Your Goal Setting Process Needs a Facelift

Yes, this is another article about goal setting. Yes, EVERYONE talks about goal setting around New Years, and yes it can get a little redundant.

But I say good! Let's get redundant! We shouldn’t just be talking about this constantly right now, but all year long! 

Because goal setting is not a once-a-year experience. And if it is, it is not going to get you very far. If your goal setting is a one-and-done activity, it needs a facelift.

Goal Setting Gripe #1- Starting With What You Want to Achieve

Seems counter-intuitive, huh? Goal setting is about getting all the things you want out of life, right? All the ways you want to better yourself? The accomplishments you want to work toward? Yes, yes, yes, but if we start with what we want, before we take a critical inventory of what we have and what we’ve done, we might actually end up with a really inaccurate and inauthentic idea of what we want.

Solution #1: Toast Your Accomplishments

Goals are about the future, so why would we bother talking about the past? Because before we look forward, we want to prime our mind with our success. That’s why we actually start our goal setting process by taking a look back at how much we’ve accomplished over the past year.

Doing this makes me so enthusiastic and excited about my goal setting because I'm always pleasantly surprised at how much I actually did in the past 12 months! When you start your goal setting through the lens if previous accomplishments, you realize it’s not that crazy to say, “I want to be all the way over there in 12 months.”

It makes dreams seem more accessible. It makes me believe in what’s really possible.

That’s why Steve and I spend the entire first half of our strategy day talking about our accomplishments from this past year. It takes us half a day (usually 9am - 12pm) to really identify all the things we have done and to appreciate how far we have come.

When you think about it, a year is a long time and you can do a lot. When you sit down and write about all of your accomplishments, all the things you've learned, all the things you've failed at, and how you moved forward, it's an incredibly energizing way to start planning for the next year.

My advice is to get as specific as possible. For us, accomplishments include: our general wellbeing, vacations, books we’ve read, fights we’ve had that we resolved, and things we tried, failed at and learned from. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying that hard, and trying new things is something we’re always striving for, so it makes it on the accomplishments list.

So before you do anything about planning for the future, I want you to sit down and take time to write out all the things you accomplished this year. Write them out in terms of your career, personal well being, and your family. Write them out in tangible things and intangible things. Both. (I felt calmer this year, or I didn’t feel calmer this year but I took steps to feel calmer can be accomplishments.)

Goal Setting Gripe #2- Not Knowing Why You Want Things

Most people start goal setting by thinking about all the things they want to accomplish this year. Then, if you’re a seasoned goal setter, you probably write them down, and work backwards to create mini goals to make them actionable.

But the first reason many people fail to achieve their goals is because they identify an outcome without also identifying the underlying motivation of that outcome. 

Without knowing your intentions, you make it too easy to sleep in, instead of get up to go the gym, or let blogging fall by the wayside when more important things seem to come up (they always will).

Setting yourself up for a successful year means getting clear on what you’re really going for and why —before you make a list of what you want to achieve. If you’re committed to achieving something big this year, give your goals the focus and time they need to thrive by laying a better, deeper foundation first.

Solution #2: Go Big Picture FIRST

If you’ve done goal setting and planning before you’ve probably written down “the big goal” at some point. Now is the time revisit that big picture goal. Things change, and they should! And before you continue down a path that you’ve been on for years, it’s worth rethinking if that’s even what you really want anymore, or if it’s just a “default goal” at this point.

Are you still excited about where you’re heading? Is it still big enough for you, or have your britches gotten considerably bigger over the past year?

Many call this your BHAG (big hairy audacious goal). Audacious means to take “bold risks.” This goal should stretch you.

We revisit our BHAG each year because it often does change. Years ago we were on a path to build a huge agency. When we realized we wanted the agency because we wanted freedom and flexibility, we realized we could achieve freedom and flexibility much faster a different way. Rather than building a huge business with a high gross revenue and an internal team in order to make enough money to have freedom, would could develop a completely different BHAG to get that freedom. We were on that agency path, going full force, until we were forced to question it (failure and debt will do that to you) but now we purposely rethink the BHAG on at least a yearly basis.

Once we’ve revisit our big picture goal, we move into our one-year goal. We ask ourselves, “Where do we want to be this time next year? How does this push us towards our BHAG?”

We define it by intangibles like, “How do we want to feel? What does it feel like to achieve those things?”

We spend a lot of time describing what it will feel like to accomplish these things because, ultimately, accomplishing the goals is less about having the things, then it is about how those things are going to make you feel. This part is magical because even if you didn’t quite hit your goals last year, if you feel the way you wanted to feel, you still ultimately got what you wanted and that’s something to be happy about.

For example, you might set a goal of hitting $20,000/month because you want to feel financially secure, but if you hit $15,000/month and are on a path for growth you feel confident about, you will likely still feel financially secure. So didn’t you then actually hit your goal?

Likewise, you may hit $20,000/month and still not feel financially secure, in which case you’ll learn that it was never about the money. That is a good sign that you should investigate those feelings instead of always trying to make more. In that scenario, more money will probably never make you feel financially secure, and that’s good to know before you spend your whole life always chasing money to achieve security, and never achieve it.

Goal Setting Gripe #3 - Thinking Goal Setting is a Once-A-Year Activity

It’s New Years, so time to start that 30-day detox, start Barry’s Bootcamp every morning at 5am and figure out how I’m going to double my revenue this year!

…until January 20th, that is.

Goal Setting at the beginning of the year is a great idea, but it only works towards actually getting your goals (the point of this, right?!) if you think of goal setting as a year long process.

Solution #3: Have a Year Long Goal Setting Process

Once you’ve set your goals for the year, I recommend breaking that one-year goal up into a goal for the next three months, and then a list of actions you need to take in the next week to achieve that quarterly goal. This list should be SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Getting granular about the steps you need to take each and every week to meet your milestones makes them more likely to happen. Steve and I share a spreadsheet where we write weekly goals based on the quarterly goals. These are specific tasks that have due dates for the following week.

Each week we have a specified date and time in our calendar that we meet to record if we accomplished the task (or not), and set up our next week's goal.

This works beautifully because, as we’ve all heard, you’re more likely to achieve a goal if you write it down. One study showed that 76 percent of those who write their goals down, rate their level of commitment, share it with a friend and check in weekly actually achieved those goals, or were in the process of achieving them, compared to only 42% of people who just thought about their goals.

It’s not rocket science: If you want to make it happen, you gotta write it down. If you write it down on a shared list with an accountability partner, and commit to revisiting it frequently, you’re a bazillion times more likely to do it.

And while we’re scheduling things, take a minute to schedule quarterly check-ins now to make sure they happen (what gets scheduled, get done), even if it's just a couple hours at a coffee shop every few months. By planning to check-in with yourself throughout the year, you’ll make sure you’re still on track. If you’re not, you can make adjustments instead of waiting until next January.

Goal Setting Gripe #4 - Focusing only on Career/Business/Money

Goal Setting call feel synonymous with “achievement” and “work,” and that can make you focus only on the work achievements. But work is not life; your personal life, family life, relationships and friendships and your work are your life, so they all deserve your full attention when it comes to goal setting. A lot of my business goals are because of personal goals, because the way my business operates, and the money I make, results in free time for personal things.

So if those personal goals are a huge part of why we do the things we do, then they will benefit from going through the goals process just like a business.

Solution #4 - Goal Set for Life

We have friends with kids who use a similar strategy for family goals. It’s easy, when you’re married with kids, to assume the other person is on board or is still the person they were five years ago. These goal setting retreats help ensure their shared values and family goals are the same.  

When we sit down for our annual Badass Your Goals strategy day each year, Steve and I spend a significant amount of time imagining and talking about personal, family and relationship goals. Like: what do we want each day to actually look like?

So it should be no surprised that when we Badassed Our Goals when I was 7 months pregnant, a significant amount of time was spent talking about baby Axl who was going to be joining us shortly.

What was having a baby actually going to be like? Who was going to be responsible for what, and when, and for how long? How much time does one really spend just feeding a newborn, and how is it possible that two grown adults with three months off are going to be spread too thin taking care of one itty bitty baby?!

Practically everyone I spoke with told us there was nothing we could do to prepare for the insanity of having your first baby. They scared us shitless, which made us believe we needed to seriously Badass Our Goals even more than usual.

Perhaps we even over-prepared for this venture because we believed everyone about how hard it was going to be.

But it seemed to have work out in our favor.

We did a million things to prepare... and when he arrived it actually felt like a vacation compared to when we are working on our business!

Sure we were up a lot in the middle of the night those first couple months. But we also literally had nothing else we had to do!

We’d pre-written my weekly articles months in advance. Our badass virtual assistant and team member Amanda (who we could never live without) was taking care of all the posting.

We planned so much for it that, since babies sleep so much, we were actually watching movies in the middle of that day (which we never, ever do) because we weren’t sure what else to do with ourselves.

Seriously, it was bizarre!

Look, I’ve only had the one kid, and maybe he was unusually easy? I have no comparison.

But what I do know is that Steve and I thought through the whole thing so much, and set such clear goals and expectations about how everything was going to go down, that when the time came we had more than enough time and energy to do it.

Our Unique 3-Step Process

We have a three-step process we’ve developed over the years that has never failed to produce big results. It requires commitment, so if you want to do it your first task is to set aside a full day to just focus on this with no distractions. If that sounds like too much or you don’t think you need a full day, you are already communicating to yourself that these goals are not as important as you say they are!

If you need a process to follow for your goal setting, we’re running a special this week only on our How to Get Anything You Want: Goal Setting Program, check it out here: http://www.badassyourbusiness.com/goals

One of the biggest differences in our process is that it focuses on identifying how you want to feel in your life. The goals and achievements are just things. How acheivements change your experience of your life is what we’re all really going after, and if you can start with that in mind, you’ll be infinitely better set up for success.

We also give you an easy to follow, step by step process to follow to hit all the main points in your goal setting strategy day (Get a friend and do it together!)

Finally, our process for keeping track of goals each week, and each quarter, for the year make sure you get MASSIVE results. If you don’t have a plan for your goal setting this year, I highly recommend you check it out.

Parting Goal Setting Words:

Whether your plans are personal or business, make sure you’re not just trying to get more stuff, but that you identify what you want to feel when you get the stuff. If you don't get a hold of what you're trying to accomplish, and ultimately how you're going to feel and live your life, you'll end up with a bunch of things and none of it will matter. You'll just want more of it, and as they say you can’t take it with you.

Finally, break out of your habits of thinking. There are many more paths to accomplishing your ultimate goals than you may currently realize, and you may be able to get there sooner than you think if you take a different path. Take a full day (or two!) to do this rpocess so you can entertain all possibilities.. It's amazing how far you can go with a clear vision and accountability. 

Cheers to your most productive—and personally enriching—year yet!