Specific
Today we’ll discuss why being specific is essential for purposefully and intentionally moving you towards your goal.
Being specific in your goals offers valuable advantages. Your time and resources are utilized efficiently, your targets are clearly defined, and distractions are minimized because you’re focused.
When you’re able to be specific in your goals, the process of achieving them progresses in alignment with your objectives.
What Does Specific Mean
The dictionary defines specific as:
Clearly defined or identified.
Why Is It Important to Be Specific
Taking action is the biggest step you can initiate when you’re trying to achieve your goals. This makes sense because nothing happens if you don’t take any action. You don’t influence your world if you don’t take any action. As important as taking action is, however, just randomly taking action won’t necessarily move you towards successfully achieving your goals.
Let’s take a simple, real-world example. Imagine you’re at home and you want something to eat. You’re really starting to get hungry and your stomach is making loud growls to let you know you can’t wait much longer. There’s no food at home so you’ve either got to go grocery shopping to prepare food at home, get take out, go to a restaurant, or order something from any one of the food delivery services available.
Taking some sort of action is absolutely necessary if you’re going to satisfy your hunger. Is it enough to say, “I’m hungry? Is it enough to say I want food? Will getting in your car and driving without a set destination help set you on the path to satisfying your hunger? Of course not! You could be driving for hours, wandering around, and all you’d be doing is wasting time and gas. After all that, you still wouldn’t have satisfied your hunger!
I was just being facetious in this example but doesn’t that sound silly? The lack of specificity makes this course of action sound so ridiculous! So in your case, what would you do? You’d figure out what you’d like to have and what you’re craving, decide which option of getting the food you’d like to go with, and then head to that destination to order your items so you can eat!
You see here that by being specific, you are able to satisfy your basic urge to eat. Not only that; by being decisive and action-oriented, you were able to satisfy your hunger in an enjoyable and pleasurable way!
Like any task or goal, you’re trying to accomplish, being specific allows you to be clear not only in the next step but also in the next series of steps towards accomplishing your goals. You wouldn’t decide to get food and then not get off your couch. You wouldn’t get in your car and not turn on the engine. You wouldn’t get your food and just leave it on the table. Everything is very clear as to what steps you’re supposed to take and what comes next when you can be specific about what you’re looking to accomplish.
Being Specific is Nothing New To You
You’ve done it countless times. You’ve been specific with your objectives and achieved your goals more times than you can imagine in the simple act of getting something to eat to satisfy your hunger. In this example, there is no hesitation, no questioning as to, “will I be able to get the food?” Or “will I be able to eat it? Why?
You’ve successfully accomplished getting food so many times, that the small motions involved don’t even require a second thought. It has come down to simply making a decision and taking action.
Why is it that with certain things, you’re able to be very clear and specific? While with other things, you can’t seem to get a grasp on exactly what needs to be done? Often, not being able to get specific about goals boils down to a lack of familiarity. By definition, if you’re trying to accomplish something new, you’ve never done it or experienced it for yourself before. How do you know what to be specific about if you don’t even know what needs to be done?
The good news is unless you’re trying to reach some sort of new scientific breakthrough, that new thing you’re looking to accomplish has most likely been accomplished before. The first step is doing some research to find what information is accessible to you. The resources available to you are immense! From information online and coaches to classes and videos, there is a wealth of experience and insight available to help you come up with a plan to achieve your goals.
By defining your goal or defining what it is you want to accomplish, you can start to look for the information out there. See what order and what sequence things have to be accomplished in. Then create a plan for yourself and start taking action based on your plan and action steps.
How Do You Set Specific Goals?
The whole purpose of being specific when it comes to setting a goal is to be as clear as possible on what you’d like to accomplish. A helpful exercise is to answer the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions. A good tip is to physically write down your answers with a pen and paper.
Asking “who” identifies which individuals need to be involved to help you reach your goal.
Asking “what”, you define the goal or task you’d like to accomplish.
Asking “when” holds you to a timeline and keeps you accountable for moving forward towards achieving your goal, despite what obstacles or distractions may arise.
“Where” helps you define your goals if a location component is present.
“Why” clarifies a deeper motivating factor for wanting to achieve your goal. It’s the reason for and spirit of achieving your goal. A good practice is to ask yourself “why” three times to get to the heart of why accomplishing this goal is important to you.
“How” helps you outline the steps for your success. Answering this question, you’ll start to see your plan forming, and the action steps begin to reveal themselves.
By answering these questions, you will gain greater clarity regarding your purpose for achieving the desired goal and have a clearer idea of the specific steps to accomplish your goal.
Being Specific is Innate
The thinking, writing, and planning involved in defining your metrics may take some time at the outset. However, defining specific metrics to track and measure your progress really helps to smooth out the process moving forward and sets you up for success on the back end.
Being specific may seem tedious at first. It may even seem unnatural. The fact of the matter is, that being specific is actually innate. You’ve been doing it since the day you were born, taking a specific action, crying, to get attention so your mom feeds you. Have you ever seen how determined a baby is when learning to turn over? The baby keeps kicking and trying and reaching its arms out this way and that until he’s able to put all the pieces together to finally flip over.
The same goes for when the baby is learning to crawl and walk. All of their actions are focused on coordinating their arms and legs, controlling their balance, getting back up, and trying each time they fall. Although this baby obviously doesn’t know anything about being specific or setting goals, the baby does have something to do. It has to move! By trying new things, gaining strength, and slowly putting the pieces of coordinated movements together, the baby starts being able to crawl.
Humans have an innate understanding of being specific and an incredible ability to learn!
Reasons Why Being Specific is Difficult
If this is really the case, that we have an innate ability to focus, be specific, and learn, why is it that you find it so difficult to be specific sometimes when setting goals and tasks for yourself?
The fear of missing out is a big reason. We currently live in a time where we have more information available to us than at any other time in history. Social media allows you to see what people all over the world are doing, the things they have, where they’re visiting, and what they’ve accomplished. So many options look so incredible, that it’s hard to decide on any specific one.
You want to experience all of them so badly, that you can’t decide on any one of them and you end up pursuing none of them. The irony of this is, that instead of not being specific and decisive due to fear of missing out, the only way to experience more is by being specific, working on one thing at a time, and focusing on taking something to successful completion or implementation.
You may also experience analysis paralysis from all the available options. Trying to weigh the pros and cons of each course of action or waiting to see what others do can set you on a path to nowhere and a future of being stuck. This happens frequently but you never hear about experiencing analysis paralysis from lack of being specific because there are no results to show for it.
Another big reason you find it hard to be specific is that being specific keeps you accountable. Laying out definite, specific plans sets firm targets for you to meet. It removes any option of coming up with an excuse to not achieve something. For instance, what if work said that you have to come in but they don’t give you a time or a schedule. How do you know when you’re supposed to show up? What will you be doing there and what is the expectation of you when you are at work?
Being accountable to yourself is the most difficult. If you have a side hustle that you’re working on, and you don’t set a specific timeline or schedule for yourself, you most likely won’t get anywhere. There are no specific goals to reach, no specific timelines to follow, and no consequences felt.
You may think that goals and being specific aren’t that important and it’s not that big of a deal to not achieve or not accomplish. However, what’s tricky about learning and accomplishing goals is that the timeline is often so stretched out that you don’t feel the effects of not achieving until much later when it’s too late or takes too much effort to change.
Desire Clarifies Specific Need
Going back to the hunger example, why do you think that action, and more precisely, specific action was taken so quickly? First of all, hunger becomes unbearable after a while and if it’s not satisfying, you can’t think about anything else but eating. If you’re watching this from someplace in the world where food is accessible to you anytime, you’re able to identify what you want to eat and go take care of it immediately. You can even get food directly delivered to you from the comfort of home.
When setting the specific goals you want to accomplish, the element of desire is a powerful motivator to take action. You literally have to have a hunger to achieve a result because there’s no letting up until you reach the goal. When the desire is present, the specifics work themselves out because of your relentlessness to reach an objective.
After identifying and clarifying a specific goal you want to achieve, ask yourself why you want to achieve this goal. Once you’ve identified your reason why you absolutely must achieve this goal, you’ll find it easy to identify specifics.
CONCLUSION
Today, we discussed the importance of being specific in setting goals and tasks. Being specific keeps you focused on what needs to be accomplished, making the most efficient use of your time and resources.
Being specific in your goals is an innate behavior that you’ve had the ability to call upon since the day you were born. What you’ve been able to do naturally and organically for your physical survival, and can also be called upon to achieve your personal, career, or any goal you identify.
To help you set specific goals, answer The Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions about accomplishing your goal and you’ll be able to gain clarity on the specifics of achieving.
Finally, identify the why, the reason that it’s absolutely essential to accomplish this goal, and find the hunger to keep driving you forward.
Like eating is necessary for life, accomplishing your specific goals is essential to living a fulfilling life. We believe that wholeheartedly and we believe in your ability to achieve that!
Thank you for joining us today and we’ll see you next time on the Modern Wisdom Guide.