Authentic Goals

Updated: February 2024

Sometimes we’ve got clear goals in life, sometimes we don’t.

This exercise is for the latter times when it’s hard to know where to focus. It’s a worksheet in a series of stages designed to get to good goals by starting from first principles.

It works best when taken one step at a time. I’d encourage whoever it taking it to not look ahead at the slides, but to take it one step at a time, and move on to the next step only once the current step is well considered. If you need to do a lot of introspecting, this might take a couple of hours or multiple sessions.That’s ok! The more more “back-burner introspection” the better the results will be.

If you’re running this for someone, it can work well to have them talk and you do the typing. I’ve found that that level of indirection tends to give people a better perspective on what they’re thinking and makes them more likely to hone an idea down to what they really want it to be. If you’d like to talk through this, I’m happy to chat about running this for others, or help you set your own goals.

Authentic Goals