The Secret Sauce of Achieving Goals
There is a lot more to goal-setting success than just setting the goal. You have probably heard of SMART goals, or in our systems, they are SMARTER goals. Weeding out the irrelevant and adding the effective elements to success goal setting AND achievement. While setting a goal is important, it’s also important to ensure that you are setting the right goals at the right time. Being ‘timely’ is crucial to ensure a positive result. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to head in the right direction:
Are You Setting Specific Effective Goals?
You can set big goals, but make sure you can then break them down into smaller ‘micro’ goals. Once you’ve set a goal, then you need to be specific so you know what steps you need to take and work backward to create a schedule of actions needed to succeed. Actions make the goal-setting system effective. This for me is actually the key ingredient in the Goal setting recipe. With action, Goals are just words. You also want to give meaning to your goals and get clear on WHY it is important.
What IF I don’t achieve these goals. How will life look like> Where would you struggle? What level of confidence, happiness and self accomplishment will you feel if don’t and how will that impact other areas of your life?
Are Your Goals Inclusive?
Focusing on only one part of your life is something you need to consider. When goals are multifaceted, you can have an impact on all areas of your life. Learn to connect the dots and will find synergy across multiple areas, and you can easily achieve more than one in different areas with the same actions. This is inefficiency. Connect the dots! There is no point in achieving financial goals if you are not happy. Your personal life and happiness also need to be considered. Aim for being complete, happy, and focused. Therefore, make sure your goals are inclusive and have an impact on other areas of your life.
Is Your Action Plan Relative?
You’ve heard of the saying, “…Knowledge is power” right? Well, it doesn’t quite work that way. The one essential element is the ACTION of your plan. Once you create the schedule, you need to truly consider how relative. Say your goal is to be healthy and reduce your cholesterol by 10 points in six months. This means you need to exercise and eat right. If you don’t schedule in the time needed, you won’t achieve this goal. It doesn’t happen by luck or magic. Think of these as ‘resources’. Time is a resource. A personal trainer in Bangkok or an online, nutrition coach are resources to help you achieve that goal.
Are You Learning from Your Mistakes?
Often when setting goals, instead of learning from failure, people give up. Using the example above, once you implement your schedule to reach the goals that you have set when you notice there are things you’ve forgotten to take into account, don’t give up. Learn from the failure and modify your schedule to be more realistic. IMPLEMENT – ASSESS – REFINE + REPEAT.
You will probably have to rewrite some of your goals and your schedule, and this is the whole point of goal setting. Adapt, and modify where you need to. Many people believe failure is something negative, however, failure is the mother of all learning. So take it on the chin, learn and adapt to be even better.
Are You Accountable and Evaluating Often?
Accountability is key. Schedules are very important to the success of reaching any goal in life. Build a ‘smart’ calendar of tasks and activities that get you from where you are now to your goal. Make it a daily habit, a ritual, something you do every single day. You can even develop a simple checklist to check off every day to keep you on track. Identify what’s not working, modify and also keep doing things that are working well for you. You can even ramp up the intensity of what’s really working well for you to achieve your goals faster.
Are Your Goals Empowering?
Use positive language, ALWAYS! When writing a goal, it’s important to write them in a positive sense, and in a way that empowers you. Writing down a goal and then changing the words to sound more positive to make it more empowering. For instance, “losing weight” seems like a good goal, but for some people, it might signify deprivation. So instead, you might frame the goal as “Look amazing in my bikini for my summer holidays.” Or you can focus on energy and confidence.
Do You Have Too Many Goals?
Keep it simple. Don’t try to have too many goals all at once. Everyone has personal life experiences, preferences, needs, and wants. If you have set goals in too many areas of life at once, you will probably become overwhelmed and stuck. Break it down, achieve, set new goals, and move on. You don’t need to do everything in one day. Aim for the small wins that lead to bigger achievements.
As you break down bigger goals into ‘micro’ goals, you will find yourself achieving something every day. Getting your 30 minutes of exercise every day is a WIN! So keep the momentum going and make it a daily habit.
Changing your lifestyle. Achieving any goal or simply aspiring to improve in any area of your life is a process. You must apply conscious awareness to everything you do, and how you think and feel. So before kicking off your new goal strategy, work through these questions and set the foundation for success.
Now dive in, get clear, build a plan and make it happen.
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