Today I want to talk about goal setting.
Folks, if you don’t have a goal, if you’re not clear what action steps need to be taken to exceed the expectations you’ve set for yourself in 2017, then you don’t have a road map to guide you toward success. Here are just 4 essential pieces of any successful goal setting and accomplishment strategy.
1. Have a Flight Plan
In the same way you wouldn’t get on a plane with a pilot that doesn’t have a flight plan to get from point A to point B, the question that begs to be asked is how can you run a significant and successful business if you don’t have a plan in place? How can you be sure you’ll get to where you want to go? How will you have a clear and actionable understanding of what your goals are?
Remember that any goal that’s worth anything must be a stretch. It can’t be easy or it runs the risk of having no true significance in the context of your life progress and growth.
2. Write Your Goals Down
Acknowledge what you want for yourself daily. You don’t have to memorize the list, you don’t have to pet it, you just need to look at it and acknowledge it on a day to day basis so that these current goals become cemented in your heart and mind and in essence becomes a part of your core values and mental state.
3. Share Your Vision
Use social media and your daily conversations to share your goals with your managers, your coaches, your loved ones, your coworkers, and the people that surround your daily life. Your words are powerful; when you put something out there about what you plan to achieve, who would want to feel embarrassed or ashamed for not putting their whole heart and effort into accomplishing what they’ve set out for themselves publicly?
There’s something really powerful about sharing your goals in this way. It creates something so essential to any successful life process: self-respect and accountability.
4. Know the Value
To reach any goal that’s worth a significant effort, you need to remember what it is you want— but also, equally important to knowing the shape of it clearly, you also need to know what you’re willing to give up in order to reach it.
Remember that life is all about tradeoffs, unfortunately or not. So we need to be really clear about what our goals are and know that our goals need to not only have a financial impact, but a spiritual and emotional one as well. If you don’t reach that goal, think about what it will cost you spiritually, and what it will cost you emotionally. On the other side of the coin, think about the self-affirmation, and the joy, or the freedom that achieving those goals will cause to form inside of your psyche.
Your goals are all about accomplishment. And when you accomplish something, nobody can take that from you. So friends, students, colleagues—remember to make every day a masterpiece, and STAY FOCUSED on those dreams!