There are many effective strategies for goal-setting.
Visualisation, strategic planning, writing goals down, breaking them into achievable chunks, ensuring they are SMART, and linking achievement to rewards are all essential parts of achieving success.
Counter-productively, having so many strategies can be so overwhelming that you don’t do anything at all.
To simplify things, let’s look at the three main steps to goal setting:
]1. Get clear on what you want
2. Tell people about it
3. Take action
The first point is essential, as it’s hard to get what you want when you don’t know what it is. Instead of setting non-specific goals, such as “I want to get fit” or “I want a more productive team”, get exact about the result you want.
“I want more profit” can be replaced with “I want $80,000 profit in the business bank account by 30 June”.
Telling people about your goals is also important. When you think about the goals you’ve achieved in the past, I’m sure the help of others had a lot to do with your success.
When you talked about your goals for more profit with a business mentor, perhaps they suggested a great marketing idea.
To help with your fitness goal a friend may have told you about a running program they’d done. A business associate may have recommended a good book to help you manage your team.
When you talk about your goals people have the opportunity to help – and most people will share their knowledge when they can.
Taking action sounds obvious, but sometimes we get so busy we fail to actually do anything to move forward. Researching a running program isn’t enough, you have to lace up your shoes and get out on the road.
Reading a book on leadership and management won’t help if you don’t use the strategies and test their effectiveness. Simply setting profit targets isn’t enough to get you a better result – you have to take better actions to get a better result.
When goal-setting seems overwhelming, use this simple checklist to get started. Let us know how you go.