Setting Clear Goals – How To Make Sure Your Follow Through

Setting Clear Goals – How to Make Sure you Follow Through

So one big thing I do with the coaching clients that I work with is about setting goals and talking about the ways that we need to set goals in order to move our business forward and get to where we want to go. Setting goals is a major part of creating a business and running it. The problem many people come across with goal setting is following through.

Put aside the general distractions that we face daily when running a business, there’s also the mental challenges and lack of planning which can affect the outcome.

But there’s often quite a few things that can pop up, which can stop us from achieving the goals that we set. There are different scenarios that come in which make it hard for us to achieve our goals so which you then end up flicking and giving up.

Here’s a few reasons why we can often fail to follow through on our goals.

1. It’s Too BIG

–          Break it down

–          Small, Achievable, measurable steps

2. Not CLEAR

–          Understand why, how, what and who is needed to make it become a reality

–          Map it OUT so everyone can see the path to the goal

3. Understand what the outcome is.

–          What exactly are we doing this for?

–          What are we hoping to achieve?

–          Is it in line with the core values and purpose of the Business

4. Not ALIGNED

–          Its not aligned with who you are as a person

–          It’s not aligned with what the Business stands for or is trying to achieve

The first one is, it’s just “Too Big”. We set a goal that’s just too massive for us to comprehend and the overwhelm sinks in and we just want to escape and give it away. The reason is because we haven’t broken it down into smaller chunks.

Picture that you’re standing at the bottom of a large staircase and you’re looking up these 20 flights of stairs and the goal is way up the top there. Now you’re trying to think well, how am I going to get from down here, all the way up there? This seems like an impossible task to jump 20 steps.

So what we do? We then we basically give it up. The overwhelm creeps in and we just say “it’s too hard”. What you need to do is need to break it down and ask yourself what are those other 19 steps that we’d need to make to get to that top flight?

You need to make them small, measurable and achievable steps. They need to be small enough that you know that you can do that little step each at a time. Measurable means that you can see that it’s been done, you can tick it off, and Achievable as in making it to the point where you know it can be done, it’s not going to overwhelm you to look at this small portion that can be done.

It might be a 20 minute task, it might be a one hour task, but setting it up in a way that’s going to hold you in the present. What I mean by that is sometimes that bigger vision or goal means then we start looking beyond that or then to far after that.

Another reason is it’s not clear. So that’s either whether it’s a goal you’re setting individually or as a goal that you’re setting as a group method to do. Ask the following:

–          Why you are you trying to do this,

–          why is this goal important to you or to the business?

–          How are you going to achieve it? So again, looking up at how we’re going to break it down and make this work?

–          “What” as in What do I need to bring in or what do I need to take out to make this achievable? What do I need to do?

–          And if it’s a group kind of scenario, you’re looking at “Who”, who are the people I need to include, and who are the people that I need to kind of exclude for clarity.

When we look at a big goal within a company with a lot of people involved, we try and involve a lot of people. And what that can often do is really muddy up what’s going on because everyone starts to put in their ideas and what their vision of the goal should be and what should happen and how and why.

So you should really be okay with excluding certain people that aren’t really relevant to the goal that you’re trying to achieve. Really map it out, allocate who needs to do whatever steps that you’re breaking down and note how they need to do it, and be clear about what role everyone needs to take.

If you’re not clear, then that murkiness will creep in from everybody. You might have people doubling up on the same job, a whole task being totally excluded because nobody’s clear about what needs to happen. Then the goal ends up getting pushed out, or just getting pushed away, because you’re never going to get there.

You really need to identify, “what’s the outcome you’re looking for”? What’s this all about? What benefit is this going to give to me in the business. So just setting a goal for the sake of saying I want to get something done is okay, but it needs to have an outcome. There needs to be a very defined purposeful outcome that needs to be linked to the core business, or the core vision that you have for this business.

You have an overall vision that we know we need to do certain things to achieve it so ask is this goal that you’ve set for this certain task linked to that overall vision? If it’s not, be okay with just putting it aside. It might not be ready right now. Don’t let the ego hold on to and say “no, I really have to do this because this is something I really want to do” when it’s not linked to anything.

What will happen is ultimately you’ll just lose interest in it, and it will phase out.

The last one is that it’s just not aligned with anything. And I mean that in a sense, it’s not aligned with you, who you are, the vision you have or the purpose you want to serve. If that’s the case then it’s definitely not aligned with the business.

So if it’s not aligned with those two things and it doesn’t fit in what’s going on in the larger vision so it’s not clear why it’s there, there’s no clear outcome of what it’s for. That overwhelm creeps in and we’re just trying to do something for the sake of doing it.

So everything we do, every goal that we set should have a clear purpose and a clear outcome and then that goal then should be broken down into very clear, manageable, achievable steps that anyone can follow. If you map it out in a certain way, anyone within the team can pick it up, and know where they fit into it, where they need to go with it.

Setting goals is great. It’s what we all need to do when we’re running our businesses. What I really work on and focus on with our clients to help them achieve what they need to do when setting their goals is to ensure there needs to be accountability to it and it needs to be measured and controlled.

So if you’re struggling with kind of achieving the goals that you’re setting, you’re not sure if the goals meaningful, it’s aligned or why can’t seem to get there, reach out, message me numbers below the email, contact me any way you can. Let’s talk about the goals that you’ve set and how we can reduce that overwhelm and make them achievable for you