Goal Setting: Ten Strategies for Success

Goal setting without plans is wishful thinking. By connecting your Personal Business Plan with your Personal Life Plan you are putting in place the foundation that will keep you focused and your business and personal life aligned. Doing so increases your chances of achieving goal setting success.

Successful salespeople usegoal setting. By modeling successful people you can accelerate your own learning and achieve the results in life thatyou want. Here are ten goal setting strategies that can help you achieve your goals more quickly.

  1. Dare to Be Great.  Great things happen to people who dare to push the boundaries of their past experience.  Ask yourself, “What would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?”  The answer may both surprise and motivate you.  Make sure your goals are exciting enough to compel you towards them.
  2. Have a Clear Outcome.  For a dream to become a goal, it must be specific and measurable.  While it’s fun to daydream about being wealthy, it takes courage and hard choices to decide exactly how much money you want to earn and what you’ll actually do to earn it.
  3. Commit Yourself.  Many people “try” to reach their goals.  Successful people give themselves no other alternative but to succeed.  For them failure is not an option.  If your goal is worth it, they fully commit to achieving it.
  4. Hold Yourself Accountable.  Once you’ve defined your goal and committed yourself to it, start talking about it.  Talking about your goals makes them emotionally real and powerful.  Each time you talk about your goals, you make a mental pathway towards its success.  Talking about your goals also allows you to get feedback and support from other people.
  5. Write it Down.   This is one of the oldest and most powerful techniques for achieving any goal.  Describe what you want in as specific and compelling detail as possible.  Describe how you will achieve it, when you will achieve it and how you will benefit from it.  Writing it down is your way of creating a vivid mental map for achieving what you want.
  6. Reinforcement.  Review your goals every day in the morning and before you go to bed.  If a goal is worth having, it’s worth 2-3 minutes each day to reinforce it.  In the morning, review your goals and ask yourself, “What can I do today to help me achieve my goals?”  Before you go to bed ask, “What did I do today to help me achieve my goals?”  Do this every day.
  7. Take Action Every day.  Most goals can’t be achieved in one day.  You can’t make a million dollars in a day, you can’t lose 20 pounds overnight, and you can’t increase sales 30% with a single call.  Break your goals down into manageable chunks so that you can take some action every day.  If you look at a task, ask “What can I do today that will move the goal forward?”  Keep asking this question until you find a manageable chunk for the day.  These can be simple things like earn an extra $100, workout for 20 minutes or do research on a key client.
  8. Manage Your Self-Talk.  Most challenging goals encounter speed bumps along the way.  When this happens, self-doubt often rears its ugly head in the form of negative self-talk.  When you start hearing yourself say, “I can’t do this”, “you blew it”, etc., remember you control the self-talk. If you don’t like the conversation, change it.  Tell yourself what you want and need to hear to succeed.
  9. Self Correct as NeededSince change is constant, make sure that you regularly review your goals and evaluate your commitment to them.  If you values or your choices have changed, change your goals to fit the circumstances.  If the goals still fit, go for them full out.  Remember, there is no failure, only feedback.
  10. Celebrate progress.  Don’t wait until the goal is fully achieved to celebrate.  Every step towards your goal should be documented and celebrated.  When you get down or discouraged, your record of past successes will quickly get you back on track.  Celebrate each and every milestone on your journey to success.

Goals are our way of challenging ourselves to discover who we are.  Just imagine how you’ll think, feel and act after you’ve achieved your most important goals.  Use the ten strategies outlined and fully experience the power of goal setting.