If you’ve read some of my other blogs, especially this one, you know I’m a serial planner. I’m a goal junkie. I have been known to get distracted by doing project planning when I should be executing the project work (I contend: let’s make sure it really has to be done before we do it at all!).

I geek out on organizing big-picture strategies and logistics. There is nothing more beautiful to me than a large, complicated project that is smartly executed.

So, for me, goal setting feels as natural to me as breathing. I adore doing this myself, and I enjoy helping others set and establish goals.

It may then come as a bit of a surprise when I say that a lot of engineers are really bad at setting career goals. At the same time, we often excel in the area of setting employer-related goals. When presented with a project at work, we are able to define the steps from where we are currently to project completion, and work well within any constraints (schedule, budget, etc.) we are given.

Your professional career goals are a bit different because you know neither the desired outcome nor the real (as opposed to imagined) constraints. It seems easier to just go along with whatever goals your employer sets for you, at least until you find yourself laid off or in a role that looks amazing from the outside, but doesn’t feel right for you. We get stuck because the traits that helped us excel in school and in our technical careers so far are often the exact same traits that hold us back when we’re imagining our own career goals.

The creates a catch -22, especially for women. Research shows that women are most often promoted based on experience. Men can be promoted on experience, but they are more likely to be promoted based on potential. Additionally, employer-driven goals often focus on maintenance or improvement of existing skills only.

You can change that paradigm for yourself by establishing career goals, and using every role you have as a chance to learn a new skill that moves you one step closer to those goals.

Our focus on productivity can limit our career aspirations.

For me, a typical Monday morning as a project-manager-who-also-has-technical-responsibilities looked like this: Arrive at work. Get coffee. Look at my to-do list for the week or plan the week if needed, assuming I didn’t get to that before leaving work Friday or on Sunday night. Determine which items needed to be done this week to stay on track to meet project goals. Determine if there are meetings I need to attend requiring either preparation or a presentation. Schedule those important things into my calendar for the week. Check email. Get more coffee. That was the first 30 minutes.

Next, I’d check in with team members working on my projects. Finally, I moved straight into my to-do list. At the end of the day, I’d compare what I needed to get done to what was actually done, and adjust tomorrow’s list accordingly. The more I checked off that to-do list, the happier I was at the end of the day. Go home, rinse and repeat the next day.

That continued until one day, checking off another thing on the list did absolutely nothing for me. All that productivity began to feel hollow and pointless. I no longer felt the same sense of satisfaction I used to, regardless of the fact that I was killing it when it came to goal-achievement at work.

I realized that my focus on getting it done for getting it done’s sake was unfulfilling at best. I recognized that my employer’s goals were not necessarily the same as my own. I knew I needed to change something, yet I couldn’t even begin to start that conversation with my boss, because I had no clue what I wanted.

I had no experience with career goal-setting outside of the confines of an engineering project. Up until that time, my only goal was to do well enough to get promoted to the next new role with more responsibility and higher pay. I didn’t stop to consider alternatives or to even take the time to reflect on what I wanted.

That, my friends, is exactly where we go wrong. We get caught up in our endless to-do lists. We value productivity above all else. We think reflection and dreaming is a waste of time. When we do set goals, we often can’t imagine a world without constraint. Our ability to execute projects within the realities of budget, schedule, and personnel make us great at our jobs while simultaneously making it difficult for us to set the career goals needed to reach our potential.

Ironically, reaching for your potential and throwing off those constraints is where most innovation in our industry occurs. Yet, our schooling and work culture experiences often teach us to work within the confines of the status-quo.

That’s why it is so critical to set your own career goals that are not dependent on your particular employer. It will help you find more fulfillment at work. It will help you develop your unique skillset, professional branding, and the expertise you need to become a leader.

It helps you put the office drama in perspective (does it matter to your dreams?).

It creates a special type of resilience that shields you from the next economic downturn because you’ll be working on developing the skills you need to move towards your own dream. Every new experience becomes one that will lead you one step closer to the life you want.

Setting career goals is the first step to owning your own career journey. In this blog, I’ll share a five step process we’ve developed, based on years of engineering project management work combined with the latest from experts on personal goal-setting, to help you do just that.

Step 1: Reflect

“You can't really know where you are going until you know where you have been.” - Maya Angelou

The first place to start is in reflection. If you’re like me, making time to reflect can seem counter-productive. After all, it doesn’t feel like you’re checking anything off your list.

Yet, one of the most common frustrations I hear from engineers when it comes to setting career goals is that they don’t know where to start. Instead, there is a tendency to ask “what are my options?” That’s the wrong approach. YOU are the only one who can find the right path for you. Other people’s options and other people’s opinions don’t matter here. Stop letting other people – no matter how well-meaning - define your potential for you.

Reflection brings clarity quickly. It’s no wonder that many successful visionaries do things like keep a journal to help them reflect. It can be challenging to make silent space in our schedules to do so.

Writing in a journal is not particularly effective when it comes to setting goals. It’s a great practice that we’ll cover in a future blog, but for the purposes of goal-setting reflection, a systems-based approach is more effective.

Put simply, you are going to audit your calendar for the previous year. Regardless of your intentions, your calendar is how you’ve actually spent your time in the last year. Did you spend your time doing things you enjoy and in ways that allowed you to grow? Did you attend many unnecessary meetings? How about the incidences of those mundane tasks that really should have been delegated to someone else but you completed because “it’s easier to do it myself?” Where did you find joy in work or at home? What do you NEVER want to do again?

To make this reflection exercise practical and quick-to-complete, I have adapted Rachel Hollis’s method of reflection to my own workflow to create a very simple process.

Make three lists as follows:

List 1: The “Awesome” list. The awesome list is the list of things that were enjoyable and worth your time. These are things that positively affect your career and your life. These are the things you want to see more of in the next year. Often, these are things that you can get lost in for hours (hello, my beautiful spreadsheets!), because you enjoy them so much.
List 2: The “Never Again” list. The never again list is a list of things you never want to do again, assuming you have a choice in the matter. These are things that waste your time. They aren’t helping you grow in a direction you seek. They might even be stressing you out.
List 3: The “Good Life” list. This list are things that make you feel like you are living a good life, and typically are not work related. These are things that when you do them, you feel good. You feel you are living your best life. Here’s a few of my own personal examples: long walks, playing tennis, date night with my husband, eating dinner with my family, massages, leisurely meals, nights out with friends, vacations, and mentoring others.

Start one year ago, and look at your appointments for each month. Add those things to the each of these lists. You don’t need to add every single activity to the list (although some prefer to do it this way). Instead, you’re looking for major categories of activities. Note: if you are the type of person who doesn’t schedule everything on your calendar, add things to your lists to the best of your recollection.

Usually, when I create these lists, list three is by far the shortest, and sometimes I need to reflect to add additional items that aren’t typically scheduled on my calendar. There have been years where I got to the end of the year and realized that although I was rocking it at work, I didn’t have any fun. There have been times I’ve thought to myself, “When was the last time I went out with my friends?” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those were the years where I felt the least fulfilled overall. For this reason, these things are going into your calendar first when we reach the final step in the goal-setting process.

So, make those lists. Write down the stuff you want to repeat (The “awesome” list), stuff you do not want to repeat (The “never again” list), and at least 5 things that you want to be doing more of in the next year (The “good life” list).

Step 2: Eliminate

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Leonardo da Vinci

Next, we’re going to eliminate. In last week’s blog, we talked about clearing out mental clutter. We’re going to use a similar approach here. You have to eliminate or delegate as many things as you possibly can from your “Never Again” list in order to make room for those big things you are going to achieve in the next year.

Some of the things on your list are not within your control, but I encourage you to get creative where possible. For one example: I was putting together a committee presentation for a conference. Creating presentations can be a very time-consuming process. So, I talked to the committee members and asked everyone to put together a group of slides and send them to me, so that all I had to do was compile and complete final editing. I’ve done this the other way as well, where I make an outline of all the basic content, put the words only on the slides, and then give it someone else to “make it pretty”. In both those cases, by sharing the workload, I got days back for focusing on my most important work.

If you could eliminate more things on your “Never Again” list, what would you do with that time? How would your life change if you were able to do a lot more things on your “Awesome” and “Good Life” lists?

Once you’ve eliminated and delegated when feasible, it’s time to move into the fun stuff. It’s time to create your new vision for the year ahead.

Step 3: Vision

Now, it’s time to set your own vision for the next year. It’s time for you to think big. Let your imagination flow. Dreams that seem doable are OK, but dreams that would make you want to jump out of bed in the morning, ready to have an amazing day, are what we are after.

A year from now, where do you want to be? Who do you want to be? What sort of life do you want to have?

Two words of caution as you start to think about your vision:

Thinking big and dreaming in possibilities is hard, especially for us technical professionals. It might take longer than you think it will. Why? Because we are really good at dealing with constraints. Our jobs depend on us being able to deliver projects that meet the schedule and budget. That makes it really easy to have a dream in our head that we won’t voice because we immediately judge that dream as “impossible” due to our perception of existing constraints.
Our dreams don’t necessarily follow what we believe to be the prescribed path in our field. That leads to playing small in our lives because of fear. We think, ‘that’s crazy’ or ‘what would people think?’ I experienced those exact thoughts as I considered my dream of writing a book. My subsequent research shows those types of thoughts are far more common in women than men. You might not be able to silence those thoughts, but let’s make 2020 the year you don’t apologize for who you are, and you go after your dream despite your fear.

To make this fun and inspirational, create a vision board. A vision board is a graphical representation of where you want to go. You can do this the old fashioned way, like printing out pictures and making a collage. Or, you can use my preferred method of creating a graphical version and keeping it on your phone. Free tools like Moodboard.com make it easy to create a collage based on inspirational photos you find online, no account required. I create one of these every year and save it to my phone, so I have on-the-spot inspiration when I need it.

If you want to do a deeper dive into step-by-step career visioning, we also have this free workbook we’ve created to help you. Just enter your information below and it will be delivered right to your inbox!

Step 4: Goal

“An average person with average talents and ambition and average education, can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society, if that person has clear, focused goals.” -Mary Kay Ash, Founder of Mary Kay Inc.

Now it’s time to turn that vision into reality. Using your “Awesome” and “Good Life” lists to ground you, what part of your vision do you want to focus on in the next year?

For example, let’s say that part of your vision is to become a recognized technical expert in your industry. You review your “awesome” and “good life” lists. You notice that certain types of work projects appear on the “awesome” list. You notice that “travel” appears on your “good life“list. Your goal could therefore be: “I want to present my technical work at a conference in a place I want to travel to.”

Once you have a general idea of your goal, you’ll want to make it SMART. This goal-setting technique has commonly been used since George T. Doran presented it in the November 1981 issue of Management Review. SMART stands for specific, measureable, attainable, realistic, and timely. It generally means taking your general goal, doing a little research, and adding timelines to it. Because this is a similar methodology to how most engineers set project goals, I’m not going to go into it in detail here. If you are unfamiliar with S.M.A.R.T. goals or need a refresher, here is a detailed article where you can learn more.

For our SMART goal example, you would do some research of conferences online. You would learn that the Grace Hopper Conference is in Orlando, Florida this year. It just so happens that visiting Disney is something you’ve always wanted to do, but haven’t gotten the chance.

Your general goal of “I want to present my technical work at a conference in a place I want to travel to”, is then made into a big SMART goal: “I want to present at the Grace Hopper conference in Orlando on September 29-October 2, 2020.”

You’d next break down that big SMART goal into smaller individual SMART goals. Create a project plan for your big goal. Here’s an example of what your plan might look like for this example:

Create abstract draft for conference by [deadline].
Discuss with manager about submitting abstract and possible employer funding/days off to attend conference.
Ask manager (or someone else you trust) to review abstract.
Receive review comments back from abstract reviewer by [deadline].
Incorporate comments into final version.
Submit abstract draft to conference by [deadline].
Determine back up plan (submit to another conference also?) in the event abstract is not accepted.
Will hear back if accepted by [date]. I will follow up on [date] if I don’t hear back.
Register for conference by [date].
Make travel arrangements by [date].
Create paper or presentation materials. (Give yourself deadlines for these)
Practice presentation [x] times on [x] dates.

As you create your project plan, you’ll start to get excited because you will see exactly how your goal can be achieved. You may even want to make more than one project plan (for example, one for work and one for wellness).

Capitalize on the excitement of putting a project plan together and making your goals a reality by moving directly to the last step in the process before putting away your plan.

Step 5: Habit

The difference between people that achieve their goals and those who don’t is actually very simple: habit.

I shared a story last week about the differences in my successful or not successful weight-loss journey (read more HERE). In retrospect, when I look at both that experience and all the times I’ve been able to do really big things (like writing She Engineers or finishing a massive project), success was the result of small habits executed consistently.

In his book, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, James Clear notes: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” I absolutely believe this to be true. Big goals and dreams do not happen if you do not have a system in place that produces consistent action towards them.

How do you create those habits? Use your calendar (bonus: it makes it much easier to audit next year!) Schedule the following on your calendar in the order listed:

Vacations.
Other “good life” list activities. For me, I need at least one of these per week in addition to daily dinner with family which is a non-negotiable “meeting” for me. That number may be different for you.
Everything in your SMART goal project plan. If you need to move your project plan dates around to avoid your vacations and “good life” list activities, do that prior to finalizing your project plan dates in your calendar.

Keeping those calendar dates with yourself is the way to make big things happen in your life. You are creating momentum when you make a little bit of progress every day through the power of habits. When it’s scheduled into your calendar, you no longer need to rely on willpower or motivation to get it done. Simply treat that “meeting” as you would a non-negotiable, important meeting with your boss, and you’ll be on your way to the career and life of your dreams.