2016 – The year of success – The year of setting goals
When you go on vacation, you plan the final destination. Let’s say you decide you want to go to Southern California and stay close to a beach but go to many of the tourist attractions.
The first thing you do is decide when you can take vacation, when the weather is right for going to that destination (Don’t go to spend time on the beach in June – they have June Gloom all month).
Now plan all the places you want to go while in Southern California. Make a list and make sure you have enough time for all of them.
Next – plan where you are going to stay. This will depend on where you want to visit. Can you get the dates you want? Is it central to all the places you want to go? Are you flexible with your scheduled time?
Time for each place you want to go to needs to be set aside. I like a vacation where I have lots of time to unwind, read and play games with the kids and grand kids. Others love vacations that are so packed that you need a vacation when you get home from vacation. You make sure it is setup the way you want.
There are many things to decide when you are taking such a vacation. What happens if something goes wrong? No sun the day you want to go to the beach, or the amusement park is closed for a special event. Some things can’t be planned for exactly so you have to have flexibility.
To make a year truly a success for you and your business, you have to do planning like your vacation. The thing is, it needs to be done for 48 to 50 weeks. So many people put weeks into planning a vacation and a few hours (if that) into planning your personal and business year. The thing they don’t realize is you don’t have to do it all at once but a vision has to be created to start with. Then smaller, mission level, goals can then be implemented and planned all during the year.
You need to know and define what a success is. How do you know you were a success if you don’t know what that looks like when you get there? This is the easy part of a successful year. Now how do you create a plan to get to “The most successful year yet?” You have to have a roadmap. Lets look at what you need for a successful roadmap for you and your business.
Several people throughout history have talked about the importance of setting goals. For a yearly plan, you need both a yearly long-term goals and short-term goals as well. The problem is most people only focus on one aspect of goals – personal, business, family and others. We need to look at all aspects of life or we will find that we didn’t accomplish what we wanted to.
Michael Hyatt, a business coach and mentor, has put together a program to teach others about “Designing Your Life.” He asks you to answer three questions and then teaches you how to use these as a foundation to create a game plan for designing your life this year. It is a powerful program and I suggest you look this up on his website (https://bestyearever.me). It is more about your life (including business) rather than just business.
One of the three questions is “What is important to you?” He teaches you to write down the categories of your life and then rank them by importance. There are many but the top five for many people are God, Self, Spouse, Children and Work. Sometimes there are many work categories or businesses. Now rank them by importance to you.
Now that you have ranked what is most important, you can start to write goals for each of these areas and then make sure they meet up with your rankings. There are a few things to doing this: write the goal down. It must be livable, deliverable and measureable by the time it is to be accomplished. This means you have to have a deadline as well for each goal. Long-term goals need to have short-term goals to help you stay on track. You must also have a coach, partner or spouse that you can share the goals with and they need to hold you accountable for these goals. Be flexible when problems occur (as they will).
Maybe your goal is to get in shape. How can you define that? You need to define the goal so others will know when you have achieved it. Another is to read daily. So how much reading will you do? Pages, time, chapters, what? Be specific. Say by when you want this to start.
Make your yearly goals.
Say you have a goal to increase your business by $150,000. When do you want do so by? What would be shorter goals to make tracking possible? How about a goal of having 1 billion people go to your website in one year? What would you think? Start it slow and build up. You can’t expect to have 100,000,000 views the first or second month.
Once you have your vision goals for all of the categories that you ranked, then you create the mission goals (the short-term goals) that will help you attain the vision. Sometimes you can’t see far enough in advance to see the second or third goal to meet the vision goal. Set the goals you can see and evaluate as you near the end of that goal to set the next one. It is like only being able to see a few feet in front of you. You change and add goals as needed to get to your destination.
Remember that not all goals that aren’t met are failures. In fact, many aren’t. I worked on a goal to lose weight recently. I was a few pounds short. Was I a failure? In a way yes, but also I did lose 10 pounds that wouldn’t have come off without the goal. I have re-evaluated that goal and implemented it into my new goals for 2016.
The London to Paris train is also a failure then. They wanted to cut the travel time from those two cities by half. It was a great goal but they didn’t achieve it until recently. They only cut the time by 45% rather than the 50%. There were some turns on the line that the train had to be slowed down for and it cut how much time that could be saved. To go from 5 hours approximately to 2 hours and 45 minutes was great but not the goal. To some, they thought that the project was a failure. Today, they can take that trip in as little as 2 hours and 16 minutes. The goal is now met but didn’t when it was originally envisioned.
The final thing to remember about goals is that sometimes they need to be adjusted to meet some limitations that can’t be overcome (remember the London to Paris train). Other goals will be too easy and need to be adjusted up. Be willing to be flexible and celebrate the milestones that you meet and the success that you have achieved.
The last thing I want you to do is set up a weekly planning meeting with yourself to schedule everything that is important. Block out the time for reading, writing, doing LinkedIn or other social media, work meetings and other business contacting. Make sure you stay to your schedule. This was something The Franklyn Covey program was all about. Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey and other have all said that the habits that make great men great, start with taking control of their time. Another was to set goals that stretched their abilities but could be attained.
The way to have the “Best Year EVER” is to plan to have it. Start with goals and time management and you will win BIG TIME! Happy New Year.