Setting goals is crucial in your life and your business.
There is a good reason for this…it helps you to do better! I am not afraid to say that a lot of the goals I set, I don’t reach. BUT, I am still much further ahead because I set them…so even though I didn’t reach the goal, the pursuit of the goal kept me more focused than I might have been otherwise, so I achieved more anyway. Sometimes I don’t set the goal realistic enough for the present circumstances, sometimes I set the time table too aggressively, sometimes I allow life to get in the way, and sometimes I just plain don’t get it done! I don’t let falling short keep me from setting more goals…I let it serve as an education that allows me to reach my next goals and as a way to adjust the course to reach the target I was originally going after….so even if I didn’t do it in the time I would like, I keep going until I do it.
Now, this post isn’t about goal setting per se…as that is a huge topic, especially if it is to serve as a teaching. But know this about goals…the people who set goals do better in life than those that don’t.
Today, I am going to talk about activity goals and result goals. The result is the thing you are trying to accomplish and the activity is what you must do to generate the result. In the case of your business, your long term result goal, which might be to replace your current income, develop some mad money, grow your nest egg, or any number of things, will be the accumulation of the results along the way (ie. developing customers and business partners). If you broke that goal all the way down, you would ultimately come up with an action plan that corresponded with creating a certain number of customers or partners in a certain period of time.
This is a good thing to do because it then dictates the action you should take on a daily basis. This is the part that is important to grasp. The action leads to the result…so which goal is more important? At first, it is purely the action goal. In a business that has some dependence on other people doing something (agreeing to use your product for example) you cannot completely control the result…but you CAN control the action.
If your goal is to approach 3 per day. This is the activity goal. This is the goal that is crucial to reach (and it is easy to do if you treat it as a must do) because all possible future results come from this. This is the goal you track. It is what you employ yourself to do! You will find that there is a general ratio between approaches and customers and business partners. Maybe it is 1 or 2 in 10 (could be more or less, this is just an example)…then you know that the result you can expect, over time, is this. So for every 100 approaches you should see a result of 10 or 20.
In a business that has some dependence on other people doing something (agreeing to use your product for example) you cannot completely control the result…but you CAN control the action.
What you do is hold yourself accountable for the activity goal of 3, then within a period of time you analyze the results to see if you are tracking the ratio. If you are reaching your activity goals consistently for 3 months, but your results goals are lagging then you know that there is an area within the process where you need to improve. This is where a coach or mentor can really help you, but for now…trust the process. If you are nice and honest and respectful…and you will approach 3 (or whatever your number…more is better) per day for a 90 day period, my experience is that you will have a significant improvement in your results. So here is what I leave you with today:
Do you have activity goals?
Are you willing to hold yourself accountable for a certain number of approaches per day (3 or more) for 90 days?
What would keep you from doing this simple thing that could help you further down the road to reaching your true goals?
Whatever answer you have to this last question is your most significant obstacle. Decide how you will win against this obstacle, because you will always have obstacles to anything of value. Defeating the obstacle is simply a decision!
