You didn't get that promotion, now what?
If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that writing down your goals works.
Sort of.
Take a look at my 2015 goals when I was in L&D at Deloitte:
– Manage the programme to support and develop unsuccessful Director & Partner Candidates
– Build awareness of the development options available through 121 development conversations
Vague and uninspiring right? More like a task list than motivating goals.
Want goals that work?
Grab pens and paper because I’m going to take you through the three step Think Like A Coach goal setting process.

But first you need a goal to work on.
What do you want to achieve in the next x months?
Be bold, what is something you would love to achieve in a time period of your choice?
For goal setting to work your goals need to be clear and specific, personal to you and reasonably difficult.
For example, “To have 10,000 Linkedin connections by 4th February 2026”.
If all you do at this point is write your goal down then you’ll be doing better than most.
But, these three steps will significantly increase your success.
Make it meaningful
If achieving your goal makes no difference to your life you aren’t going to stick with it so use these questions to make your goal meaningful to you.
– What’s in it for you if you achieve your goal?
– What would achieving this goal enable you to do?
– What would happen if you didn’t achieve this goal?
Make it measurable
You’re more likely to achieve your goals if you track your progress.
– How will you track your progress towards your goal?
– How often will you track your progress?
Your goal might not have a clear metric to track like 10,000 connections. Instead you could try a scale of 1-10 to rate your progress. For example:
– On a scale of 1 to 10, how [confident do I feel presenting in work meetings] right now?
Then ask yourself, Where do I want to be in [one year from now]?
When you check-in with yourself you can ask the scale question to track your progress and then this next question to work out what you need to do next to get to your goal:
– What needs to happen to go one point higher?
Make it memorable
If your goal is not memorable, visible or ideally both, then it will be easy to give up on it when the going gets tough. So ask yourself:
– What would make this goal memorable for me?
Things that have worked for me are:
- I had a picture of a book authored by me on the wall while I was writing Think Like A Coach.
- I had a Spotify playlist called, “I’m going to finish faster” when I was aiming to run 10km in 50mins.
This is just for you so you can go as weird, niche, silly and quirky as you want.
And let me know what you come up with, I’d love to know.