If You Want to Be Richer or More Skilled.. Beware!

If you want to be richer, more skilled, have more clients you might need to beware!

And this warning applies to pretty much any goal that ends in ‘-er’  e.g. I want to be richer, thinner, fitter, happier, etc.

It also applies to any goal with the word ‘more’ e.g. I want to be more rich, more successful, more happy, more fit, more skilled, etc.

In the fields of NLP & Neuro-Semantics we have a model called the Well-Formed Outcome model which consists of a handful of criteria that we can check our goals against to make sure that they are ‘well-formed’.  

If we don’t check them against those criteria we potentially have an ill-formed outcome which leads to ill-formed results in our life.

When our goals are formatted in the format of “I want to be more X” or “I want to be X’er” we have set them up so that they can have a perpetual nature to them, which is a major problem!  

In this format they become ongoing, never fulfilled, and impossible to reach an end state.

If I want to be “more rich” or “richer”, how do I know when to stop, how do I know when to evaluate my progress, and how do I know when to celebrate?  

So how do we clean up these kinds of outcomes to make them more ‘well-formed’?

The main two solutions I recommend for these types of outcomes are:

1. Specify the amount and 2. to add a time frame.

For example:

• “I want to be richer” becomes “I want to make $X by Y date”, or
• “I want to make $X at Y frequency (e.g. monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.)”
• “I want to be thinner” becomes “I want to weigh X on the scale by Y date”
• “I want to be more skilled” becomes “I want to develop X specific skills by Y date”
• “I want to have more clients” becomes “I want to have X number of clients by Y date.”

When we take these types of goals and make them specific and put them on a deadline all of the sudden the perpetual nature of the goal goes away and they become realistic, measurable and attainable.

And beyond that there becomes a date/specific time in the calendar where you can check it off and celebrate if you’ve achieved it, or if not you can rethink what you wanted because at the end of the day you made up how much you wanted and you made up the date that you wanted it by!

If you didn’t achieve it in your desired time frame your hypothesis was off so you can just rethink how much specifically and ‘by when specifically’ and start experimenting again!

Of course there are more well-formedness criteria than these two and different criteria will apply to different goals. To learn them all, receive the full checklist, and have me walk you through taking your goals and making them well-formed check out this home study course: https://perceptionacademy.com/courses/goal

Any questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here.