3 Steps For Setting Achievable Business Goals

Setting Achievable Goals Made Easy

Setting meaningful goals you’ll actually achieve, both in business and personal life, can be a big hurdle in creating your vision for the future and unlocking your potential. In this article, we will explain the process of how you can set achievable goals, create a strong vision for the future, and perform at your very best.

The Equation For Setting Meaningful Goals

The first step in unlocking your true potential is through something we call destination mastery. What is Destination Mastery? Well, simply put -  you work backwards! Stay with me here, as I will explain fully. When visualising your specific goal, look to the finish point and think about in detail what that looks like. Now work your way back through the timeline, documenting what it will take to get you to the goal you now envisioned. At ActionCOACH, we also use a formula or equation to help with this process: 

That equation is: Dreams x Goals x Learning x Planning x Action

By using this equation will help you learn how to set solid goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, results-based and time-bound. 

Start by scoring yourself out of 10 in each of each of the points in the above formula and document how well you have done on each section. We would suggest breaking this down by asking yourself the following questions:

•  How well do you dream big and set definable goals over a certain time period?
• When you know that you need some new skills do you learn them in order to achieve those goals?
• How well do you break down those learnings into bite-sized chunks to create a plan that you will implement?
• How well do you do out of ten at taking decisive action when faced with following through with your plans?

Scoring these categories out of ten will show you where your goal-setting is weakest so that you can take action to change those scores.

Creating Your Vision Before You Take Action

The next step is to create a strong future vision, but why is having vision important? Imagine you were building a house, where would you start? You might think you’d start with the planning stage where you find an architect or a builder and you start to plan the house room by room. But, it actually starts before that by creating a really clear vision in your mind. You might imagine how the living room will look or how to arrange the furniture in your bedroom or the type of kitchen you would like.

Anything man-made in our world has been created twice: first in somebody's imagination and then in reality. Creating a really strong vision will help you realise your goals and create a clearer path forward for you or your business.

Reaching Your Potential

So you may now be asking, what do I do now that I have set my goals and my future vision is clear? How do I follow through in achieving them? We would advise that this is now where you start to thank about your mission. To find your mission you can think about the following 3 key questions to  define several important elements:

• What are your/your business’s core values?
• What is the culture in your business?
• What are the rules of the game, what is acceptable and not acceptable?

Thinking about these questions will help you determine the key components of your business and your expectations of your team,so you and your business can achieve its full potential. 

One barrier most businesses and their teams have when it comes to achieving their goals is interference. So we use this simple formula to help tackle this:

Performance = Potential - Interference. 

Use these steps when looking at solving potential problems and barriers that may arise when striving to achieve those all-important goals. Addressing these interferences head-on and working to remove them will not only make that path towards hitting that goal successful but will also boost performance from your team and yourself. 

Setting goals represents a gap between where you’re currently at and where you want to be. Starting by setting meaningful goals will help you create specific and, mostly importantly, achievable goals. But, without having the right vision and mission your goals will be hard to achieve. Visualisation is one of the most powerful tools you can use to make sure you have a clear path towards achieving your goals.

If you need support with creating goals that work for you and your business, talk with your local ActionCOACH to find out if they can help you achieve those business and personal goals