Setting Goals to Avoid the New Year’s Trap and Achieve Year-Round Success
Picture your most important goal; what does achieving it look like? What steps are necessary to do so? How long will it take?
If you were able to quickly (and thoroughly) answer those questions, congratulations, click ahead to another post. However, if you struggled to articulate much beyond what your goal actually is, we’re here to provide a little support and guidance around the goal-setting process. As with anything else, there’s more than one way to pursue and plan your goals, and we encourage you to follow what works best for you–vision boards, planners, manifestation. That said, we urge you to change how you think about goals.
Too many of us approach objectives both personal and professional as shiny trophies off in the distance, where if only we could exercise just enough self-discipline or work just a little harder, we’d reach them.
This is the New Year’s fallacy that has tides of the hopeful streaming into gyms every January, only to wash out come February. Rather than frame your goals in this counterproductive way, think of them not as monolithic prizes to be won but as compelling puzzles to be assembled, one piece at a time. What we mean by this is being able to break overarching life goals–being healthier, achieving a certain level of business success, even something as seemingly concrete as writing a novel–into smaller, actionable steps that fit together to create the desired outcome.
The beauty of this perspective is that these specific “sub-goals'' increase your odds of success by making it easier to maintain focus and motivation, checking off one item at a time rather than trying to tackle an entire, insurmountable challenge. Telling yourself “I need to be in better shape” is one thing; defining that for yourself as an achievable process, i.e. “I want to do 30 minutes of cardio every day” is much easier for the mind to wrap around, not to mention far less demoralizing.
Goal-setting centered around delineated actions also gives you more control over the timeframe of what you want to accomplish.
Each part adds up to a greater whole, and it's your call at every step of the way to determine what qualifies as a realistic time table. Decide what needs to be done daily, weekly, monthly, and beyond; in doing so, you’ll not only have figured out what needs to be done, you’ll have a roadmap for your future. Every target you choose will coalesce over time into an objective measure of where you started, how far you’ve come, and how much further still you have to go.
One final piece of advice: whatever your goals may be, write them down. Having a physical reminder conveniently located is a powerful motivator, something you can revisit when you’re struggling to remember what all of your hard work is for. Writing things down stores them in our subconscious, and our subconscious has a way of prioritizing objectives without us even knowing. If you need something a little more powerful to keep you on track, find accountability partners in whatever community you prefer–family, friends, even a networking group of like minded peers–that can ensure you’re making strides toward your goals.
Most importantly, this approach is flexible and responsive to your needs as circumstances change. When owning a business, nothing stays the same forever. Your goals as you’re just starting out will differ from the ones you set as you become established, and those inevitably won’t match the objectives you choose as you push for further growth. Avoid the “messy middle” plateau of entrepreneurship by having this system for goal setting and evaluation in place early on. Keeping your goals divided in manageable pieces, on a timeline of your choosing, will keep you from being owned by your business, rather than the other way around.
