As you may have noticed, we are now well into the New Year. On New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, you probably told someone what your New Year’s resolution was. The problem is that by now, most of us don’t remember what our resolution was, or worse, have already given up! For most people, they didn’t take the time to write their goal down. The key to accomplishing your goals is simple: have a written plan.
Define areas of importance
Start with a few areas that are important to you. Some suggestions to consider are career, family and friends, business, personal development, health, volunteer, hobbies and financial.
Define your goals
Remember that you need to focus on a few goals that are measureable and attainable. If we list everything that we want to accomplish, we tend to become overwhelmed and find that our rate of success is low.
Make all your goals as specific and actionable as possible. This means they should be things you can take action on, with a timeline to accomplish the goal. For most of us, if we can’t put our goals into our calendar, with milestones toward achieving each one, our targets probably aren’t specific enough.
Visualize
I have always relied on my calendar, Word documents or mind-mapping software to help me stay on track with what I want to accomplish. When I joined ATI, I learned another way to keep me focused on my objectives. ATI encourages the use of a goal poster, a picture you can keep on your desk that continuously reinforces the goals visually every day of the year. I have also made my goal poster a screen saver on my computer, again to keep my aims visible.
Create accessibility
When you have your goals, milestones and timeline completed, it’s a good idea to send it to your smartphone, tablet or any device you use regularly, so you can scroll through your objectives every day.
Update it
By putting your goal plan on all your devices, you can review it anywhere! Standing in line for coffee, before your next meeting or any time you have a free minute. This regular review helps keep your goals front and center and allows you to note accomplishments that you have made toward your objectives.
Review your goals
Whether you actually review your goals on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis is entirely up to you. By creating a way to access them electronically and with the support of a goal poster, you make them portable and give yourself the opportunity to review them regularly wherever you are.
While I would like to share all my goals with you, I’ll make things brief. I can tell you that I have two children in college and one in high school, and a retirement plan that I want to grow, so you can probably guess that I just need more money. I won’t bore you with the details. However, I believe it is important to have some goals that are not business or career oriented, but are just for enjoyment. If you click ationlinetraining.com/abrn1305, you can see part of a mind map that I have created to help me focus on spending some time doing something I enjoy, something that I have been thinking about and haven’t started yet. And yes, with the kids in college, I’ll probably quickly realize that the car will have to wait!
Now that you have the steps to defining measureable and attainable goals, it’s time for you to sit down and create your goal plan so you can begin to accomplish everything that you want!
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