Reframing our goals as actions might be the trick that keeps us on track when we tend to procrastinate, struggle to organise, or find it difficult to create new habits.

If you’re anything like me you might have made a gazillion plans to reach certain goals – in business, fitness, or any other aspect of life – only for your bulletpoints list of things to do and steps to complete to be forgotten in just a few days, no action bein taken, pages and pages of paper planners going to waste.

You might have listened to innumerable experts who taught you new ways to decide what you really want and how to break it down into achievable steps.

You might have reframed your definition of success countless times, set intentions for the day, the week, the month, the year and the next and the one after, just to regularly fail to fulfill them.

What it wrong with us?

Perhaps nothing. Perhaps we’re just looking at it from a distorted perspective.

We are defining our goals as outcomes: making x sales/week, this much profit per month, reach this many sales by that specific day in the year – or lose (or gain!) this many kilos by that particular day, fit in that pair of jeans, look like that other person, be fluent in Mandarin, or whatever else we think we ourselves and our lives should look like so that we could feel happy.

Perhaps we might try setting goals in the form of actions: put in this many hours of work/week, find new ways to promote our work, remember why we love doing what we do, go on a walk every day even if just to work or back, resist the temptation to smoke at least once in a day (or to drink, or to eat something unhealthy).

Because as someone said, outcomes are just ideas. Actions are results. If you set an intention in the form of an action, and then go ahead and do the action, you’ve achieved your result. How much more motivating does that sound compared to the endless compiling of lists of outcomes by deadlines that you already know you’ll fail to meet?

Then, the actions will bring the outcomes. But focus on the actions.