Set Yourself Up For Success: Planning Your Goals for the Upcoming Year
As part of this series, you now have a fresh perspective on what you accomplished and what worked (or didn’t) from the current year. You have started to identify some ideas for goals that you want to achieve. You even have ideas on new tools or resources to support you.
Time for Fresh Perspective: On You. Conducting an Annual Review
Set Yourself Up For Success: Planning Your Goals for the Upcoming Year
Building a Winning Year: Completing an Annual Review and Planning Session With Your Team
Planning your actual goals and how you will accomplish them becomes a final step in setting yourself up for success in this coming year. We are not going to cover the specifics around setting SMART or SMARTER goals, or building your SPRINTS. I have covered those previously, and you can click on the links for each of those for reference. What we will discuss here is what you will need to do to set up for achievement this year.
What does success look like?
Capture the vision of what the positive outcome from your goal achievement will look like in the future. Add that to these four steps to define what ‘complete’ will look like for you.
Step 1: Determine what you need to measure
What are the indicators that you have achieved your goal? These could be numbers, could be a project, could be the vision you built in your head. Ensure you have a clear understanding of what success looks like for you. If you are using numbers, ensure you also define how it will be sustained. Hitting a weight goal, for example, is a tremendous achievement, but unless you have a plan for maintaining it, you may end up setting the same goal again in the future.
Step 2: Measure it
Define how you will measure your progress over time and at what intervals. It is important to have this as well-defined as the metrics themselves. Do you have a way to get that data easily? How will you track it? Building a consistent routine around reviewing the results will allow you to apply updated actions as part of your goal achievement activity. Keep your measurements someplace you can see them to help remind you of the targets and steps you are taking to achieve them.
Step 3: Stay positive; look for progress
Progress is not the finish line, but seeing it sure helps to know that the finish line is closer. Recognize there will likely be some setbacks along the way. A misstep here and there cannot be a reason for scrapping the plan or giving up. Stay positive and know that you can achieve what you set out to accomplish. You did the groundwork and established a realistic and achievable goal. You can get it done. Use your progress as motivation for the next step.
Step 4: Make everything visible
This ties to all three steps above. The more you see your goal and what you want to accomplish, as well as the scoreboard, and the progress, the more it will drive you to completion. Keep your goals visible so you see it regularly. Depending on your goal, that may be a daily review, or possibly a weekly one. You decide what is going to work best for you.
The last piece of successful goal planning is to work through what you need to do differently to achieve your goals. Just because the calendar changes years, and you wrote some things down you want to do, doesn’t mean it all just happens. Behaviors and actions will need to change.
What new habits or routines will you need to achieve your goals?
Your first question should sound a bit like, “what do I need to change to make this goal achievement happen?” This likely will center on many of your habits and routines. They could be subtle changes, or more significant. Plan these out. For the larger shifts that might need to occur, you’ll want to have a strategy for how you implement them. If you state you want to start to wake up at 5am, and you currently get up at 6am, that is a big difference. How will you achieve that? You’ll need a plan for getting to bed earlier and practice getting up earlier. If you just set your alarm for the new time on the first workday of January, the likelihood that it works to sticks beyond a couple of days is small. Have a strategy for how you’ll implement your new habits once you identify them.
Is it a planning issue? Time Management Issue? Or quantity issue?
Why are you making these shifts to your habits or routines? What were the obstacles you have experienced in the past? You’ll need to determine whether you have a time management issue, a planning issue, or if you have bitten off more than you can chew. I have been guilty of all of those. These tend to be the biggest barriers to accomplishing what you want.
As an example, I’ll share a shift I made in 2021. I knew I needed to get started a little earlier to achieve my exercise goals (which were part of my weight loss goals). I also knew I wasn’t going to be able to get up much earlier than I already was. So, my change was two-fold. Set the alarm for ten minutes earlier, and remove the arbitrary start of the work day I had for myself. That opened up some extra minutes to extend my exercise routine to achieve what I wanted. It has worked out really well, and I was able to establish a new morning routine because of these small shifts. I knew when I needed to get to bed to achieve my seven hours of sleep target and still have the time in the morning for the exercise aspect. Both work together on my weight loss outcome target.
(Note: on November 6th, I did hit my 2021 target weight. Yay!)
I mention the date also because initially, I am sure I wanted to hit that target much earlier in the year. But I stuck with it. There were plateaus that felt like I would never get there. I remained positive, and continuing to measure the right things helped me push forward.
I have more big targets in 2022 —
Complete planning for tomorrow at end of each day.
Defining a hard stop time each day to close out the work portion.
I am asking myself now: What needs to happen for that to occur routinely? Block time differently? Change my follow-up schedule? Have group team calls in the afternoon instead of morning? I have begun my process of habit and routine review and identifying what will need to change next for me to achieve my desired outcome.
In the final article of this series, we will look at applying what has been laid out for individual use and apply that to the team setting.
Setting up for goal achievement is as, if not more, important than establishing the goals themselves. It is one thing to have SMART goals, but if you don’t have a plan on how you will achieve them, it may not matter. These steps for identifying how you will measure your success and what steps you need to take to enable the activities for achievement should help ensure you are set up for success in the coming year.
How will you plan for your goal achievement success?
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