Happy new year to all our readers! On our community last week, we discussed goal setting. We all set goals every single year and while that is perfectly fine, we need to also know how to achieve our goals. Continue reading to get tips on setting achievable goals & following through with them.
I am going to be handling goal setting. Goal setting is not about having fancy ideas. Goal setting is even not a day project. Goal setting is a continuous effort to bring your desired future into reality. It’s a science and just like all sciences, it’s backed with proven templates, theories and facts. It’s an art because it requires inspired deep thinking, visioning and creativity.
Let me say here that goal setting is a bit different from vision boarding. I am clarifying this because for the past 2 years, it’s been the new trend we have used to replace goal setting. Vision boarding is the art part of Goal setting. It focuses on envisioning and futuristic reality. Goal Setting goes beyond the art to get down to measurable metrics and action steps. Vision board is focused on making your dreams reality and tapping into power of positive thinking to activate your desired results. That is why your vision board is filled with picture and cutouts.
It’s like having a working document and a presentation document. Your presentation document is a summary of key things from your working document. Most times, it’s designed in PowerPoint.
Goal setting does not stop at envisioning, it drills down to more details. This is why, we have the acronym “S M A R T”.
Specific , Measurable , Achievable , Realistic , Time-bound.
Before I go into the setting of goals, goal setting starts with an APPRAISAL or ASSESSMENT of the previous timeline. You set goals for 1 month, before setting a new one. You need to assess the one of last month.
You cannot set goals for the future without understanding your present and your present can not be understood without the past.
– Abayomi Adewumi 2021
Ask yourself tough questions:
- How did 2020 go for me on the 7 important pillars of life?
- What worked best for me?
- What did not work?
By the way, my 7 key pillars of life are:
- Social
- Family
- Health
- Career
- Finance
- Learning
- Charity/Character
You assess yourself and grade yourself based on the goals you set last year.
NB: I said grade yourself on the basis of the goals you set not your friend’s goal.
If you noticed, I have avoided going into the details of SMART because I know it’s an over flogged topic. You can get resources on it on Google.
Setting goals is useless if you do not have focus areas or fundamental pillars guiding you. You need to set SMART goals in all these areas or areas you find important to you at different stages of your life. Your report card from your assessment is what will drive your new goals. If you did not complete any goal in the last year for any reason, you do not need to set new goals. Find percentage completion, understand why you did not complete it and set plans to complete it now based on resources allocation. Your pillar might be a little bit different from mine based on your reality.
Fun fact: I do not have a completely new goal for 2021 since I did not finish 2020 goals.
I just assessed it, tweaked it and moved on to execution at speed of light as a sure guy. Another key thing you should do is breaking your goals down into achievable chunks. The principle of gathering momentum posits that with small wins, you are motivated to do more and achieve big wins. A 1.2 million naira goal for a year simply means 100k monthly which means 25k weekly and 5k daily for a 5 days operational business.
Lastly, your goals are nothing without a control measures put in place. How do you know you are on track? How do you know when to go back to drawing board? How do you know when you are on a roll and things are sweet? Your goals must include what we call KPIs (key performance indices) in management consulting. Set aside time weekly to review your goals. Set aside more time monthly to review your goals. Set aside even more time quarterly to assess your goals. Do not stop at just setting the goals.Go a step further to creating an actual plan by breaking your goals down into action steps which you can now allocate resources and deadlines to
PS: Goal setting for business owners is a bit different.
You should be assessing your business on 5 pillars of business:
- Business model
- Marketing/Sales
- Finance
- Systems/Processes
- People
- You should also set goals on those fundamental pillars
Question:
What if you had a goal pertaining to your social life and listed out steps to achieve that but after the season past, you realize the steps didn’t work for you, is it advisable to carry over that goal into another season?
Answer
Assess the goal in relation to the reality on ground, understand what limited you and tweak the new goal to fit the season of its relevant.
