Follow Through – Goals Won’t Just Attain Themselves (2/3)

Wednesday was the beginning of our series on goals and I wrote of the importance of goals as well as how to come up with them. Today I want to elaborate on how to set them in stone, what to do with them once we’ve set them, and how to actually achieve them. The point of setting goals is to complete them, deciding them is first step. Fortunately, if we’ve already decided our goals, the hardest part is out of the way! Now it’s time to follow through.

Since deciding on what we want to accomplish is out of the way, we can now set our goals in stone. Up to this point we have goals that are pretty flimsy and need to be solidified. Everyone has heard of S.M.A.R.T. goals and it seems cliche but it’s true, our goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. If we’re not Specific and the goals aren’t Measurable, how do we know if we’ve ever achieved them? If they’re not Attainable or Relevant, than why bother working towards them in the first place? And if something is not Time-Bound, we can procrastinate forever and fool ourselves (and others) into believing we’ll get it done ‘someday.’

• Bad Example: “I want to save money”
• Good Example: “I am going to put away $250 each month into savings for a year”

My Goals are broken down into two categories: Things I want to accomplish by a certain date and things I want to accomplish every day. This is what works for me and this is how I have learned to form good habits. I have longer-term goals such as owning a home on the beach in my hometown by the time I’m 35 and finishing a marathon on December 14th, 2013. I also have daily goals to read, write, do a devotional, and call my Dad. I track these things so I don’t forget to do them on a whiteboard in my room. These serve as daily reminders of what I need to do each day to shape myself into who I need to be. I must do these things each day if I want to accomplish those life-long goals. The daily goals tie into the longer term goals and reinforce them, helping me take baby steps each day towards moving mountains. For example I write every day because I need to practice if I ever want to finish my book.

So up to this point we have set our minds on something and it’s more than likely been all thought. But what is the difference in thinking about something we want to accomplish and thinking about that taco we had for lunch yesterday? Not much… It is easy to have a thought, it is harder to clarify it in conversation, and it is even more difficult to write it out. So a goal is not a goal until is is written down. Writing a goal down A.) Helps clarify what that goal is B.) Serves as a reminder of what we committed ourselves to C.) Is the second step in our process.

Goals can be written down anywhere that is prevalent and they should be written out by hand, not typed. There are scientific studies behind this, but I won’t elaborate here, I just know I my goals are much more attainable when I write them versus typing them. We can write them on an index card and laminate it to carry around with us, we can post it on the refrigerator to see each day, or my personal favorite is to take an dry erase marker and write them on my bathroom mirror so I have to see them each day. This is my way of ‘looking my goals in the face’ each day.

Once a goal is set, a plan of action needs to be taken. For someone that wants to lose weight, the first thing to do is clear out the fridge of all the mayo, carbonated drinks, sugars, etc. and replace them with fruits and vegetables as soon as possible. For me it was to start the blog and commit to writing each day, setting time aside for the book each week. For the person that wants to save money it’s to start a budget immediately and take out that first $250 from the paycheck before any other expenses are covered. Our paychecks, just as our time spent at work, will expand to the allotment we give it.

The next part of the plan to meet our goals is accountability. Writing out the goals is the personal accountability part, but telling others is the public accountability part. In Goal Setting I gave an anecdote about the sales guys and asking them to set goals for themselves, this was my way of making them accountable to me. We would review their goals from the previous meeting to see what they had done to meet their goals, if they had met them, and what their next steps were. One in particular wrote that he aspired to having his own store some-day, and he was able to achieve that goal not 12 months after he wrote it down and we discussed what it would take to make that happen and I have never been so proud  in my life. My way of public accountability is to send out this blog to as many places as I can find. All I needed was a few readers to text me or email me and say they liked what I had to say and to keep it up, and now I know I have people that are expecting me to write. THANK YOU!

I hope that the length of this post has made us fidgety to get working on our goals and that it has given a full spectrum of how to do it effectively. If not, please leave me a comment or get in touch with me for any clarification that you’d like to see on the blog. Thanks for reading, now put these words into action!

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Here is an amazing podcast on goals from the Entreleadership Team of the Dave Ramsey Network about goals that helped inspire me to write these.