Since I set up my advertising Agency in 1987, I am constantly amazed by how few businesses goal set or even understand it. Without goals in our lives, business or personal, we pretty much just aimlessly wander through life with no direction.
I was fortunate enough to be introduced to a personal development programme when I was 24, nearly 40 years ago, and have followed this through my personal life and my business life since that time. Let me give you a couple of examples that you can probably relate to.
- Most of you would have booked a holiday 6 or 12 months in advance. You know what it will cost and you would know how much you need to save per month up to the departure date to pay for the holiday. Guess what? If you don’t save the money for the time its due to be paid, you aren’t going.
- Another example may be losing weight. We have all done it on probably more than one occasion, and for example, we set ourselves a goal to lose so much weight before we go on our summer holiday. We then break that down to a weekly amount to lose, as its easier to break any goal down into bite sized chunks. So we have a long term goal, maybe a year or a few months away and then we break this down to monthly, weekly or daily goals to make sure we stay on track. The danger is if we don’t stay on track we then either have to lose 10 kilos in the last week (because we did nothing beforehand) or we give up months before because we didn’t have the discipline.
Goals setting is worthless if we don’t have the discipline to follow through, and we do have to accept responsibility for our own actions. If we have discipline in our lives, we will succeed. If we don’t we wont. We cannot blame someone else for our failure. There will be loads of opportunities for us to give up our goals and then we blame someone else. Guess what? If you don’t succeed you have either set your goals too high or you lacked the discipline and responsibility to follow through.
Goals need to be a stretch but also achievable. If we stretch too far then we give up before we have started; bite sized chunks, remember?
Look at where you currently are, and then look at where you want to be before the end of the year, and work backwards. So where do you want to be by the end of Q3, then Q2 and finally Q1, and then look at where you currently are and where you want to be by the end of Q1 and make sure you have a goal that’s achievable by the end of March and then break down that 12 weeks into weekly or daily goals and make sure you do what needs to be done to achieve that 12 week goal – no excuses. If you can stay on track for the first 12 weeks, you will have set the stage for the rest of the year.
Goal setting is vital to your success in business. Don’t be average, AVERAGE PEOPLE HAVE WISHES AND HOPES, SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE HAVE GOALS AND PLANS.
Wishing you all success for 2019. Make a difference