DETERMINE WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - Doable: The Girls' Guide to Accomplishing Just About Anything (2015)

Doable: The Girls' Guide to Accomplishing Just About Anything (2015)

STEP 5: DETERMINE WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE


When Ella Viscardi started her fashion blog, Ella Etcetera, she knew she wanted to take her interests in art, fashion, and music online so she could share them with people. Over time, she realized that her passion for fashion was emerging as the clear focus, and so she shifted her blog to reflect that. But she didn’t necessarily know if or when she’d be successful, nor did she know what success actually meant to her.

“In the beginning, I kind of thought that success was measured by how many followers I had or how many comments I was getting. Today I still don’t have thousands of people reading my blog, but I have been recognized by websites like Teen Vogue and Refinery 29, and for me personally those are huge successes.”

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Ella’s story spotlights what one of the most important, yet often ignored, parts of going after goals is—determining what success or completion looks like. For some To Dos, recognizing success is a no-brainer, but for many amorphous goals, success can live in a fuzzy gray area or, even more tricky, be dependent on what other people think or feel. In order for a To Do to be truly attainable, you’ve got to get über clear on how you’ll know you’ve achieved it. I talked about this briefly in Step 1: Defining Your To Do, but this is such an important factor in achieving what you set out to do that it warrants its own chapter.

What Is Success?

Think about the concept of success. People talk about wanting to be successful in their lives, but what does being successful actually mean? Does it mean making a lot of money or having a fabulous house or car or wardrobe? Or is it about going to an Ivy League college, getting a prestigious degree, and fearlessly rising through the ranks of a fabulous career path? Maybe to you being successful means having a positive impact on the world or living a simple life with a perfect balance of work and play. Whatever it is, your definition of success is likely different from that of your friends and family—it’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. How you perceive success is likely connected to your value system and reflects your personal priorities.

The same idea applies to goals and To Dos. In chapter 2, we looked at the goal of wanting to be a good soccer player. When we applied our technique for making vague goals more concrete, we were easily able to get specific about what we might want to do. We decided that being a good soccer player could mean scoring more consistently; being an expert juggler, dribbler, passer, receiver, and/or shooter; or having enough stamina to last an entire game.

But as we discussed, the only way to know you’ve successfully achieved your goal is to figure out what that definition of success is for you—and only you—in relation to that specific goal. Determining what success looks like shouldn’t be an afterthought of goal pursuing, and it isn’t just for vague goals, either. It is a practice that should be built into every single goal and To Do you work toward.

Let’s see how this Doable step works when applied to real goals. Here’s a list of ten different To Dos that teen girls told me they were working toward when I was researching for this book:

Goal

I want to be on time for work.

I want to improve my SAT score.

I want to learn Spanish.

I want to earn enough money to buy a used car.

I want to make honor roll.

I want to ask my crush to be my date for prom.

I want to change the world.

I want to be nicer to my sister.

I want to travel to NYC.

I want to become a better photographer.

As you can see, some of these goals are more concrete than others, so before we do anything else, let’s apply Doable step 1—Define Your To Do—to these goals so we know exactly what it is these girls want to accomplish. Here’s what this step might look like were we to dig deeper into these goals:

Goal

Defining the To Do

I want to be on time for work.

I want to leave 10 minutes earlier for work so I can arrive 5 minutes before my shift begins … every time!

I want to improve my SAT score.

I want to boost my SAT scores in all three sections by at least 50 points each.

I want to learn Spanish.

I want to go through the entire Rosetta Stone Spanish Level 1 DVD this summer so I can speak conversational Spanish.

I want to earn enough money to buy a used car.

I want to save up $2,000 to buy a used car.

I want to make honor roll.

I want to get all As this quarter so I make honor roll for the first time!

I want to ask my crush to be my date for prom.

(No change.)

I want to change the world.

I want to regularly volunteer for organizations that are working toward eliminating poverty.

I want to be nicer to my sister.

I want to stop yelling at my sister, be more patient with her, and stop getting in trouble for fighting with her.

I want to travel to NYC.

I want to save enough money to take the train to NYC and see a Broadway show before I graduate from high school.

I want to become a better photographer.

I want to take a photography class at the Art Institute this summer and start taking more photos.

Now we can see exactly what each To Do looks like so we can get started. These Doers are ready to take action! Except … we still don’t know what achieving those goals actually means. As you can see from the following breakdown, what a successful outcome looks like is super straightforward for some, while for others, not so much.

Goal

Defining the To Do

What Success Looks Like

I want to be on time for work.

I want to leave 10 minutes earlier for work so I can arrive 5 minutes before my shift begins … every time!

I will not be written up for being late to work once in the next three months.

I want to improve my SAT score.

I want to boost my SAT scores in all three sections by at least 50 points each.

I will get at least a 660 in math, a 570 in writing, and a 600 in critical reading when I take the SATs again in June.

I want to learn Spanish.

I want to go through the entire Rosetta Stone Spanish Level 1 DVD this summer so I can speak conversational Spanish.

I will go through the entire Level 1 program by August 31 and score above 90 percent on all the exercises.

I want to earn enough money to buy a used car.

I want to save up $2,000 to buy a used car.

I will have my car!

I want to make honor roll.

I want to get all As this quarter so I make honor roll for the first time!

I will make honor roll this quarter.

I want to ask my crush to be my date for prom.

(No change.)

I will have officially asked my crush to go the prom with me by May 1.

I want to change the world.

I want to regularly volunteer for organizations that are working toward eliminating poverty.

By the end of the month, I will be a volunteer with an anti-poverty organization in my community and will be scheduled to volunteer at least two hours a week.

I want to be nicer to my sister.

I want to stop yelling at my sister, be more patient with her, and stop getting in trouble for fighting with her.

I will not argue with my sister more than once a week.

I want to travel to NYC.

I want to save enough money to take the train to NYC and see a Broadway show before I graduate from high school.

I will have traveled to NYC and seen a Broadway show by June 15 after my senior year. (Now the question is, what show should I see?)

I want to become a better photographer.

I want to take a photography class at the Art Institute this summer and start taking more photos.

I will have taken the Advanced Photography class at the AI, and I will be taking at least 20 photographs each week and posting them on my blog.

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See what I mean? By taking the time to ruminate on the ideal outcome for each of these examples, success is now a reachable goal—it will be unquestioningly apparent when each girl has achieved success. And when it’s time to get down to business, the girls will know exactly where they’re headed. So don’t skip this step. Do it for every To Do on your plate! I promise it will make the journey toward completion that much smoother, plus you’ll know exactly when it’s time to break out your party pants and celebrate your accomplishment.

It’s All about You

In step 1, we touched on the fact that sometimes you might be working on goals whose success relies on outside factors (meaning, they’re not within your control), and we looked at why it’s critical that achieving your goal is something that’s 100 percent within your power. But if your goals don’t start out that way, have no fear. Just like the way we tweaked the vague goals to make them more concrete, we can also rework the outcomes of goals that are focused on others and turn them back to you.

Here are some examples to help you think about how you might apply this filter to your own goals and To Dos:

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Goals with Outcomes beyond Your Control

Tweaked Goals with Outcomes within Your Control

Getting a book published

Completing a book and submitting it to publishers for consideration

Getting into your dream college

Meeting the application criteria for your dream college and submitting a strong application

Becoming prom queen

Running for prom queen

Images THE CONTROL TEST

If you’re not sure whether or not the outcome of your goal is within your control, ask yourself if achieving your To Do requires one or more individuals, an organization, or a business to:

■ Vote for you

■ Endorse you

■ Hire you

■ Choose you

■ Say yes to you

If the answer is yes to any of the above, find a way to shift the power back to you.

To reclaim power over your goal, restate your To Do so it’s about the pursuit of something (such as pursuing a college scholarship) as opposed to the attainment of it (receiving the scholarship). You’ll go after these kinds of goals with the same drive and motivation as you would any other goal, but this change of focus makes the goal 100 percent within your power … 100 percent doable.

This reframe has been an important consideration for teen scientist and researcher Naomi Shah because so many of the things she’s working on don’t have clear, predictable outcomes—after all, she’s conducting scientific experiments.

“There’s really no one who has done the research that I’m doing,” she explains. “So what I usually do in terms of success is try and define a goal for myself, like, ‘Success is if, at the end of this year, I can have some type of result to share with people who can benefit.’ It doesn’t have to be breakthrough. In research, you can never predict whether your data is going to support your hypothesis. So because of that, you can’t really bank on your data proving what you think it’ll prove.”

If Naomi tied her definition of success to the outcome of an experiment, she’d have absolutely no control over whether or not it could be achieved. So she reframes success in a way that works for her.

See It

When I was in high school, track and field was my thing—specifically, the hurdles. By junior year, I was one of the top 100-meter hurdlers in my county (that’s county, not country!), and I lived, ate, and breathed my race. My particular obsession was trying to convince my less-than-long legs to manage the standard three steps in between each hurdle, which were placed 8.5 meters apart. Four-stepping, which required alternating legs every time I jumped over a hurdle, was what my natural running stride inclined me to do, but I knew I was losing precious time with those extra steps. If I was going to compete with the big girls, I had to find a way to lose that fourth step.

Each year, long before track season started, you could find me doing circuits in the hallway after school. My English teacher, Mr. Bankert, who doubled as a track coach, volunteered his time to help me run drills. Between the drills, the speed workouts, and strength training, I was covering all the bases and doing everything I physically could to improve my chances of reaching my goal. But would it be enough?

Enter Chariots of Fire. I watched the 1982 Academy Award-winning movie (based on the inspiring true story of two track and field runners in the 1924 Olympics) over and over and over, and soon I was obsessed with the signature soundtrack by Vangelis. That soundtrack was the background to my dreams … literally. Each night I’d play the soundtrack and, as I drifted off to sleep, I’d let the music guide me in a visual meditation in which I totally nailed the three-step. I’d picture my race: stepping into the starting blocks, hearing the sound of the starting gun, lurching forward toward the first hurdle, perfectly clearing the wooden obstacle, and then step-step-step-hurdle over the next one. Down the lane I’d go, powering through, feeling stronger with each stride.

This listen-and-dream pattern became my nightly ritual. I don’t think I even realized that I was creating emotional memories and emotional energy that tangibly increased my chances of making my vision a reality. But I did it, and it worked. Though three-stepping between hurdles was something I always had to work hard to do, I did it, especially in the races where it mattered.

Earlier in this chapter, we explored the importance of being specific about what accomplishing our goals and To Dos looks like. I won’t be written up for being late for work once in the next three months, or I will have traveled to NYC and seen a Broadway show by June 15 after my senior year.

But really serious goal getters take their efforts to a whole other level by focusing not just on what accomplishing the goal will look like but also what it will actually feel like— just like I did with three-stepping those hurdles. When you can tap into your emotional side as you pursue a goal, you’re much more likely to reach it.

Not to get all woo woo on you, but there is plenty of evidence out there to show that what we think about becomes what we experience. As Dr. Srinivasan Pillay, author of Life Unlocked, explains, “The brain regions involved in ‘intention’ are very connected to those regions involved in action. As a result, firing up those brain regions involved in intention will start to fire up your action centers.” This is part of the foundation for the law of attraction, the quantum mechanics theory that was made popular around the world by the movie and book The Secret.

Whether you buy into the ideas behind the law of attraction or not, it’s hard to argue with the idea that what we think about becomes our experience, at least on some level. Think about all the Debbie Downers and Negative Nellies you know. Doesn’t it seem like they continue to attract more crappy stuff into their lives, while people who focus on the positive just seem to find more good things to celebrate everywhere they turn? The same idea applies to pursuing goals and To Dos. If we choose to think about how awesome it will feel when we’ve accomplished our goals, we’re much more likely to achieve them than if we were to spend all our time worrying about what might go wrong or picturing ourselves failing.

Think about it—if I’d spent all my nights in high school lying in my twin bed, dreaming of my race, and picturing myself hitting my knee on each hurdle or catching my foot and sprawling out on the track on my hands and knees, what do you think would have been the likely outcome of my races? Two words: track rash.

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Write It

Visualizing yourself reaching your goal can provide that extra energy to propel you toward a successful outcome, but to seal the deal, write out exactly what you want to happen.

Images WRITE NOW!

1. Grab your journal or Doable workbook and flesh out exactly how you’d like the experience to unfold, but with a twist: Write it as if it’s a done deal. So, instead of jotting down what you want to achieve, imagine you’ve hopped in a time portal and emerged three, six, or twelve months down the road. Then write from your future self’s perspective about what you’ve already achieved.

2. Add in lots of details about how you feel having achieved it. This will marinate your thoughts in all that good energy.

For example, if I had done this for my goal of wanting to be a three-step hurdler, it might have looked something like this:

It’s the end of track season, and I’m so psyched that I ran my 100-meter hurdle race at my meets exactly the way I wanted to! Three-stepping in between each hurdle was so much fun, and I felt strong when I did it. I love that I was able to power through each race, and being able to keep up with Mary Gooch at districts was so, so awesome! I’m so happy that I put in all that extra time training and that I reached my goal—it feels incredible!

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Collage It

For visual, creative thinkers, vision boards can be a great way to capture the essence of a goal in an artistic way. If you haven’t seen one before, a vision board is simply a visual representation of the goal you are trying to reach. The most common way to make a vision board is to create a collage of photographs, images, and words cut from magazines that together create a vision of your hoped-for result.

“Something a lot of my friends do is create vision boards, but to be honest I was perhaps cynical of them in the past. I thought just pasting words and pictures of things isn’t going to make them happen, you know—you have to actually work hard and take action,” explains Tammy Tibbetts, who was only twenty-three when she started thinking about her nonprofit. Her organization, She’s the First, sponsors girls’ education in developing nations, giving them the chance to become the first ones in their families to graduate from secondary school. The idea is that they’ll go on to positively impact their villages and the world.

But last year Tammy added the creation of vision boards to her other goal-chasing strategies. “I made this vision board and put it on the wall next to my desk at home, and I have to tell you, it’s like magic. Things actually did start to happen, and it wasn’t because I just glued them to a piece of paper. It’s because I see that board every single day in my bedroom, and it helps remind me of what I want to do… . You can’t underestimate the power of visual reminders.”

Tammy achieved her goal of harnessing social media to create tangible social change. She’s witnessed the impact firsthand, guiding her organization to help hundreds of girls in the developing world be the first ones in their families to go to college. And though she received the Diane von Furstenberg People’s Voice Award in 2013 and was recognized as one of Glamour’s 20 Young Women Who Are Already Changing the World, Tammy has many more big goals to chase, including writing a book and traveling around the world to work directly with the girls She’s the First supports.

Whether you choose to write out your future vision or, like Tammy and her friends, create a vision board, post whatever you create on your wall, on your desk, on your mirror, or in the front of your journal. Just make sure it’s somewhere you can see it often. Then, read through it and soak in the words, or take time every day to let your eyes rest on the images you chose and really feel those emotions that come up. Doing this even once a day will help keep you focused, positive, and inspired about not only what you’re trying to achieve but also why you’re doing it and how you will feel once you’ve accomplished it. And this, my friends, will propel you forward.

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Make your own vision board! It’s easy peasy. All you need are some words, some images, a dream, and a little imagination. Here’s how:

1. Decide whether or not you want to make a vision board on poster board or create an electronic one on your computer.

2. If you’re using poster board, grab some old magazines (ones you can cut up) and flip through them, clipping images and words that somehow connect with your goal. If you’re creating a virtual vision board, search for images online and save them in a vision board file.

3. Make a collage with the images and words on your poster board or virtual vision board, the only rule being that there are no rules.

4. Have fun! Your vision board doesn’t have to be a literal representation of the goal you’re trying to achieve—it just needs to connect with your goal on an emotional level. The point is to create an image that allows you to feel those positive emotions you’ll experience when you’ve reached your goal so you can spend time marinating in that delicious vision every day.

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Write it, draw it, collage it, or just envision it—whichever approach you choose, taking the time to clarify your ideal outcome for your goal will make achieving that outcome much more likely. Do it for each goal, and remember—this is your pursuit, and therefore what a successful outcome looks like has to be defined by you … and only you.


STEP 5 SUMMARY


People constantly chase after “success,” but so few actually take the time to consider their own personal definitions of success or define exactly what successful completion of a goal means. Instead, we tend to get caught up trying to achieve and complete things based on others’ points of view or a fuzzy vision of reaching the other side of a goal. When it comes to pursuing goals, figuring out exactly what successful completion means to you is really the only way to move forward in a Doable way.

Step 1: Define Your To Do Images

Step 2: Detail the Little Tasks Images

Step 3: Defend against Obstacles Images

Step 4: Develop Support Systems Images

Step 5: Determine What Success Looks Like Defining what a successful outcome for any goal looks and feels like isn’t just a nice thing to do if you have the time. It is a practice that should be built into every single thing you take on. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

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■ Make sure your final outcome is something you can measure, track, and check off your list. For example, I will have my car! I will make honor roll this quarter. I will have asked my crush to go to the prom with me by May 1.

■ Doable goals rely on outcomes that are completely within your control. If achieving it means others must vote for you, endorse you, hire you, choose you, or say yes to you, rework the goal. Getting into my dream college becomes Meeting the application criteria for my dream college and submitting a strong application.

■ Visualize and dream about what accomplishing the goal will feel like. By tapping into the emotional connection you have with a goal, you increase your chances of reaching it. Whether you do this by visualizing it while you’re lying in bed, by writing in your journal, or by creating a beautiful vision board, explore the outcome you are hoping for.