Making Goals Real

Before you build a goal properly, you need to make sure it actually exists.

That sounds strange. Of course your goal exists. You can think about it. You can feel it. You can describe it in a sentence.

But can you see it? Can you picture yourself doing something specific when you’ve achieved it? Can you point to it in the real world?

If the answer is no, you don’t have a goal yet. You have a nominalisation. And nominalisations, however compelling they feel, are one of the most reliable ways to ensure a goal never gets anywhere.

What a nominalisation is

In language, a nominalisation is a verb or process that’s been turned into a noun. A doing word converted into a thing. The problem is that the thing it creates doesn’t actually exist in the physical world.

Confidence is a nominalisation. So are happiness, success, motivation, fulfilment, and stress. You can’t hold them, measure them, photograph them, or point to them across a room. They’re processes that have been frozen into objects, and they make terrible goals because your brain has nothing concrete to act on.

People fall into this trap constantly. I want more confidence. I want to be happier. I want less stress. I want to feel more fulfilled.

These feel like goals. They’re not. They’re descriptions of internal states with no clear picture of what achieving them actually looks like.

How to de-nominalise a goal

The fix is straightforward. You take the abstract noun and convert it back into a process. You ask: what would I be doing if I had this? What would I see, hear, and feel? What specific actions or situations would tell me I’d arrived?

Take confidence as an example. I want more confidence is a nominalisation. Ask: what would I be doing if I were more confident? Perhaps you’d be speaking up in meetings without rehearsing everything first. Perhaps you’d be approaching new people without the internal negotiation that currently precedes it. Perhaps you’d be applying for roles you currently talk yourself out of.

Any of those is a real goal. A specific, visualisable, actionable destination. I want to speak up in meetings without rehearsing everything first is something your brain can work with. I want more confidence is not.

Do this with every goal that’s framed as an abstract noun. Ask what doing it looks like. Then use that as your goal.

Why visualisation works — when it’s the right kind

This isn’t a contradiction of the last article. Imagining that you’ve already arrived is what drains your drive — that’s exactly what Oettingen’s research on mental contrasting showed. Imagining yourself doing the work is rehearsal, and rehearsal is what builds the pathway. Visualise the process, not the podium.

High achievers across sport, performance, and business have used visualisation for decades. The reason it works is neurological, and the research behind it is about process, not outcome.

Research by Pascual-Leone and colleagues demonstrated that people who mentally rehearsed a sequence of actions showed similar neural changes to those who physically practised it. Vividly imagining an action engages many of the same neural pathways as performing it — which is why rehearsal in the mind has measurable effects on performance in the body.

This means that when you visualise yourself doing the specific actions your goal requires, repeatedly and in detail, you’re not just motivating yourself. You’re literally rehearsing. You’re building the neural pathways. Training the patterns. And when the real moment arrives, those pathways are already established.

This is also why the goal has to be concrete and specific. You can’t visualise a nominalisation. Try to visualise confidence and you’ll get a vague warm feeling. Visualise yourself walking into a room full of strangers and striking up a conversation, and your brain has something to rehearse.

What effective visualisation looks like

Most people who try visualisation do it too vaguely to be effective. They imagine a general sense of having succeeded. A fuzzy picture of being somewhere better. That’s not enough.

Effective visualisation is specific, sensory, and repeated — and it’s the doing, not the arriving. You need to see the actual scene. Where are you? Who else is there? What are you doing with your hands? What can you hear? What does it feel like in your body?

The PETTLEP model developed by Holmes and Collins recommends making mental rehearsal as physically, environmentally, and emotionally realistic as possible. The closer your imagined scenario matches the real situation, the more effective it becomes. So don’t just imagine crossing the finish line. Imagine the weather on the day. The sound of the crowd. The feeling in your legs at mile twenty-four. The closer to reality, the better the rehearsal.

Do this repeatedly. Not once, before you’ve forgotten about it. Daily, if the goal matters. The emotional response to a vividly imagined scene is remarkably similar to the emotional response to a real one — which means feeding your mind specific, positive, detailed images of yourself doing the work starts preparing you for that work.

Priming yourself for the goal

Most of what shapes your daily behaviour happens without you consciously deciding it — habitual patterns, half-noticed cues, the small choices that add up over a day.

Vague, abstract goals give that machinery nothing to work with. Specific, vivid images of you doing something concrete give it a great deal. Feed it positive, specific visualisations of the actions your goal requires, and you start noticing opportunities, making small decisions in its favour, and behaving, in small ways, like someone who is already moving toward it.

This is the same mechanism behind the article on focusing on what you want. What you focus on internally shapes what you notice and act on. Positive, specific, concrete goals give you the right material to work with.

Making it stick

The combination of de-nominalisation and process visualisation does something important that goal setting alone doesn’t. It makes the goal feel real before you’ve achieved it.

When a goal feels real, you treat it differently. You make decisions in light of it. You notice relevant opportunities. You start behaving, in small ways, like someone who is genuinely moving toward something rather than just thinking about it.

That shift, from thinking about a goal to inhabiting it, is where the real change begins.

Your first step

Look at every goal you’re currently working with. Check each one for nominalisations. If it’s framed as an abstract noun, ask what you’d be doing when you’ve achieved it and rewrite it as that.

Then close your eyes and visualise the most important goal — not the moment of arrival, but yourself doing the work. Not vaguely. Specifically. Where are you? What are you doing? What can you see, hear, and feel? Make it as real as possible.

Do that again tomorrow. And the day after.

In the next article, we’re going to build the complete SMARTER framework. Everything you’ve done so far has been preparation. Now we build the goal properly.

Further reading

1. Pascual-Leone, A., Nguyet, D., Cohen, L.G., Brasil-Neto, J.P., Cammarota, A. & Hallett, M. (1995). Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills. Journal of Neurophysiology, 74(3), 1037-1045.
2. Holmes, P.S. & Collins, D.J. (2001). The PETTLEP approach to motor imagery. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 13(1), 60-83.
3. Pham, L.B. & Taylor, S.E. (1999). From thought to action: Effects of process- versus outcome-based mental simulations on performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(2), 250-260.
4. Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself. Viking.