In NLP there are four conditions for well-formed goals:
- Goals need to be stated positively, i.e. you have to figure out what you want rather than what you don’t want.
- You need to know what you feel, hear, see, smell and/or taste when you reach your goal. Otherwise you might achieve your goal without knowing it.
- You need to be able to achieve your goal yourself.
- Your goal needs to be okay for you, your loved ones and your environment.
‘Nothing too much!’ – How often the individual is advised to set himself a goal that he cannot reach and is beyond his strength, so that he will at least reach that which his strength is capable of when put to the farthest stretch! But is this really so desirable? Must even the best performers who live according to this teaching, and their best performances, not acquire something exaggerated and distorted precisely because there is too much tension in them? And when as a result one sees nothing but struggling athletes, tremendous efforts, and nowhere a laurel-crowned and triumphant victor, does that not envelop the world in a grey veil of failure?
Daybreak paragraph 559