Almost every piece of advice about setting goals tells you the same thing. Make it specific. Make it measurable. Put a date on it. Decide exactly what you want, write it down in a form you can track, and then go and execute.
It’s good advice, and for a lot of things, it’s the right advice.
But it’s also close to useless for the work I do.
Because in coaching, the goal you walk in with is rarely the goal you walk out with – and that’s kinda the point.
What SMART goals are actually for
The SMART framework – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound – is a good tool for execution. When you have a set target like a certification, revenue number, or a race you want to finish, it’s a sane way to organize yourself and get there. It turns a vague intention into a plan you can act on, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But it helps to remember where it comes from. SMART was coined in 1981 by management consultant George Doran as a way to write sharper corporate objectives. That’s its native habitat: an organization that already knows what it’s trying to achieve and needs everyone pulling the same way, and for the job it was built for, it works.
The trouble starts when you take a tool for executing a target you already have and use it to find one you don’t.
SMART goals can’t help you there, and they can quietly get in the way, because a goal that’s specific and measurable and time-bound feels like progress simply by existing. You can spend a year diligently working toward something that was never quite what you wanted, and the framework will reassure you the whole time that you’re on track and making progress.
The three questions, and why they’re not what they look like
When someone starts working with me, the first three questions are almost always the same:
- What do you want?
- How will we know when you’ve got it?
- Why does it matter to you?
At a glance, that looks like SMART: Define the outcome, define the measure, confirm it’s relevant.
But the questions are designed to do almost the opposite of what they appear to do. Each one is a way of prying the goal open.
“What do you want?” is the easy one to answer and the easy one to get wrong, because the first answer is usually the socially available one – the thing you’re supposed to want, the answer that would make sense to other people if you said it out loud.
“How will we know” sounds like a question about metrics, but I’m using it to set a tripwire: a way to notice, later, the moment the official goal and the real one start to drift apart.
And “why does it matter” is the one that does the work, because the answer is usually where the goal you need has been hiding all along.
So I ask the three questions, and then we hold the answers loosely. They open a conversation rather than forming a contract.
What it looks like when the goal moves
Here’s the kind of thing I mean.
Someone comes to me with a clean, sensible goal: decide, within six months, whether to sell their home and leave the city for somewhere quieter. Specific, measurable, time-bound. Textbook.
We start where we always start, with why it matters. And what surfaces, over a few sessions, isn’t about the city at all. It’s that nothing in their week belongs to them. Every hour is spoken for – by work, by other people, by the low hum of obligations they never agreed to out loud. Moving had become the one lever big enough to look like it might fix that.
Once that’s on the table, the goal looks different.
Leaving the city was a proxy, a stand-in for something they couldn’t yet name, shaped into a relocation because a relocation is the kind of thing you can put on a calendar. The thing underneath it, once it’s visible, turns out to be something they can start on a Tuesday afternoon without selling anything. Maybe they still move. Maybe they don’t. But the move is no longer carrying weight it was never built to hold.
That person didn’t fail to reach their goal. They found the one underneath it.
This happens all the time. The goal set in session one gets revised by session three, not because the person was being indecisive, but because the work surfaced something they couldn’t have seen at the start. Jim Collins has a useful image for the stretch after a part of your life dissolves: a fog you move through, in which the next direction tends to find you sideways rather than head-on, and it’s usually why you feel lost after a big goal.
Each session is less of a checkpoint on a fixed route than a step that moves you somewhere you couldn’t see from where you set out.
Negative capability
There’s a phrase I keep coming back to, from a letter the poet John Keats wrote a little over two hundred years ago. He called it negative capability – the state, in his words, of being in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The capacity to sit inside an open question instead of grabbing the first answer that makes the discomfort stop.
I’ve come to think that’s the real skill coaching builds, but a locked-in goal trains the opposite reflex.
A premature goal is a way to end the discomfort of not knowing. It feels responsible. It feels like motion. But settle on it too early, and you’ve closed the question before the answer has a chance to arrive, then spent your energy chasing a target you picked mainly because picking it felt better than staying unsure.
Holding a goal loosely is harder than it sounds. It asks you to keep moving and stay open at the same time, to act before everything has resolved. That can feel passive, but in practice, it’s the more demanding approach, because you have to do things, learn from them, and let what you learn redirect you, rather than deciding once and then defending the decision.
You don’t need the answer to start
If you came here hoping I’d tell you to walk into a life coaching session with your goal already worked out, I’ll disappoint you. You need much less than that. A rough sense of what’s pulling at you, and a willingness to let it turn out to be something other than what you assumed. That’s the whole entry requirement.
It’s also why, when people ask up front exactly what they’ll get out of this, I rarely have a tidy answer. We find out by doing it, and the finding is often a surprise to both of us. I’ve stopped apologizing for that. It’s the truest thing I can say about the work I do.
What you do get, when it works, is an order of operations that most goal-setting skips.
Clarity first, getting honest about what you want underneath the version you’d give at a dinner party. Then, confidence, which is mostly what clarity feels like from the inside once it arrives. Then communication and action. Most goal frameworks begin at that last step. It belongs at the end, once you know what you’re aiming at.
You can’t run that sequence backward. You can’t manufacture confidence about a goal you’ve never examined, and you can’t skip to clean action while the target is still standing in for something you haven’t named.
So bring the goal you’ve got. It’s a fine place to start. Just don’t be surprised when it isn’t the one you leave with.
That’s not the plan going wrong.
That is the plan.
