Have you ever sat down and thought, “I’ve achieved way too many of my goals. I really need to slow down”?
No? Me neither.
If you’re like most of us, the opposite is true. You did what they said: you set goals, you made them SMART. You even wrote them neatly in notebooks; the kind of notebook that grown ups use. Or maybe you wrote them on loose pieces of paper, which, if you’re like me, you immediately misplace.
So it’s no surprise if you’ve struggled to accomplish your goals. Because what no one ever taught you is the step before the goals. The step of how to choose a goal in the first place.
I mean, how does one go about setting goals anyway? Not just setting goals, but deciding which goals are actually worth setting?
The Illusion of Goal Setting
We’re often told that we need to create goals. Goals, we’re promised, are the gateway to everything in life: career success, financial freedom, a healthier body, a more organized home, a better life.
We look around and see people who seem to move through life with quiet certainty. They know exactly what they’re working toward. They make decisions without spiraling. Their lives look coherent.
And if they can do it, the logic goes, why can’t we?
But for many capable, ambitious women, especially if ADHD is in the mix, the moment we sit down to “set goals,” something doesn’t click. One part of us believes goals matter. Another part freezes. Overthinks.
We might draft a list, maybe even shape it into perfectly worded SMART goals, and then watch them drift to the margins of real life. The gap between what we’re told about goals and how we actually experience them can start to feel like a personal flaw.
But it isn’t.
Because before goal setting, there’s a step almost no one talks about: taking inventory.
Not of tasks. Of life.
Instead of asking, What goals should I set? a more honest question is, What part of my life needs attention right now? What feels strained, unfinished, or quietly begging for care?
“People who say they ‘don’t know what they want in life’ usually haven’t lacked desire—they’ve lacked a structure for noticing where their life is already signaling a need.”
See, people who say they “don’t know what they want in life” usually haven’t lacked desire; they’ve lacked a structure for noticing where their life is already signaling a need. Once you identify the area of greatest strain, or greatest upside, goal setting becomes less about aspiration and more about intervention.
Unfortunately, we learned how to write goals, but not how to choose them. So how are we supposed to know which goals are worth setting in the first place?
The Hidden Skill No One Taught You
Think of anyone whose success feels intentional. A founder. An athlete. A writer. An actor. What they share isn’t just ambition or talent. It’s an unshakable sense of direction. They know precisely what they’re working toward, and their energy isn’t scattered across ten competing priorities.
Yet most of us were never taught this skill. School taught us how to meet benchmarks. Our jobs taught us how to hit metrics. And society taught us which achievements signal success. But nowhere along the way were we taught how to decide which of those achievements to pursue. Which benchmarks actually matter for your life. Which metrics deserve your limited time and energy.
So we set goals we think we should want.
We borrow ambitions that look respectable.
We chase milestones without ever asking where they’re meant to lead.
And without that kind of discernment, goals lose their meaning, and effort loses its direction.
Why “SMART Goals” Don’t Solve the Real Issue
Open almost any productivity book and you’ll meet the same prescription: SMART goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound.
On paper it sounds good, doesn’t it? Scientific almost. Like the the kind of things that should be intuitive to grown and responsible adults.
But the framework was originally built for managers writing performance objectives, not for people trying to untangle real, complicated lives.
And it quietly assumes something crucial has already happened: that you already know what matters most.
SMART criteria don’t tell you which area of your life should take priority right now, what can safely wait without long-term cost, or which goals are responding to real pressure versus borrowed expectations.
The result is familiar: you find yourself creating a list of well-structured goals that still feel disconnected, heavy, or strangely hollow. Not because the format is wrong, but because you skipped the selection process entirely. And this the missing the step.
What SMART Goals Don’t Tell You:
What Should You Do Before Setting Goals?
When was the last time you took inventory of your life? When was the last time you actually sat down and asked,
Which area of my life needs the most attention right now?
See, we never learn how to take inventory of our lives. I never learned that. Have you? Yet this is the missing step, the secret ingredient that turns goals from ideation into reality.
You can have big, aspirational goals. Those matter.
But for those of us who struggle to create goals in the first place, for those of us who never quite knew what we wanted, or where we were supposed to be in life, the most reliable way to finally follow through is to start with need.
To create a goal that is responding to something real. Because when a goal addresses an actual pressure in your life,
a financial strain, an emotional weight, a sense of instability, a quiet knowing that something isn’t working,
it stops being abstract. It becomes necessary.
And necessary goals are the ones we that stick. They create their own momentum because ignoring them has a cost you can feel.
That is what no one ever taught us: how to look across the areas of our lives, take an honest inventory, and let that audit decide what deserves to become a goal.
How An Audit Helps You Set Goals
In the Permission to Achieve™ System, this shows up as the Area of Life Audit—a structured assessment that helps you identify which area of your life (finances, health, work, relationships, or home) needs attention most. It’s designed for people whose mental bandwidth is already spoken for, so the structure does the heavy lifting. While SMART goals help you structure goals once you know what they should be, the Area of Life Audit helps you choose which goals deserve to exist in the first place.
The Area of Life Audit examines three key questions:
- Where is there instability? Finances that feel unpredictable, health concerns you keep postponing, work that’s draining more than it’s sustaining, relationships that need repair, a home environment that adds stress instead of reducing it,
- Where is there sustained pressure? The thing you keep thinking about at 3 a.m. The situation that quietly drains energy every single day.
- Where is there unused potential? Skills, ideas, or opportunities that keep getting pushed aside because “someday” never arrives.
When you answer these questions honestly, your goals become responses to reality instead of decorations on an already overloaded calendar.
Why This Works for ADHD Brains (and Anyone Managing Too Much)
Here’s what makes this approach particularly effective for people with ADHD or executive function challenges: it removes the need to hold multiple competing priorities in your head simultaneously.
When prioritization, working memory, and time perception are strained, everything feels equally urgent or equally abstract. The audit creates an external structure that does the sorting for you. Instead of relying on willpower to remember what matters most, the system decides, and holds that decision stable.
“The audit creates an external structure that does the sorting for you. Instead of relying on willpower to remember what matters most, the system decides—and holds that decision stable.”
The same pattern shows up in people without a diagnosis who are simply managing too much—careers, caregiving, finances, health, and logistics all competing for limited attention. Long-range planning becomes harder not because you’re incapable, but because your cognitive bandwidth is already spoken for.
The audit asks: which single area, if given a clear goal, would relieve the most strain? That question cuts through the noise.
How Do You Choose Which Goals to Prioritize?
First, pause goal setting and run a simple life audit. Scan your life for the area that feels the most strained, unstable, or loudly unfinished. Whether it’s finances, health, home, work, relationships, or something else that keeps resurfacing in your thoughts.
Second, choose one primary area to support for a defined period of time, instead of trying to “fix everything” at once. That area becomes your anchor, not the only thing you care about, but the thing that gets priority when time and energy are limited.
Third, craft a small set of specific goals that directly serve that area over the next 90 days. The horizon is short enough to stay emotionally connected to, but long enough to see tangible progress.
In other words, stop starting with “What should my goals be?” and start with “Where does my life most need support right now?”
From Audit to Action: Here’s what this looks like in real life
Sarah’s audit revealed that her finances were the primary source of sustained pressure. Every decision, whether to replace her aging laptop, whether she could afford therapy, whether to say yes to dinner with friends, carried a background hum of anxiety. So she made financial stability her anchor area.
Her goals weren’t “make more money” (too vague) or “save $5,000” (potentially overwhelming).
The goals were to create a functional spending plan and identify two ways to stabilize income by March 30.
Notice what happened: the audit identified where her life needed support. The prioritization gave her permission to let other areas coast. Her financial goals gave her something concrete to work toward without requiring her to plan her entire financial future at once.
Have questions about choosing goals or starting your Area of Life Audit? See our [FAQ on Goal Selection]
The Permission to Achieve™ approach formalizes that process: audit first, prioritize, then follow through in focused cycles.
When you work this way, goals stop being a test of your character and become a tool for real change. You’re no longer chasing every possibility at once; you’re making deliberate decisions about where your energy goes and why.
Over time, that combination of honest audit, clear priority, and contained focus does something quiet but powerful: it lets your life move forward on purpose, not by accident.
