Tag Achieving Goals

When Goals Matter – Part Four

Steve Keating 1 Comment

I remember asking one of my mentors many years ago what I needed to do in order to be successful. His answer, as usual, what short and to the point. He said you must have balance in your life. 

 

It was his opinion that you could be the most successful business person in the world but if your family hated you then you were not truly a success. He believed that an unbalanced obsession in any one part of your life kept you from complete success. 

 

I believe he was 100% correct in his assessment.

 

So I recommend setting goals in six key areas of your life. Those areas are family and home, financial and career, spiritual and ethical, mental and educational, social and cultural and physical and mental. (For those of you who think that’s 12 areas I’m okay with that too but the pairings actually go together)

 

I think you’ll find that having goals in each of those areas can help you achieve them all. You may not always be motivated to head out to work but when you realize that you’re actually working for your family it tends to make it easier. Perhaps you’re really kung ho about getting that promotion at work but when you also have a goal to have a thriving social network you may be more likely to pull yourself away from that desk. That means you have some balance in your life. 

 

Before we go any further let’s make one thing perfectly clear; when I say social network I’m talking about the old fashioned kind, you know, the kind where you interact with actual humans, face-to-face. Talking to them…with your voice. No amount of social media followers or friends will ever replace human contact and never kid yourself that it will.

 

Now, back to goals.

 

Once you’ve determined where to set goals you’re pretty much ready to start writing them down. I like the SMART method of setting goals, you’ve likely heard of it many times. Make certain your goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timed. 

 

It’s a great method for setting goals, it has just one problem….it seldom works. It’s not really that SMART goals fail because they are not smart, they fail because most people don’t seem to understand the definition of specific. They end up with MART goals and that doesn’t even sound smart. 

 

So, in the fifth and final post of this series we’re going deep on specificity. You’ll end up with goals that represent your roadmap, a detailed roadmap, to success.

 

Until then consider this… I’ve always heard it said that there are only two things certain in life, those being death and taxes. I’d like to add this to the certainties of life: if you’re willing to be stopped in the pursuit of your goals there will always be someone or something to stop you. 


The more specific you are in setting your goals the harder it is for someone else to get in your way. You’re looking at a substantial investment of time in order to be specific when setting true goals but it’s an investment with a guaranteed return because it’s an investment in yourself. 

When Goals Matter – Part Three

Steve Keating 1 Comment

Hopefully since my last post you’ve been considering those activities you do with some regularity that provide you with no return on your time investment. Your odds of accomplishing anything new go way up when you’re prepared to give up something old to get it. I guess maybe that’s what “they” mean when they say life is full of trade-offs.

 

If you’re indeed serious about stopping something in order to start something new you’ll need to set a stop goal with as much specificity and accountability as any other goal. We’ll talk about those goal setting characteristics in our next post but the key thing to remember is that a stop goal is indeed a goal and the same rules apply if you plan on achieving it. Old habits die hard and unless you’re very intentional about killing them they tend to linger on indefinitely.

 

There is no magic to the number of goals you have but keep in mind if you’re focusing on 21 different things you actually have no focus at all. Prioritizing your goals in order to focus is a key to actually achieving them. It’s also perfectly okay, in fact it’s good practice, to occasionally adjust and rethink your goals.

 

If you’re serious about goal setting then it’s vital that you be honest with yourself. If you have a goal to be debt-free in 3 years then don’t try to convince yourself that you can go three years and never spurge on something. Build the occasional spurge into your goals, discipline is important in achieving goals but so is realism. Being overly aggressive when setting goals causes frustration and frustration is a short path to failure.

 

Your formal goal-setting process begins by determining your vision and your mission. You should write out an actual vision and mission statement to guide you through your goal-setting and your life. Your vision statement is a description of where you are going in life and what it will look like when you get there. Make it fun, make it appealing and make it truthful. This is YOUR vision, don’t be talked out of it by someone who wants to run your life. It’s hard enough to achieve your own goals; you’ll find it nearly impossible and totally unfulfilling trying to achieve someone else’s. 

 

Once you have your vision statement you’re ready to develop your mission statement. This is a statement that sums up the direction you want your life to take in the future. That direction should be leading you directly to your vision. Once developed your mission will become the driving force behind your goals, both personal and professional. 

 

Goals always matter but when you’re on a mission you’ll find that goals really really matter.

 

By the way, if you’re still wondering about those stop goals then a mission statement can really come in handy. If you’re doing something too frequently that doesn’t help you accomplish your mission then you may want to set a stop goal around it. That allows you to focus more energy on the things that do help you accomplish your mission.


In my next post I’ll discuss the areas of your life you may want to consider setting goals and exactly what a true goal looks like. Until then start thinking about your vision and mission. Understanding, with great specificity, where you want to go in life is absolutely essential if you truly hope to get there.


Stop Before You Start

Steve Keating 4 Comments

Geez, what happened to 2014? It went fast didn’t it? I hope it was a productive and prosperous year for you. I hope you kept all your resolutions and achieved all your goals. I hope!

Hope is nice but it’s no substitute for an actual plan.

If you’re like the vast majority of people, your resolutions were toast before you received your first paycheck in 2014. If you set goals your odds were somewhat better. If you set goals along with developing a plan for exactly how you would achieve them your odds of reaching them were actually pretty good.

If your plan included what you would stop doing in order to start doing something more productive then your odds of achieving your goals in 2014 were excellent.

Most of us are very busy people, we just don’t have much free time on our calendars. Yet when setting goals for the coming year we just add more to the mix. To be more successful we will start doing_____________. Go ahead and fill in the blank.

Do your goals for 2015 include starting new habits, starting new activities, starting new projects? Well that just isn’t realistic unless you first plan to stop doing something too.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve joined fitness clubs. I budgeted the money to pay for it, but not the time to use them. It was just one more thing that I didn’t have time to do. To be a bit more precise, it wasn’t that I didn’t have the time, I just didn’t make using the clubs a priority. To use them, I would have had to stop doing something else, I CHOOSE not to do that. It wasn’t really a concious choice but it was a choice just the same.

Unless you found yourself with an abundance of time in 2014 it’s foolish to add more to your “to-do” in 2015. Before you add anything new, take something off.

So let me suggest you begin your 2015 planning by making a “Stop-doing” list. A list of those “things” that you do which get you little or nothing in return. Make a concious choice about how you invest your time in 2015. Open up some time in your day to begin doing some new things that help you reach a goal.

Your success in 2015 might not determined by what you do; it may well be determined by what you don’t do any longer.

Will 2015 be Better for You?

Steve Keating 6 Comments

They are here! The “Holidays” have arrived. The days of the holiday season seem to go by much faster than the rest of the year. Before we know it 2015 will be upon us. Soon, people will be wishing us a Happy New Year and we’ll be hoping for a brighter 2015 for ourselves and those we care about.

Stop hoping. Start doing.

Now is the time to set goals for 2015 and the rest of your life. Research shows that 84% of people have no formal goals. They have plans, dreams, hopes and of course, the ubiquitous good intentions but not true goals.

True goals are written out objectives, along with an almost daily plan for how you will achieve those objectives. True goals are what high achievers use to get ahead. True goals are what successful people use to motivate themselves.

I could write pages on how to set goals but there is already enough info online that covers the subject better than I could. So here’s a different kind of help, a 2015 kind of help.

Here are three apps that can help you determine just how successful 2015, and the rest of your life will be.

GoalsOnTrack. Perhaps the most robust goal-setting app available, it allows you to record your goals, your personal motivations, start and end dates, sub goals, habits and most importantly, action plans.

It will sync with Google Calendar and Outlook and you can create goal templates within the app as well. It’s not the prettiest of the goal-setting apps but it’s very effective.

LifeTick. My goals are based on my Core Values. The beauty of this app is you begin the goal-setting process by defining your own core values, after all, these are YOUR goals.

Once you have determined your Core Values the app will walk you through the SMART goals process and then add the steps required to help you actually achieve the goal. It lets you keep track of your goal achieving activities and let’s you add notes too.

One big difference is that it is multi-user so others can be part of your goal setting process, this is great for couples. The big downside of this app is that it’s desktop based and in my experience life is mobile.

Strides. This is a great looking app and it has excellent dashboards. It’s like looking at your life on a Smartphone screen. This is more of a habit tracking program than a true goal-setting app but it understands that there are different types of goals and allows you to track the activities required to achieve them. It’s not free (3.99) and it is only available for iOS at the moment.

There are other apps you can check out, which one you choose matters less than the fact that at least your thinking about and planning your future.

Start now and take your time. Goal-setting can, and should be time consuming. You are after all planning the rest of your life. Research conducted by AAA says that the average person will spend 40 hours planning a two-week vacation. Research conducted by me says the average person will spend 0 hours planning the rest of their life.

Don’t be average!