Five years ago I would have fixed the Excel.
A colleague needed help. I jumped on a call, walked them through some options, and was milliseconds away from saying “just send it over and I will handle it.” The words were already forming.
I stopped myself just in time.
Not because I did not want to help. Helping is at the core of everything I do. But in that split second I caught myself about to offer the wrong kind of help. The kind that solves the immediate problem but leaves the person no more capable than before. My goal was never to be the person people come to when they need someone to do their work for them. It was to be the kind of support that helps people reflect, identify the real bottleneck, and discover that they are actually capable of solving it themselves.
Taking over that Excel would have felt helpful. But it would have been the wrong kind of help.
That moment was not about a spreadsheet. It was the result of years of deliberately redesigning how I respond to the world around me. And it started with learning how to set the right kind of goals.
The difference between goals that change things and goals that just fill your to-do list.
Most of us have set goals before. Plenty of them. And most of us have also abandoned them, not because we lacked discipline, but because the goals were either the wrong kind or disconnected from anything that actually mattered to us.
Here is the pattern I see most often in corporate professionals. They are exceptionally good at setting goals at work. Targets, KPIs, project milestones — they know exactly how to define success in a professional context. But when it comes to their own lives, they either set no goals at all or they set small, reactive ones. Fix this habit. Manage this stress. Handle this problem.
The issue is not the goals themselves. It is that there is no bigger picture to connect them to.
Setting a goal without a vision is like navigating without a destination. You might be moving efficiently. But you have no way of knowing whether you are moving in the right direction.
This is what the Redesign Loop is built around. Before you can set meaningful goals, you need to know where you are trying to go. Not in your career. In your life. What does a genuinely fulfilled version of your life actually look like? What would it feel like to wake up and know you are moving in the right direction?
Once you have that picture, even a rough, imperfect version of it, everything else becomes easier to evaluate. Including which goals are worth your time and which ones are just keeping you busy.
The SMART framework and the part most people get wrong.
You have almost certainly come across SMART goals before. In a professional context the framework is everywhere. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound.
It works. But there is one element that most people apply well at work and completely neglect in their own lives.
Relevant.
In a professional context, relevance is easy to assess. Does this goal contribute to the project outcome? The metrics are clear. But in the context of redesigning your life, relevance requires a more honest and personal question. Does this goal actually take me closer to the life I am trying to build? Or am I focusing on it because it feels manageable, or because someone else expects it of me?
Let me show you what this looks like in practice using a real example from my own life.
A few years ago I realised that one of the things standing between me and the life I wanted was my tendency to react to every demand, request and expectation around me. I was saying yes automatically, going the extra mile constantly, and wondering why I never had the time or energy to focus on what actually mattered to me. The big vision was clear: stop reacting to my life and start designing it. So I set a specific goal around learning to evaluate before responding rather than reacting on autopilot.
Here is how that looked through the SMART lens:
Specific. Instead of automatically agreeing to everything, take a moment to evaluate before answering. In practice this meant one small but deliberate shift — from an immediate yes to “let me get back to you.”
Measurable. How many times did I pause before responding this week? How much time had I freed up? On a scale of one to ten how stressed was I feeling? Simple measures that made invisible progress visible.
Attainable. Switching from automatic yes to “let me get back to you” to eventually responding from a place of genuine choice is completely achievable. It does not require a personality transplant. It requires a small, repeatable shift practiced consistently over time.
Relevant. This is where the nuance matters. Saying yes was not automatically a step in the wrong direction. Not every request was misaligned with my goals. What was misaligned was the automatic, unconsidered yes. The goal was to create the space to evaluate each request against my own resources, boundaries, capabilities, and short- and long-term goals before responding. To decide whether something fitted into my life rather than forcibly ramming space for it. Every decision made from that place of conscious evaluation was a step toward the vision, regardless of whether the answer was ultimately yes or no.
Time-bound. Implementable immediately. No waiting for the right moment. No excuses.
That is what a SMART goal looks like when it is genuinely connected to a bigger vision. Not a performance metric. A deliberate step in a chosen direction.
Why small milestones are not a consolation prize.
Here is the honest truth about that Excel moment. It was not a dramatic turning point. There was no single day I decided to become someone who empowers rather than rescues. It was the result of hundreds of small, almost invisible choices made in the same direction over a long period of time.
And that only became possible when I let go of the all-or-nothing thinking that had governed most of my life up to that point.
I used to believe that if I could not do something completely and perfectly, it was not worth mentioning. Total success or total failure. Nothing in between counted.
I have literally sprinted up a mountain trying to reach the top faster. It does not work. And it is not a particularly enjoyable experience.
The problem with the all-or-nothing mindset is not just that it leads to more failure. It is that even when it leads to success, the success does not stick. You reach the top of the mountain and feel a rush of achievement. And then almost immediately you are already scanning the horizon for the next one. The feeling disappears before you have even caught your breath.
James Clear captures this beautifully in Atomic Habits, a book I would put on the essential reading list for anyone serious about real, lasting change. His argument is that small, consistent progress compounds over time in ways that dramatic all-or-nothing efforts simply cannot. The goal is not to sprint. It is to build a system that keeps moving you forward even on the days when motivation is nowhere to be found.
For the Redesign Loop this means breaking your bigger vision down into milestones so small they are almost impossible to fail. Not because ambition is a problem, but because success builds momentum. And momentum is what makes the next step easier than the last one.
In my say-no example, every “let me get back to you” was a win. Every time I paused instead of reacting automatically, I acknowledged it. Not with a party, but with a quiet internal recognition that this happened, that this was progress, that this counts.
Those small wins accumulated. The pause became easier. The eventual no became natural. The thinking pattern shifted. And every yes and every no became information. Proof of progress that would otherwise remain invisible.
We are wired to discount gradual progress and fixate on how far we still have to go. Tracking even the smallest wins creates a counter-narrative. It shows you the distance you have already covered rather than only the distance that remains.
The Excel moment was not a decision I made in that split second. It was the natural outcome of all those small decisions before it. That is what consistent, deliberate progress toward a clear vision actually looks like in practice. Not a dramatic transformation. Just the quiet accumulation of choices made in the same direction, one small step at a time.
Where do you want to go?
The question is not whether you are capable of change. You already are. The question is whether you are moving in a direction you actually chose.
Most corporate professionals are exceptional at achieving goals. The problem is rarely execution. It is that the goals they are chasing were never really theirs to begin with. Inherited from expectations, borrowed from other people’s definitions of success, set in reaction to circumstances rather than in service of a vision.
What would it look like to set a goal that was genuinely yours? One that came from a clear picture of the life you are trying to build rather than the pressures you are trying to manage?
Start there. Get the vision clear, even roughly. Then find one small, specific, relevant goal that takes you one step closer to it. Make the first milestone almost embarrassingly small. Track it. Celebrate it. Let it compound.
And if you want support building that vision and translating it into goals that create real, lasting change, that is exactly what the Redesign Loop is designed for.
👉 I’m in!
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