Are you sick of not achieving the goals you set? 

Setting goals is part of growing a business, and yourself. 

Here’s 5 Tips for Goal Setting, so you can learn how to achieve the goals you set.

If you haven’t been taught about how to set goals, it can be frustrating to see yourself identifying the things you want to achieve for yourself, your family and your business … and then watch them never come to fruition.

Goal setting isn’t something that comes naturally to everyone. Some really struggle with how to think about their future, articulate the specific things they want to achieve, or what to do to make the dreams they have actually come true.

In this blog, we take you through 5 Tips for Goal Setting. However, up front, it’s important to talk about the elephant in the room.

What is that elephant in the room? 

Well, it’s you, and your mindset. 

If you’ve been setting goals, and not achieving them, it’s worth having a think about how your mindset might be preventing you from taking actionable steps towards those goals you’ve been setting.

Perhaps it’s because you prefer to be comfortable and stay safe. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, hey?

Maybe you’re worried about losing friends, or your family giving you a hard time for achieving your goals and uplevelling your life?

Or, maybe you’re worried that people will think you’re a bit of an idiot, a bit ‘up yourself’, for thinking you can make those goals happen in your life.

Some of these things may seem true. And some of them may not be. But if these are the limiting beliefs you have floating around in your head about why goal setting and achieving goals is not for you, or you find you consistently don’t achieve the goals you do set, then let us say this:

Don’t let others view of you keep you playing small. It serves no one. 

As Nelson Mandela once said:

“There is no passion to be found in playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

So, let’s look at 5 Tips for Goal Setting, and help you stop playing small!

5. WHY MANY FAIL WITH GOAL SETTING

There’s a range of reasons why many fail with goal setting. Here are a few:

A. Your goals aren’t your own, but what you think you should be achieving based on what others think success looks like, or you feel you need to achieve to ‘measure up’ to others standards

Setting goals on things you aren’t passionate about, or don’t really own as your own, will totally set you up for failure. Goals are about delivering you closer to the life you dream about having, and what that looks like is different for everyone. Create goals that are true to yourself and your family, not what others think you should be achieving.

B. You fear success – or you fear failure

Setting goals, and naming the things you want to achieve, it can be scarey! It’s a lot easier to pretend you don’t actually want anything greater for yourself, and just carry along like everything is completely fine. When you name what you want, and then you don’t achieve it, that failure can really sting. OR, you achieve it, and all of a sudden you’re thrust into a new level in your life that feels uncomfortable, or means you can’t hide, that can be equally hard. 

Many fear success far more than they feel failure, because they fear the visibility that can come with success. Figure out your fear.

C. Your goals are too general

Many have goals like “I want to be fit” or “I want to be healthy” or “I want to be wealthy”, without identifying exactly what that means in a measurable way. 

You may have heard about SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This can be a great guide for how to think about goal setting and the type of definitions to create for each of your goals.

So, instead of saying “I want to be fit”, you can set a goal about what being fit looks like for you. It might be “I want to be able to run 5km in under 30 minutes, within 3 months time.”

D. You don’t take action

There are loads of people who set goals for themselves, which simply stay on the paper they’re written on and never go anywhere else.

It’s like that joke of someone begging to win the lottery, but never buying a ticket. 

It may sound obvious, but if you don’t actually take action towards achieving your goals, they are very unlikely to come to fruition!  

When you set a goal, identify the steps you need to take to achieve it, so it simplifies the pathway towards that goal, and helps you achieve it far more simply.

E. You don’t put time frames on when you want to achieve your goals by

When you set goals, give yourself timeframes of when you want to achieve them by. This isn’t to put undue pressure on yourself, but it forces you to think about how important these goals are to you, and then to plan out those steps so the goal is possible.

When you don’t set a timeframe, it becomes easy to kid yourself about how well you’re doing at achieving your goals. Because really, all your goals are just things you haven’t achieved yet – rather than goals you’ve failed to achieve at all. 

Don’t cheat yourself. (Keep reading for more information on timeframes for goal setting).

4. SHOULD YOU DO ‘SMART’ GOALS OR BHAG’s?

Remember I said SMART Goals is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound goals.

Many believe this should be the way you always set goals. However, there are some goals that may be so out there, so big, that it’s difficult to fit them into this framework.

So, should you only do SMART goals, or dream big? Well, both.

You may find there’s a range of goals you want for yourself, your business, your family, that can be put into that SMART framework. When you can use the SMART framework, it can simplify achieving those goals, and facilitate you identifying the steps it will take.

However, some goals are really big. Really big dreams.

You may have heard these be called B-HAGs, or Big Hairy Audacious Goals. These are the goals that seem so big, but they’re the ones that get you out of bed in the morning, put a fire in your belly, and give you purpose in your life. 

For us at Live Life Build, one of our B-HAGs is that we’ll go to a BBQ, and people will only have great stories to tell about their renovations or new builds (and not the disasters and horror stories we hear now!) 

There is great power in naming and stating your goals – whether they’re SMART or BHAGs. Putting out there what dreams and goals you have and speaking about them to your friends, your colleagues, your mastermind buddies, can enable others to get excited about your goals too. It builds a network of possibilities and opportunities where connections can be made that might facilitate your goals.

You’ll find too that keeping those BHAGs front of mind will help you remember your ‘why’, and can be huge motivators through tough and challenging times. BHAGs can be awesome fuel for those times.

3. CONSIDER DOING FUTURE SELF JOURNALING

Now, this can feel weird and woo woo for those who haven’t heard about this before, but we really encourage you to consider journaling your goals as your future self.

What does this look like?

Well this is where you think about your goals, and write them in your journal like you’ve already achieved them.

So, say a BIG goal is to build your own forever family home. As a builder, this can be a huge source of pride and achievement, and also a big investment in your business profile too.

Write about this goal like it’s already happened.

“I’m living in my family home which I built.” 

And then describe it in detail (based on the dreams you have for it).

If that feels hard, then write out what your ideal day looks like. Your ideal work day, your ideal weekend, your ideal month, your ideal year. That will help you think about how you’re spending your time, what your family is doing, where you’re living, and what type of money you’re making.

I know this will feel bizarre. But it works, it really does. 

We make most of our decisions from our subconscious. That is, we run most of our life on auto-pilot. Our subconscious is not just what our current life is about, but it’s about what our childhood was like, what our parents may have embedded in our thinking (which can come from their own childhoods, etc). 

Future self journaling helps you be more self-aware about where autopilot is limiting your ability to achieve your goals. Add visualisation to this, and you start to set your brain up to work in your favour. 

There’s a huge amount of scientific research around this, about the plasticity of the brain, and creating new neural pathways to improve your thinking, your behaviour, and your ability to change your life. If this interests you at all, we encourage you to start with self journaling, and do more research into this area.

(The book, The Power of Your Subconscious by Joseph Murphy is a great resource to get started on understanding your subconscious).

2. GOAL TIMEFRAMES: USE 90 DAY GOAL SETTING

One of the things we do with our Live Life Build members, is our 6P Elevator® exercise.

This is a special “Wheel of Life” that goes through twelve areas of their business and life, and helps them rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. We’ve identified these 12 areas based on what we believe helps improve their personal and professional success and performance.

What’s a Wheel of Life? Well, it’s a great coaching wheel that gives you a visual representation on how well you’re doing in specific areas in your life and business, and helps you identify where imbalance is occurring (making your wheel unable to happily roll on forward!)

The 12 areas that we’ve chosen for our 6P Elevator® relate to our 6P Methodology of Personal, Project, People, Partnerships, Processes and Professional.

The 12 areas we have our members rate themselves on are:

• Personal: Well-being, Relationships, Self-Improvement
• Project: Contract, Costs, Sustainability
• People: Leader, Culture
• Partnerships: Client, Designer
• Processes: Systemisation, PAC Process
• Professional: Profit, Operations

Once members rate themselves on these 12 areas, they identify some specific goals they want to create to improve their rating.

And then, each 90 days we revisit the 6P Elevator®, and see how everyone has done.

Why 90 days? Because it’s a timeframe that’s long enough to achieve some bigger goals, but not so short, you can’t get anything done. And it helps you be more flexible and agile about setting goals as well. 

Having 90 day timeframes also helps you chunk down those much bigger goals into manageable timeframes and steps. Momentum can be really powerful, and seeing yourself achieve specific steps towards a much bigger goal – and celebrating those wins along the way – can build momentum to those bigger milestones.

1. REVIEW AND REVISIT YOUR GOALS REGULARLY BY WRITING THEM DOWN

However you go about setting goals, make sure you review and revisit them on a weekly basis. 

Don’t just look at them. Write them down again. 

Why does this work? Well, neuroscience calls it encoding. As this Forbes article states:

“Encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analysed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Writing improves that encoding process. In other words, when you write it down it has a much greater chance of being remembered.”

Whether you choose to write and re-write your goals through daily journaling, or by including it in your weekly planning, take the time to write them down regularly.

You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to forget your goals when you don’t do this. 

And remember, these are YOUR goals. They’re the dreams and things you want to achieve for your life, your family, your business. So, they’re important. 

Stop playing small. Take the time to set yourself up for success, keep them front of mind, and take the steps you need to achieve them.

Live Life Build’s 6P Methodology unlocks the 6 ways to elevate your building business: 

PERSONAL | PROJECTS | PEOPLE | PARTNERSHIPS | PROCESSES | PROFESSIONAL

Are you playing small? What can you do to achieve the goals you set for yourself and your business?