Sandra Yeaman

Audacious Goals – Let’s make some goals! Let’s make them SMART and BIG!

Hoo-boy. This one is tough. I have some big goals, even audacious ones, but the idea of writing them down as SMART goals, well that’s just plain scary, like climbing up a mountainside scary.

Any goal I can write up as a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused, and Time-bound sentence is too small for me to consider audacious.

For example, I plan to travel to Norway in 2018. So my goal is to read the relevant sections (covering Oslo, Lillehammer, Røros, and Trondheim) of my DK Eyewitness Travel Guide on Norway (specific and achievable) and make a list of the ten places (measurable) in each location that I must see on my trip (results-focused) by April 1 (time-bound).

But I think of audacious goals as ones so big I need to keep them in my mind for a time while I chip away at them in order to find the smaller chunks that I can handle and define as SMART goals.

For example, I know I need to have at least one additional novel outlined in my head before I begin the process of seeking representation for, or deciding to publish independently, my current work-in-progress. I consider that an audacious goal because I need to do a lot of work–research and thinking–before I can choose which of the many stories hiding in the corners of my brain I should work on next. I can’t make the goal specific yet.

What I can do is make a list of all the little steps I think I need to complete–reading more books about the places of each potential story, listening to the tapes my great-uncle made about his experiences in one of those places, finding images of the places to augment my memories so I can describe them. But a list is not a goal.

For now, I will settle for making lists. I just discovered the Tasks and Reminders options in my Google calendar where I can save those lists.

Photo credit: Redd Angelo