Want To Know My Goal Setting Secret?
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It’s that time of year! I love fall for all sorts of reasons. I love watching the trees change colors, pulling out my snuggly sweaters, yummy soup and most of all I love goal setting.
I love thinking about the coming year, planning my next steps and the knowledge that anything is possible in the next 12 months.
Where will you be this time next year?
It’s a wonderful question to ponder. The reality is that some people hate goal setting though. It’s stressful, they are afraid that they can’t meet their goal, and the whole thing gets to be too overwhelming.
What I see for may people is that they set themselves up for failure from the start.
Here’s how goal setting typically works. You decide how much money you want to make in a year or sales you want to close and divide the number by 12. Now you have your monthly goal and off you go. Right?
Here’s the thing. I don’t know about you, but I actually don’t hit my goal every month. Things come up to distract my energy from my work and sometimes my heart just isn’t in it. Let’s face it you can’t go all out all the time. You need a chance to regroup, catch your breath and recharge.
The main issue with setting your goals based on a 12 month year is that you don’t have any margin for error. I see many people get behind by a month or two and then give up because they feel like they can’t ever catch up.
Here’s my secret dramatically increasing your chances of success: Set all of your goals based on a 10 month year.
I know, you were probably hoping for something more profound, but try it. You will be amazed at the impact is has.
You can stop being so hard on yourself if something starts to slip, and you will be more inclined to stay the course because you have already built in make up time.
Best of all, in a perfect world, if you do meet your goals in the first 10 months of the year, imagine the vacation you could take during the other 2 months!
To your success!
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Nicole, this is a great post! Thanks for the tip.
I talked to a very successful friend this week who met her money goals by September – $1 million in her business! She was at a bit of a loss because she didn’t know what to do with herself for the rest of the year and/or thought she should have aimed higher.
What do you think?
Hi Adele,
Wow! That is fantastic that she met her goal in September! Congrats on doing $1M in business. Two things, one is to celebrate the success. An entrepreneurs we are always focused on the next goal and rarely take time to actually celebrate a job well done. Done beat yourself up for aiming too low, celebrate the fact that you did incredibly well. The second thing is then to set 2 goals. One being a 3 month goal of what you want to accomplish in the next 90 days and then the second being what you want to accomplish in the year ahead.
Wishing you much success!
Nicole
Love it, Nicole! Such a simple tweak, but one that will pack a powerful punch.
Thanks Lisa! It made a huge difference for me when I started doing it because it relieved a lot of the stress from always feeling like I was behind.
xoxo
N
Yep, I do this as well and it’s what I teach. Partly the maths is easier dividing by 10 not 12 so people can work out a year to month target in a couple of seconds 😉 but mainly I think it allows for lots of love time off!
Cathy
Haha! Cathy, you are so right about the math. Aside from building in a margin for error, it just makes the math easier which makes people more inclined to do it.
Nicole