How to become a goal setting MASTER!

Welcome to 2018! We're going to spend the first blog post of the year on CREATING CLARITY OF VISION because there are some things we need to wrap up around our goals before we really put them into action for the new year.

Two weeks ago, I asked you to write down your goals however you wanted to because the most important thing was getting them out of your head and onto paper in whatever format worked for you - a notebook, a piece of paper, or maybe you typed them up and printed them out. This week, we're going to take goal setting to the next level with some tips to make them more alive and more effective for you throughout the year, but first, let's review the seven core goal setting areas again one more time.

Goal Categories

1 - BEING - What are you doing to be as healthy as you can be in mind, body, spirit, and emotions? Because if you are not together, there's not much you can do for other people and the rest of the world.

2 - RELATIONSHIPS - Not only your significant other, but your family, your friends, your community and others throughout the world. What are your goals around relating to people?

3 - VOCATION / CAREER / MISSION - The way in which you're adding value to the world. How are you bringing your gifts to bear every day to add value to others?

4 - FINANCIAL - What are your the financial outcome goals, not only for your income, but your savings? When do you expect to be financially independent so that you can choose what you do every day? That's a great goal, if you haven't thought about that one before.

5 - TIME -  What is your relationship to time? Are you using your time effectively? Are there things that you could do better? What does your perfect day look like and are you living it?

6 - LIFESTYLE - What is your lifestyle like? Where are you living? Have you optimized your environment? Do you have a good vehicle to get you around to get things done? Are you traveling? Do you eat well? What are those things that you're doing in your life that create your lifestyle, and how do you want to move those forward this year?

7 - CONTRIBUTION - What are you doing in terms of contribution? This may be related to your career and your mission goal, but it may not be. There may be some other things beyond your career and mission goal where you want to contribute.

8 - CELEBRATION is an eighth goal category, but I don't consider it one of the core 7 categories because you could be doing celebration throughout the year for specific goals, accomplishments, and achievements or you could have one big celebration at the end of the year.

The One Thing

With that quick review behind us, let's take a look at a couple concepts from "The One Thing" by Gary Keller. It's probably the best goal-focused book that I've ever come across. What Gary says in a nutshell is you can have a really long to-do list, but there's only a couple things on your to-do list that should go on your success list.

Gary provides a key question that if you ask this in every area we've just reviewed, it'll really be enlightening for you - "What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?" That's a great question! So, make sure you ask this question for every goal area where you're setting goals.

Gary also goes over six productivity myths and I want to take a minute to go over these because they are important as you get into setting goals and further looking at how you're going to execute in your coming year.

Productivity Myths

1 - Everything matters equally. No, it doesn't. What's your one thing in each area of your life that matters the most? Think about that.

2 - Multi-tasking is Productive. There's a cost to multi-tasking called context switching and it's when you continuously move from one area to another, and some of you probably know what I'm talking about here, and it's one of the biggest areas of ineffectiveness out there. Focus on the one thing that's important.

3 - It takes a disciplined life to be successful. What Gary says is it really just takes habits to lead to success, and habits can be built. I recommended an app a couple weeks ago called The Way of Life. It's a great app for building lasting habits.

4 - Will power is always on will-call. Gary spends a good chapter on this in the book and it's really great because he says no, that's not true because you will eventually deplete your energy. You have to manage your time and your energy to focus on what's the most important.

5 - Life balance is desirable. The fifth one is a great one for a lot of people, too, because everybody thinks "oh, I can have a balanced life," but Gary does a great job of pointing out that's not really true because in order to be really effective, sometimes some things in your life need to be put on hold so you can focus on that one thing that really matters at that moment. Then, you can always come back to those other things, but you need to set your life up in a way that you can make that happen, and the people around you support you when you get into focusing on one thing at a time.

6 - Big is bad. Big is not bad. Big is great. That's what this blog is all about, making you realize that you're POWERFUL BEYOND MEASURE. What are your BIG GOALS that lead to BIG ACTION that leads to your BIG LIFE?

Goal Refining Questions

Next, for each area, there are some questions that you should ask to refine each goal. Let me walk through these.

1. Specifically, what does success look like for the goal in question?
2. Who could you enroll to help you achieve this goal? There's power in numbers.
3. What is the one thing you can do next that will move this goal forward? Back to the one thing theme again.
4. When will you get started?
5. When will you be complete?
6. Who will hold you accountable?
7. How will you celebrate? There's that eighth goal category. How will you celebrate when you get that goal accomplished?

Ask those questions for all your goals and help add a little more richness to how you are articulating your goal for yourself this year. As you will see next week, the more detail the BETTER!

The 12 Week Year

The next great, relevant book here is "The 12-Week Year" by Brian Moran and he does a great job of breaking down the year into quarters and if you do the math, each quarter actually has 13 weeks. However, Brian talks about having a 12-week plan for each quarter and using that 13th week for clean up and re-planning for the next quarter. I love this book. It's a great way to think about how to break out your year so that by the time you get to the end of it, you can look back and go, "Wow, that was my best year ever."

Here's a link to a Microsoft Word template that I use to help me break everything down into 12 week years. The document has four pages as follows:

1. The 2017 Review Questions
2. The 2018 High Level Questions
3. Goal Details - fill in as follows:
   1. On the left hand side of page three, you're going to put the category and type of goal.
   2. In the middle section is what is the goal is specifically and what are your quarterly milestones?
   3. On the right side, you're going to put your why.  Also, how's it going to change your life? Finally, how will you celebrate achieving that goal?
4. Quarterly Action Plan - this goes back to the "12-Week Year"; i.e. how do I break this goal down to small enough components that I can have achievable stepping stones on the way to accomplishing the overall goal?

Transform from Text to Audio

Here's my last super goal tip, and I don't know anybody that's really doing this tip consistently. I've talked to a bunch of people about it, and nobody's really taking me up on it. So, when you do, you'll realize that this tip is super powerful.  Here's the process:

1. Take your goals and copy / paste them into a Word document
2. Update as needed so that they flow in a reading format
3. Copy and paste them into From Text to Speech tool. 

This process takes your written goals and converts them into an MP3 file that you can drop on your smart phone so you can play it:

1. In the car
2. While you're getting dressed
3. Anywhere you have a few minutes to go through your goals

The more that you review your goals like this throughout the days, weeks, months, then the more they are manifested! If you did nothing else but this ONE THING (thank you Gary Keller) I firmly believe that this tip alone could change your life towards the direction that you want to go.

Next week, we're going to be talking about additional tips so that once you're done setting your goals this week, I will give you more tips for making sure that you stay on track throughout the year. I trust that you enjoyed this blog post, and we'll see you next week.