Leadership Goal Setting
Lead to Succeed

Here’s hoping that each of you enjoyed the holiday season and the New Year celebrations as much as I did. With every new year we’ve become accustomed to re-committing ourselves to take the necessary steps to improve the quality of our lives.

If you're like most people, you've made some of those promises and you’ve started out with great intentions, only to be distracted and eventually derailed from pursuing your goals.

The skill of goal setting is just that – a skill. Goal setting is a skill that most people were never taught in school. Rather, many learn the benefits of goal setting from their employers who understand the importance of getting clear on how to break down a goal into bite sized pieces and how critical it is to maintain focus on the process through regular tracking and reporting.

Your New Year’s resolutions probably consist of the most important goals that you need to achieve for long-term health and happiness. Your goals might include items such as: Losing those unwanted pounds so that you can enjoy a more active and healthy lifestyle; re-connecting with old friends and family that you’ve drifted apart from; addressing the important issues in your most valued relationships; or, doing a better job of setting a more worthy example for your children by taking ownership of the key challenges in your life.

All of the above are examples of wonderful goals that should be pursued with laser-beam focus.

The trick to adhering to your New Year’s resolutions is to follow the same key steps to goal setting in your personal life that you are required to adhere to in any effective professional work environment. These steps include the following:

Choose Goals That Are Meaningful

Give some considerable thought to the goals that you are going to commit to. Your most meaningful goals will create a strong sense of emotion in you.

Choose goals that inspire you. Once you achieve the goal, will it add value to your life? Ask yourself what it is that you really want and why you want it. How will meeting the goal benefit you, those you love, and those who love you?

By clearly understanding the emotional, physical, health and financial reasons for achieving a goal, you will avoid setting the wrong goals for the wrong reasons.

Personal goals that evoke passion are more likely to be achieved. Motivation stems from what we are passionate about. When we can successfully link our goals to our passions we instantly gain leverage that helps us to become successful.

Once you've decided on your goals, commit to them publicly. Announce your goals only to family, friends and co-workers who will remain supportive of your efforts. Never share your goals with people who are likely to sabotage you or those who are negative and will not support you.

Make a long list of all the benefits of achieving your goal. Keep the list close to you so you can add to it throughout the year. Keep the list in a place that you will visit often, such as your daily planner, so that you can constantly remind yourself of why the goal is important to you.

Create A Plan That Is Measurable & Specific

Once you have determined what your goals are, your next step is to create a detailed action plan that breaks down the various tasks that must be completed in order to successfully achieve each goal.

With a measurable and specific plan, you are very likely to accomplish your goal. However, without a solid plan, your chances of success are substantially decreased.

An good action plan is squarely focused on the outcome of each task and how it contributes toward the achievement of the overall goal.

Whenever you are determined to achieve a specific goal, draw up a success blueprint using our free Master Action Plan (M.A.P) Tool. This free tool is truly your MAP to success.

This process will allow you to effectively think through each task and ensure that your time is spent in the most productive manner possible. The M.A.P. tool asks the important questions “How much? Of what? By when? By whom? and.. Why is it important?”

If you encounter difficulty, get help as quickly as possible. Your goals are much too important to put off to another day, next month or “someday”.

Stay On Track Using Time Targets

Unfortunately, time is in limited supply. Once a minute or an hour has passed, you can never regain those precious moments. Time cannot be recycled – it can only be leveraged or lost.

It’s a simple fact that in this age of multitasking, dual career/daycare mom’s and dad’s – the scarcest commodity of all, is TIME. The most efficient way to maximize your time is to utilize a time management day timer or planner. Planning your day effectively is key to being able to make steady progress on your personal goals.

With our busy schedules and high demands, it’s unlikely that anyone wouldn’t find a time management product useful. In fact, we strongly encourage our readers to start referring to time management as “Life Management”. It’s that important!

Life management is about taking personal ownership of every aspect of your life. Holding yourself accountable to achieving your most important goals is a discipline that is more easily developed using a time management system. As we’ve mentioned many times on our website, we recommend the RPM system, which is fully explained in Time Of Your Life.

Expect & Predict Obstacles, Adjust Quickly and Keep Pushing Forward

Where you are today is not so important as where you are going. In addition, we can all expect to experience roadblocks as we pursue our M.A.P.. How we respond to various challenges and how quickly we adjust to overcome them - will ultimately determine how successful we are at achieving our goals.

If you think about it honestly, you’ll admit that the sum of all your past decisions have placed you directly where you are today. In the same spirit, the choices you make now and going forward will determine where you’ll be in the future.

We all choose where we are in life by the decisions we make, or fail to make. If you don’t like where you are today then now is the perfect time to choose a new path. Every individual is encouraged to believe that in one great moment of decision, a person’s entire life can be transformed.

Take some time to seriously determine where you want to be in this world and how you can get there – then, begin the journey. Persistence will eventually prevail.

One of the problems many people face is that they look at successful people and believe “that could never be me”. What people must understand is that every person who says this – is absolutely right.

However, it is also true that every person who says “that CAN happen for me” is also 100% absolutely correct.

The key learning here is that each person’s BELIEF will determine his or her outcome.

In Summary:

We’ve broken down the above goal-setting information into the following key actions to get you started:

1. Identify your goals by writing them down. Choose goals that are meaningful and commit to them publicly.
2. Develop a master action plan (M.A.P.) to reach your goal.
3. Set a deadline for the achievement. Establish a specific end-date. Use a good time management system to plan and track your progress.
4. List any potential obstacles you must overcome as you pursue your goals.
5. Identify the people and groups you need to work with to reach your goal. BELIEVE you can do it.
6. Write down the benefits of achieving your goal. ("How will this postively impact my life?")
7. Keep your benefits list close to you to stay focused on the prize and gain inspiration to achieve your goals.

On a periodic basis, it is important to re-evaluate your goals to make certain that they are in alignment with what you truly value and want out of life. As we learn and grow, our values change. Therefore, our goals in life change as well.

Remember that personal and career goal setting is a life-long process. Once you have completed one goal, be sure to replace it with another. This way you will always continue to experience personal growth and self-development and reap the benefits that goal setting provides.

Recently I came across this little story that I feel helps put a lot of what we choose to do, or not to do, into a clearer perspective. I encourage you to think about your goal setting choices as you read the following:

One day there was this Priest (Note: Please feel free to replace “Priest” with "Minister, Rabbi or Mullah" or whatever term suits you best – as this is a non-denominational story.

At any rate, the story goes on to say that this man of God became quite enamored with the weekly State Lottery.

Each week without fail, he turned on his TV to tune into the weekly lottery drawing.

Week after week, as you might expect, the Priest failed to win the lottery.

As each week past, the Priest began to become depressed, and he even started to doubt his faith.

Eventually, after repeated failures to win the weekly lottery, the Priest became so discouraged and outraged that he screamed out in desperation... "Lord, why are you not allowing me to win? PLEASE LORD, let me win the lottery."

Suddenly, at that very instant, all four walls of his room began to shake violently. Through a newly formed crack in the ceiling a piercing white light filled the room. The Priest was in awe as he heard a thundering voice from high above him say...

"For heavens sake, give me a chance. BUY A TICKET!"

I really like the above tale as a great reminder to us all to stop placing so much emphasis and effort into what’s going wrong in our lives. Instead, we should put that same energy into figuring out what we must do to take personal ownership of the changes and improvements we seek to achieve.

For every goal we set, we must research and prepare ourselves to succeed in achieving each goal. We must “buy a ticket” to our own success, rather than expect others to simply give us what we want.

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