Page 163 - Hard Goals

154 HARD Goals

5. So far outside my comfort zone I’m too dumbfounded
to even respond (“I’m in such a terror-stricken state I
can’t even think.”)

This test is pretty subjective and requires a personal judgment
call, but the most effective goals are going to be somewhere
around choice 4. Choices 1 and 2 are way too easy, and choice
5 is way too hard. But choice 3 is getting close, and choice 4 is
right on the money.
If you think back to our exercise at the beginning of the
chapter, you probably said that your greatest achievements were
outside of your comfort zone. You also most likely said that
when you were just starting to pursue that great achievement
you had some doubts about whether or not you’d be able to pull
it off. It’s pretty much defi nitional: if your goal is suffi ciently
easy that you have no doubts about your ability to achieve it,
then it can’t be that important a goal. But if your goal is so
grand that its achievement warrants a mention among the top
few great accomplishments in your life, then it’s going to make
you feel a twinge of excitement, nervousness, or something.
If you answered the above question with choice 1 or 2, it’s a
sign that you need to make your goal another 20 percent more
diffi cult. If you answered with choice 5, make it 20 percent less
diffi cult. More often than not, if you fi xed your goal properly
with the fi rst test (how will this goal stretch you?), then you’ll
need less tweaking here. And thus, you’ll typically need to make
smaller adjustments to your goal (in other words, adjusting by
20 percent instead of 30 percent).
The whole point of this exercise is to get you into that sweet
spot of diffi culty. Because when you make your goal too easy,
while you may hit your target, it won’t be signifi cant enough