Speaker offers advice on how to achieve goals through inspiration, not end result

Key takeaways:

• Journey mapping and vision planning help to remind individuals about the purpose behind goals.
• These strategies break down overall goals while using visual imagery and metrics.

Goal setting should be centered around purpose, action plans and motivation rather than the achievement alone, a presenter at the Women in Medicine Summit explained.

According to Stacy Wood, ACC, founder of Through The Woods Consulting, the “why” behind a goal “is the thing that’s going to keep you going when you have a long stretch of time and a tedious hill to get to that goal.”

However, this mindset was absent during Wood’s past experiences with setting goals.

“I wasn’t making progress on any of my goals because I was scattered, spread thin and I hadn’t paid attention to what was under the surface,” she said. “I wasn’t reflecting back on the deep why that brought me... to the goal itself.”

Wood encouraged physicians to implement two strategies in place of traditional goal setting: journey mapping and vision boards, which draw on inspiration and execution.

“Journey mapping is about unpacking what’s there, getting organized, prioritizing what matters and then strategizing on how you’re going to make it happen,” she said.

Wood explained the first step in the journey mapping process is to list all your unfiltered thoughts, which can either be wants or needs in your life.

These thoughts, or “buckets,” should then be organized into groups based on themes, and buckets that are nonurgent or do not strongly resonate with you should be removed.

Each group of buckets will then be given a title, making it a focus area. For example, Wood’s focus area was building a healthy body, which had buckets like drinking more water, walking daily and sleeping 7 to 8 hours a night.

The last step, Wood said, is to create small habits and action plans for each bucket that will help to support the focus priority. These plans should be specific, such as what days and times they will occur.

“We attach the why and the motivators to the little things we have to do because it’s so much easier to commit to them,” she said. “In a sense, your goals become the overall nurturing a healthy body, and these are the tactics to reach your goal.”

Vision planning is then done to help follow through with the actions and goals established through journey mapping. Each focus area’s vision board should display the intention behind the focus group, in addition to imagery, action plans and metrics for every bucket.

Wood suggested vision boards be updated quarterly and placed somewhere where they will be seen every day.

Ultimately, “it’s going to help you maintain that motivation, and it’s going to help you with the implementation,” she said. “They bring together the what, the why and the how.”