By: Michael DeVenney
Success is goals – and everything else is commentary.
The key to achieving the success you want in this world comes down to a very simple habit – writing down your key goals and focusing your efforts and attention on them regularly.
How do you define success?
It’s all invented. The reality of success is that is it all invented anyway so we might as well invent a vision and framework for success that brings meaningful results personally and professionally for us and those around us.
“Most people don’t lead their own lives – the accept their lives”
John Kotter
When you focus on your goals you multiply your progress.
Performance without goals is a meandering road – it can happen but it’s not consistent or sustainable. At times, we all get clouded by pressures for short term returns, get lost in the numbers or caught in our “busyness”. We believe our own story. We lose focus. We drift and wonder where our energy and motivation has gone.
We have to be clear in our minds where we want to go next.
When you combine goals and performance, you have meaningful success. People create success in their lives by having a vision of where they want to be. We have moved from an age of manpower to the age of mindpower.
Goals are is not soft.
Clear goals means having an immediate answer to the question “what will your business look like in five years?”
Goals are really clarity about what you want.
It starts with the concept of making the future your property. Remember, if it’s all invented anyway, why not be the one to do the inventing?
“There’s an old saying that Noah didn’t wait for his ship to come in – he built one”
John Maxwell
Goals are more than a destination – they are a way to determine the direction of our future. Goals form the actions we take and the actions we take generate the results that make our business.
Think about your goals – successful people think about their goals every day. All successful people are intensely goal-oriented and your ability to set goals is the master skill of success.
Goals increase your confidence, develop your competence and boost your motivation.
You become what you think about most of the time.
Living without clear goals is like driving in a thick fog – defining your goals clears the fog and lets you focus and channel your energies and abilities.
The people who don’t set goals don’t understand goals:
- They think goals are not important and don’t understand that your future follows your direction – luck is simply having goals
- They don’t know how and confuse wishes and dreams with goals
- They have a fear of failure and sabotage themselves to stay comfortable
- They have a fear of rejection and stay where they are
You can either spend your time preparing or repairing. Think about the difference in your life if you do one as opposed to the other. When your focus is on preparing, you focus on today, increase your efficiency and confidence, save money, pay now for tomorrow, and move to a higher level. Focusing on repairing makes you put attention on yesterday, consumes time and breeds discouragement, increases costs and pays now for yesterday and becomes an obstacle for growth
What is the goal advantage?
Goals tell us what we need to learn next:
- Goals help us focus on the most important things giving us energy
- Goals help us choose and decide on the best opportunities that fit us and give us a sense of direction
- Goals help us communicate and act providing us with growing confidence in ourselves and also how we work with other people
- Goals help us be accountable giving us a sense of meaning
Goals provide us with lifelong learning that is custom-designed just for us, working with our strengths and identifying our weaknesses and constantly evolving and integrating our lives.
Goals help us learn more, learn faster and learn better.
Goals support us in giving up hope of a better past – it has already happened and cannot be changed but our future can.
The key advantage of goal planning is to make the future your property.
The decision to accept responsibility for yourself, your future and your results is the essential decision for success. When you make excuses, blame others, complain or criticize you give your power away and let other people take control over your future.
Be future-oriented – it is the common characteristic of successful people. Have an immediate answer to the question “what will your life look like in five years?”
Step one is to define a five year vision for your success.
“We greatly overestimate what we can do in one year. But we greatly underestimate what is possible for us in five years.”
Peter Drucker
Once you have a clear vision, think back to how you would achieve it – asking how forces you to be both future-oriented and positive.
One key to goal planning is to make your plans in writing. Only about 3% of people put their goals in writing.
Mark MacCormack, author of a study “What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School”, did research on Harvard MBA graduates from 1979 to 1989. The main question was if the graduates had clear, written goals for their future and plans to accomplish them. The results…
3% Yes
13% Goals but not written or planned
84% No real defined goals at all
Hope was the major strategy.
The results of the study 10 years later reveal the significant advantage of goal planners. The 3% of the original graduate study group who had clear, written goals with plans were earning 10 times that of the other 97% group combined. The only difference in their success was the clarity of their goals. The study was repeated for a further ten years – the same results were realized.
Define your goals, write them down and make plans for achieving them.
Simple but not always easy. Goal planning and visioning are not genetic abilities. However, they are habits and like any habit they can be learned.
We often start our thinking with what is wrong and what we need to change. Goal planning should start differently – with a positive focus. To start your goal plan, think about what has been positive for you in the past year (or longer). What have you achieved or accomplished that made you proud and pleased? What events created great satisfaction and enjoyment for you?
Write down the five to ten achievements or events that are the most positive for you. Next to each one, write out why each event was important and what you could do to build on your success. What you identify as most positive for you generally also relates to areas of strength. If you focus first on the positive and build on your strengths, the goals you set will be more meaningful and motivational with a greater likelihood of success.
Think about the progress you have achieved and also the progress you want to make in the next three to five years. What do you want to accomplish?
Ask yourself the question, “If we were sitting here in three years looking back, what has to have happened for you to be happy with your progress?”
Think about different areas of your life and work and clarify where you want to be in three years.
Create your professional future by answering a series of questions and thinking about what you want your career to look like.
- What would your ideal position look like?
- What would you be doing with your time?
- What would you be earning?
- What people would you be working with (clients or teams)?
- What kind of responsibility would you have?
- What company or industry would you be working with or in?
- How would your colleagues speak of you?
What needs to happen to get there? What progress needs to be made in the next three years?
Review your areas of positive focus and the next steps you want to take, the progress you have made and want to make, and areas in your life for growth. Narrow your goals to three to five most important to you. A rule of thumb is if you have less than three goals you are probably missing opportunities and if you have more than five goals you are going to scatter your energies too much and not be able to achieve your best. The key is to aim for three to five core goals.
Focus on results, concentrate on solutions and have an action orientation. There will always be obstacles so always think about what can be done and how can a problem be resolved.
Remember, goals increase your confidence, develop your competence and boost your motivation.
Now write out your goals. Follow these six steps to be successful at goal setting:
- Decide exactly what it is you want with each goal – clarity is essential. Being more physically fit is a great idea but not a goal – what specifically do you mean by being fit? A goal for being more physically fit may include a weight objective, exercise objective, or sleep objective (or all three) – the key is to be specific about what you want to achieve.
- Write it down and be specific and measurable. Make sure each goal can be measured in some way. For the example above of being more physically fit, you may want to measure the exercise sessions you have, body fat or other fitness aspect, or time off. Every goal needs to be measurable.
- Set a deadline for each goal. Be realistic and look at when you will have completed your goal – commit to a deadline.
- Make an action plan for each goal – what are the steps you need to follow to achieve your goal by the deadline.
- Take some action immediately (within 48 hours of setting your goal) to move forward. A short term action or milestone within the first 30 days builds commitment.
- Focus on progress each week by reviewing your goals, noting your progress, and deciding on next steps.
As Dan Sullivan of The Strategic Coach says, “there are no such things as unrealistic goals just unrealistic time frames.” Dan helps entrepreneurs achieve their greatest results with a model of lifetime growth:
- Always make your future bigger than your past
- Always make your contribution bigger than your reward
- Always make your learning greater than your experience
- Always make your performance greater than your applause
- Always make your gratitude greater than your success
- Always make your enjoyment greater than your effort
- Always make your confidence greater than your comfort
Successful people fail more than any other people – there will always be roadblocks and obstacles. Identify the constraints and get rid of them. The two main blocks to your success are always the internal ones – fear and doubt. The antidotes are courage and confidence and the keys to courage and confidence are making the future more predictable and increasing your control of your direction. The answer to courage and confidence is simple – goal planning.
If you want different results, do something different. You will never achieve great results in your life without consistent and persistent action.
Goals change your life. Goals increase your confidence in knowing exactly what you want and need to do. Goals develop your competence as you know where to focus your efforts and learning. Goals boost your motivation as you have certainty to what you are working toward.
You create your own future and make the key decision to be successful. You accept responsibility for yourself, your situation, and everything that happens to you. We all have circumstances – it is our decision to become master of our own futures that separates the successful from the rest.
Give up hope of a better past. We all have our share of baggage that we worry about from our past. Nothing we do today will change our past. It is done. We can only learn from it and move forward.
Remember, it’s all invented – revise the story!
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