A successful year
How to plan for a successful year
What's the one thing that will make the difference in whether you have a successful year or not?
It's the goals and objectives you set for yourself and your business for the coming 12 months.
There's no right way to set goals. People do it in different ways. What's important is that you do set them. Some people write letters to themselves, others write stories that talk about what it's like in 12 months time. Mindmaps are often used, and also the tried and trusted bullet-point list.
Get your goals visible
Whatever method you use, it's clear that goals needs to be written down and formalised to give them the best chance of success. They need to be visible, in your face on a regular basis and not gathering dust in your drawer. Whether it's a wall chart, a graph, a vision board, or a formal set of goals - having them in a visible, readable and instantly recognisable form takes you a long way towards achieving them.
Struggling to define them?
If you're struggling to define your goals, try thinking beyond the time-frame you're looking at. Ask yourself "what does success look like and feel like for me?" Then come back from that longer term vision to a closer time and consider what you should be doing in the next, say, 12 months, to head you towards that longer term vision.
Don't fall into the trap of limiting your goal setting to your business. We recommend taking the big picture view and considering family, health, financial etc. As well as setting objectives you want to achieve, you could also set objectives for things you want to stop doing, eg. taking work home with you on the weekend.
The best time for goal setting is when you are removed from your daily patterns and can be objective. The Xmas / New Year holiday period is perfect for this.
Take some time to formulate your goals for the next year - for your business, your family, your health ... your life.
SMART goals
Make sure your goals are SMART .... or better still .... SMARTER
S pecific (what, how and why...)
M easureable ("losing 10 ks" vs "losing weight")
A chieveable (is it attainable?)
R ealistic (do you have the resources to achieve it)
T imely (by when?)
...
Ethical
Rewarding
Create your destiny
It pays to remember the past doesn't determine the future. Just because you may have set goals before and perhaps didn't achieve them, doesn't mean this will be so in the future.
"Create your own destiny or someone else will"
Jack Welch (former General Electric CEO)
"Alice is completely and thoroughly lost, not knowing which way to turn, so she asks the Cheshire cat, perched rather precariously on a tree limb, for some help.
“Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?” asks Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to go,” replies the cat.
“I don’t much care where,” says Alice.
“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go,” came the reply.
“So long as I get somewhere,” Alice adds as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” grinned the cat."
We assume that if we are working hard we must be getting ahead. But working hard and being busy trying to get ahead without specific, clearly defined goals on how to do it, is living in a fool’s paradise.
Start planning your successful year today
