I am a huge believer that you need goals in life to be happy and increase the chances of achieving success. Success means different things for different people but regardless of the goals, I still think setting them are important.
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At 19/20 years old, I set a goal of owning a business that turned over £100,000. At the time this seemed really crazy. I had no money, no experience, no family connections and no idea of what type of business to start. Within 18 months I had hit this goal...was it the right goal to have? Probably not, but nonetheless it made me believe goal setting worked.
At this point I started to look into goal setting more and tried to perfect it over the next five years. I am sure there is still room for me to improve it further - but this goal setting strategy has allowed me to hit a number of my goals in the last 5 years.
Send me an email and I will reply with my PDF goal setting planner
1. Make a longer term life goal
By this I mean think about what you want your life to look like in 10 - 40 years' time (depending how old you are). Write a one pager on what every aspect of your life looks like at this time in the future. Use this as a guiding focus for all your other goals but don't get too caught up on how you will get there.
2. Make a 1 year goal list
These need to be believable - so if you don't have a business today and no experience running a business - don't say you want a business with £20 million profit in 12 months' time because you won't believe it is possible. But using my example when I was 20 - I wanted to own a business with £100,000 worth of sales.
3. Break down your one year goal list into 12 months
Once I have my year goals I will then break it down into monthly goals. So what do I need to do, each month, to reach that one year goal list. At the start of each month I get my one year goals out and decide what I need to do that month to stay on track. e.g for me to hit £100,000 I needed to sell £8,333 per month.
4. Break down your month's goals into weekly goals
Once I had my monthly goals I then needed to break it down to 4 weekly goals. So week 1 'what do I need to do'. Week 2...etc. Again at the start of each week I would look at the month's goal and write the weekly goals. e.g for me to hit the £8,333 I needed to sell £2,083 per week to stay on track.
5. Break down your week's goals into daily goals
Finally I would start each day by looking at my weekly goals and breaking it down into daily activities I needed to do, in order to hit the weekly goal. e.g to hit £2,083 per week I needed to sell £416 (per working day). To do that I knew I needed to get at least two new client leads per day. To get two new client leads per day, I needed to speak to 20 decision makers.
This simple process makes hitting £100,000 in sales seem a lot easier and makes you hold yourself accountable everyday.
In reality it is unlikely to be this straight forward as you might have multiple goals. But regardless of what they are, you still need to break them down into daily activities and hold yourself accountable.
Following this structure doesn't guarantee you will hit your goals, but I believe it will massively increase your chances and has allowed me to hit 7/10 goals I have set.
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