What Are Contingency Goals?

What are contingency goals and why use them? A contingency goal is a goal you use if you change direction, achieve a goal, or meet resistance with your primary goal. It’s a contingency plan for when things don’t go as expected.

In fact, it’s especially useful if they do go as expected! Once you have achieved a goal, it’s easy to drift off into a vague meandering mind space. This is because you’ve “arrived” at your “destination”. As such, you’re no longer driving yourself forwards anymore, so it can be easy to drift.

I only recently heard about contingency goals from one of my online mentors and it immediately struck a chord with me. I’ve set goals in the past, and achieved them only to drift off and meander for years afterwards! In my 20’s I set a goal of becoming a stuntman, which I achieved in 2002 (here’s my IMDB page).

What I failed to do, was set a contingency goal once I had achieved my primary goal of joining the British Stunt Register. My contingency plan was eventually to escape the film industry and build an online business. But it took me a few years to realise this is what I wanted.

Contingency goals are useful for when things aren’t going to plan. My stunt career wasn’t what I had imagined, and over time I became demoralised by it. I wanted an online business to give me more control over my income. With the stunt business, I was always at the whim of a phone call.

What Are Contingency Goals & Why Use Them?

It’s useful to have a contingency plan for an online business too because things might not go exactly as you expected them to. For example, you might run out of advertising budget, and need a fall back marketing tactic. I experienced this personally, and hence why I have used blogging extensively. My income from stunt work was always sporadic, which didn’t give me a consistent income for marketing my online business.

But I had plenty of time to create content – so blogging seemed like the natural contingency plan when my ad budget ran low.

A contingency goal gives you the power to create a new destination, rather than hoping that your current habits will take you there. After a few years as a stunt performer, I realised just waiting for jobs wasn’t a good strategy. But I didn’t have a contingency goal for when the phone stopped ringing!

Many people who start an online business have felt trapped by their jobs and income. A goal to build a profitable income online gave me an option out of the stunt business, which I ultimately felt trapped by.

My Latest Contingency Goal

I set myself a goal a few weeks back to attain 1000 website hits on this website through organic means. I even wrote a post sharing my strategy: “how to get 1000 hits on your website without paying“.

My goal was to get 1000 hits a day, by today (31st August 2024). While today isn’t over yet, yesterday I reached 860 hits organically, a slight shortfall to my main goal.

The 1000 hits was a contingency goal. After I ran out of advertising budget, I could no longer run paid advertising. But I had a lot of time. So the contingency goal was to generate traffic, leads and sales through blogging.

Why Use Goals

As my latest goal has shown me, there’s huge importance in goal setting. By setting a goal which is both important to you and meaningful, which meets the criteria of believable and desirable, it should drive you towards a meaningful future outcome which you have control of. Not doing so allows you to fall back into your old habits and behaviours and your life becomes the default setting of what has always been so.

Insanity, as Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Goal setting allows anyone to set a future destined event or circumstance and then work steadily towards it in a logical and consistent fashion.

When I’ve failed before with goals, it’s been because I didn’t believe in them, or I didn’t really care about the outcome. Setting a good goal inspires you towards its outcome, and allows you to focus on its achievement in a desirable and enjoyable way.

Once you have achieved a goal, it’s easy to fall back into old habits and downwards towards your lowest acceptable standards. A contingency goal can be used when this happens. It allows you to focus again, and keep moving forwards towards a life of your conscious choice, rather than living by default.