Three Simple Ways to Dramatically Improve Your Chances of Achieving Your Goals

December 17, 2018
Category: Achieve Consistent Business Success,Be a Highly Effective Owner,Business Tips,Define Your Vision and Plan,Live a Happy, Balanced Life

With 2019 right around the corner, many of you are thinking about business goals and New Year’s resolutions that you’d like to make for next year. I know that I am!

But if you’re like most owners that I work with, and I bet you are, after the New Year’s motivation wears off and you’re back in daily grind of your business, it’s hard to keep those goals in mind. When things get crazy busy for you (and you know they will) it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and to forget about your New Year’s goals and plans.

So here are three easy, proven ways to ensure that you maximize your success in achieving your goals in the coming year:

1. Set specific measurable goals

Research shows that setting a vague goal, like “I hope to grow my business” or “I’d love to make my business more efficient,” is about as effective as setting no goal at all. Only about 3% make any progress using vague goals like these.

This year make your goals S.M.A.R.T: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant to you, and Time-framed. Rather than having a vague goal like “grow my business” try “Increase my sales each month by 25% over the same month last year.” Or instead of “I’d love to make my business more efficient,” try “I want to create procedures and retrain my crews to increase my Gross Profit from 40% to 45% by the end of June.”

Research shows that simply by making S.M.A.R.T. goals your chances of success increase to over 20%.

2. Break your goal down into smaller bite-sized tasks

When you start to attack a big new goal, do you often feel overwhelmed? Does it seem impossible to achieve your goal from where you are right now? I mean, where do you start? What do you do? Procrastination and avoidance seem like the only good answers. But they’re not.

The best thing to do is to break your goal into a series of manageable bite-sized tasks that you can handle easily in a short period. You know what they say about eating an elephant, Right? “One bite at a time.” The same thing applies to reaching your goals. Start completing some of your bite-sized tasks each day and the next thing you know you’ll be making real progress.

People who set SMART goals and break the goal down into a series of smaller tasks to reach them had an average success rate of 35% in reaching their goals.

3. Be accountable for your progress.

Unfortunately, with all that you have going on in your business and life it’s not easy to move ahead with your goals and plans despite all of your best intentions. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to keep you moving when the going gets tough. All you need to do is to share your goals with someone else. Ask someone to hold you accountable to reach your goals and then check in with them regularly on your progress. Here are some simple ways to have others hold you accountable:

• Ask an accountability partner, maybe a friend, your spouse or another business owner you know to hold you accountable.
• Create or join an accountability group that you each can report to regularly to hold each other accountable.
• Work with a coach. 🙂 A coach will remind you of your vision and commitments, and help explore your roadblocks to action and hold you accountable for making the progress that you want

Adding accountability to your SMART goals and bite-sized tasks can increase your success rate in reaching your goals to over 50%!

So, there you have it – Three simple ways to dramatically improve the chances you achieve your goals in 2019. I highly recommend that you add these three simple steps to your business tool kit for 2019.

I guarantee that you’ll be pleased with the results!

Have a great year!

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