in a position—or not in the mindset right now—to make donations. Totally understandable. But remember, you can always do little small things that make a huge impact.

I just heard this on the radio while I was traveling for work, and a woman was talking about her work in a school. I’ve heard other people say similar things: how much just interacting with the kids—especially kids who come from troubled backgrounds—can mean.

And she tries to bring a little joy into their lives—and usually, they respond so positively that it ends up bringing joy into her life, too. It’s easy to forget how much benefit we get from small acts like that. And this isn’t about making it all about us, but people say, Well, I don’t really have the energy to go around saying hi to everyone I meet.

Actually, you probably do. Just this morning, one of the people who works at the place where I’m doing work right now. I don’t really know this woman well. I’ve met her two or three times when I’ve passed through because I work there occasionally. She saw me—she was driving out—and I gave her a big smile when I saw who it was. She smiled, and that was it. I smiled at her. It wasn’t hard.

When I got back, she gave me a huge smile and a big wave. It lifted me up for the morning, too. So what you give comes back, and it’s just a good way to change your focus—from looking inside at all the things you don’t like about what’s going on right now—to bringing joy to someone else. And realizing, You know what? I really do have the power to bring joy to the rest of the world.

So again, as always, remember that one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. It changes your perspective on the world in a very positive way. If you can, and you’re able, UKR7.com and WCK.org are two great places where you can donate on a national or international scale—and of course, don’t forget about your local charities, too.

Just smiling at somebody on the street—just acknowledging them. Anything. Wish them a good day, wish them a good morning, just make eye contact. A lot of times, people feel like nobody in the world notices them. And something as simple as catching their eye, smiling, nodding—whatever it is—just acknowledging that they’re there as a person can completely change their outlook on the day.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please leave a like, subscribe, and drop me a comment—let me know if there’s something else you’d like to hear.

Have a great week. Remember to live the life you dream of, because that’s the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and at 7EveryMinute.com.