Goals, how to set and achieve any goal!

Today we are going to talk about how to set attainable goals and achieve those goals in a realistic time-frame.

Goals are major part of business and life.  My goals are what push me to be an over achiever.  Ever since I was a young boy growing up in the country, I set goals for myself.  Some of those goals were great, others not so much.  The great thing about the not so great goals are that they allowed me to learn how to make good goals and set realistic time-frames to achieve those goals. 

The first thing that I encourage everyone to do when I put on my goals seminar is to set a time-frame for the goals you are going to write today.  I set three different time-frames, Distant future, near future, and NOW. 

Distant Future Goals are meant to be goals that you can work towards for several years.  Those goals might include something like retirement, owning my own business, marriage, buying a house, or buying a vacation property.  You get the drift.  These goals are not usually something that you can achieve today they take a little time to accomplish.

Near Future Goals are the goals that you can achieve in the next 6 months to a year.  Some goals for this category might include, buying a house, getting married, starting to date again, paying off credit cards, cleaning my garage, finishing that one project, starting a new job, or starting my business.  These goals are something that you can accomplish but probably not toady.  They take a few months of planning to make sure that you are ready.

NOW Goals are goals that you can accomplish today.  These goals might include, starting a diet, exercising, getting married, buying a house, taking a shower, starting your business, changing jobs, upgrading your flip phone to a smart phone, starting your business page for social media, you get the drift.  NOW goals mean that you can do them today without much thought or effort. 

I’ll bet that you noticed that some goals fit into more than one category.  Like buying a house, starting a business, changing jobs, getting married.  That’s because we are all at different places in our lives.  While I might be ready to get married tomorrow, you might want to wait a little while.  You might be ready to jump into your own business but I’m content with working for someone else for the rest of my life. 

Our goals can change depending on where we are in life and what we want.  Now that we have our different categories for our goals, it’s time to start setting some. 

How do I set an attainable goal?  Attainable means that we can go out and actually achieve our goals. 

I had a person once come into my office and said Dan my goal is to sell $1 Million in my first year!  I was stoked for him; he set a massive goal.  He was stepping into a roll selling something he had never sold before.  I had two options.  The first is to let him run with this passion and give him all the support I could, or I could help him set an attainable NOW and Near Future Goal.  You see he had a great distant future goal.  To sell that much.  The problem was that he had never set his NOW goal.  We worked together and he set a NOW goal of one sale in the first month.  His Near Future Goal was to sell five contracts in a month and his Distant Future Goal changes to sell 15 contracts a month.  We lost the $ amount and started focusing on the amount of contracts sold.  This really helped to make his goals attainable. 

To set great goals that you can attain you need to start with Distant Goals.  Then you reverse engineer those goals and make your closer goals work towards your Distant Goals.  This way when you achieve a smaller goal it puts you that much closer to your HUGE goal. 

Take a few seconds and imagine yourself in 5 years where are you?  What are you doing?  Who are you with?  What do you have in your hand?  What clothes are you wearing?  Imagine every detail. 

All right, do you have it?

Great now write it down, every detail.  This part is important, trust me.

Sweet now that you are all done with that.  Can you see your real Distant Goal?  A quick version for me is that I am in jeans and a soft shirt, I have sand between my toes, and I can hear the waves crashing against the shore.  In the background is my vacation house with nothing between my family and the ocean.  There is some awesome greenery surrounding the place.  My wife is next to me and my children are older some of them even married with kids.  We are all together enjoying this place and our company.  We don’t have to worry about money anymore because we have several businesses running seamlessly in the background.  We still work hard, but we play harder and enjoy our lives, every second of them. 

This is a great example of a simple distant goal.  It has a where, what, and who.  Now I can reverse engineer this goal. 

Near Future Goals for this Distant Goal would include.  Starting hands off businesses grow said businesses, staying close to family, buying beach house, learning to surf, raising my kids to have God in their heart, keeping my marriage healthy.  These are just a few.

NOW Goals would break down each Near Future Goal into attainable goals that push me towards the end goal.  Let’s take stay close to family and break it down.  NOW goals would include: vacationing as a family, play family games, have family dinners regularly, be a friend and a parent to my kids, be there to support them in their activities, show them how much I love them not with money but with love and affection, listen to them, don’t make them feel dumb. 

You would do this for every aspect of your future goal.  

The last aspect of goal setting is to make yourself accountable for the goals that you set.  The best way to help yourself be accountable is to share them with someone who you trust to kindly ask you how you are coming with your goals.  If you divulge all of your goals they can ask you a simple question like, “How if family game night going?”  That simple question will make you accountable.

Remember that these are just the basics for setting real and attainable goals.  We will have more blogs in the future diving deeper into goals. 

If you or your team are interested in having a training on, goals contact us today to get that set up.  We will gladly come to you and help your team set attainable professional or personal goals.

Ok now it’s your turn.  Email me your goals dan@eclipse-dot.com.  Let’s share our goals and make ourselves accountable.