Many people feel as if they’re adrift in the world. They work hard, but they don’t seem to get anywhere worthwhile.

A key reason why they feel this way is that they haven’t spent enough time thinking about what they want from life, and haven’t set themselves formal goals.

After all, would you set out on a major journey with no real idea of your destination? We didn’t think so!

Goals are part of every aspect of life.

So try to set goals in some of the following categories:

• Career – What level do you want to reach in your career, or what do you want to achieve?
• Financial – How much do you want to earn, by what stage? How is this related to your career goals?
• Education – Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need to have in order to achieve other goals?
• Family – Do you want to be a parent? If so, how are you going to be a good parent? How do you want to be seen by a partner or by members of your extended family?
• Artistic – Do you want to achieve any artistic goals?
• Attitude – Is any part of your mindset holding you back? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets you?
• Physical – Are there any athletic goals that you want to achieve, or do you want good health deep into old age? What steps are you going to take to achieve this?
• Pleasure – How do you want to enjoy yourself?
• Public Service – Do you want to make the world a better place? If so, how?

Everything comes down to priorities, and what you would like to accomplish in every aspect in your life. Whether you make a conscious choice or go with subconscious preferences.

Without setting goals or objectives, life becomes a series of chaotic happenings you don’t control.

What is SMART Goal Setting?

SMART goal setting brings structure and trackability into your goals and objectives.

Instead of vague resolutions, SMART goal setting creates verifiable trajectories towards a certain objective, with clear milestones and an estimation of the goal’s attainabililty.

In corporate life, SMART goal setting is one of the most effective and yet least used tools for achieving goals. Once you’ve charted the outlines of your project, it’s time to set specific intermediary goals.

With the SMART checklist, you can evaluate your objectives. It also creates transparency throughout the company. It clarifies the way goals came into existence, and the criteria their realisation will conform to.

What exactly do you want to achieve?

The more specific your description, the bigger the chance you’ll get exactly that. S.M.A.R.T. goal setting clarifies the difference between ‘I want to be a millionaire’ and ‘I want to make $20,000 gross profit a month in high ticket commisions for the next ten years by being an affiliate’.

Questions you may ask yourself when setting your goals and objectives are:

• What exactly do I want to achieve?
• Where?
• How?
• When? Today, this week, this month, in six months, 1 year or in 5 years.
• With whom?
• Why exactly do I want to reach this goal?

M: Measurable

Measurable goals means that you identify exactly what it is you will see, hear and feel when you reach your goal. It means breaking your goal down into measurable elements.

You’ll need concrete evidence. Being happier is not evidence; not smoking anymore because you adhere to a healthy lifestyle where you eat vegetables twice a day and fat only once a week, is.

Measurable goals can go a long way in refining what exactly it is that you want, too. By defining the physical manifestations of your goal or objective makes it clearer, and easier to reach.

A: Attainable

Is your goal attainable?

That means investigating whether the goal really is acceptable to you. You weigh the effort, time and other costs your goal will take against the profits and the other obligations and priorities you have in life.

If you don’t have the time, money or talent to reach a certain goal you’ll certainly fail and be miserable. That doesn’t mean that you can’t take something that seems impossible and make it happen by planning smartly and going for it!

R: Relevant

Is reaching your goal relevant to you?

Do you actually want to run a multinational, be famous, have three children and a busy job? You decide for yourself whether you have the personality for it, or your team has the bandwidth.

If you’re lacking certain skills, you can plan to attend training. If you lack certain resources, you can look for ways of getting them.

The main questions to Ask are:

• Why do you want to reach this goal?
• What is the objective behind the goal, and will this goal really achieve that?

T: Timely

Time is money!

Make a tentative plan of everything you do. Everybody knows that deadlines are what makes most people switch to action. So install deadlines, for yourself and your team, and go after them.

Keep the timeline realistic and flexible, that way you can keep the morale high.

Being too stringent on the timely aspect of your goal setting can have the perverse effect of making the learning path of achieving your goals and objectives into a panicky race against time.

Which is most likely not how you want to achieve anything, that is if you achieve anything complete at all.

Further Tips for Setting Your Goals

The following broad guidelines will help you to set effective, achievable goals:

• State each goal as a positive statement – Express your goals positively. For example; “Execute this technique well” is a much better goal than “Don’t make this stupid mistake.”
• Be precise – Set precise goals, putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can measure achievement. Then you’ll know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can celebrate when you have achieved it.
• Set priorities – When you have several goals, give each a priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by having too many goals.
• Write goals down – This cements them into your subconscious and gives them more force.
• Keep operational goals small – Keep the low-level goals that you’re working towards small and achievable. Which gives more opportunities for reward. Also if the goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it.
• Set performance goals, not outcome goals – You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. It can be quite dispiriting to fail to achieve a personal goal for reasons beyond your control!
  If you base your goals on personal performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your goals, and draw satisfaction from them.
• Set realistic goals – It’s important to set goals that you can achieve. It’s possible to set goals that are too difficult because you might not appreciate either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how much skill you need to develop to achieve a particular level of performance.
• Set your lifetime goals first.
  Then, set a five-year plan of smaller goals that you need to complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan.

Once you have written your goals. You must keep the process going by regularly reviewing and updating your goals. Also remember to take time to enjoy the satisfaction of achieving your goals when you do so.

Interested in S.M.A.R.T. goal setting?

If you’re interested in a coaching session using SMART goal setting or any other coaching technique(s), let us know!We are here to help. If you want any help, just Messenger us (Private Message Us) at our Facebook Messenger link – m.me/EasyOnlineBizSolutions

If you don’t already set goals, do so, starting now.

Talk Soon,
Nicky and Dave

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