Making the goal!
Today when you say goal, most people think of the World Cup happening in South Africa. Even if you’re not into soccer football, it’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement!
Since it’s June, there’s another reason to think about Goals: mid-year review. I know it sounds boring. If you haven’t been working on your action steps to get you to your goals, then it also might sound scary. If you wrote your goals at the beginning of the year, shoved them in a file somewhere and haven’t looked at them since then, goals may sound downright frightening!
Put your fear and trepidation aside and pull out your Goals. The mid-year review is a time to recommit, revise and plan for the remainder of the year. If you’ve been remiss in your action items, let yourself off the hook. Focus on what you can do now.
3 Most Important Things You Can Do To Reach Your Goals
- Recommit. Make a pact with yourself that you’ll follow through on your plan. Tell someone else. Enlist a coach! Write down your commitment. Without a commitment to your goals, it’s almost impossible to follow through with your plan. You’ve got to believe in your goals. Recommit to them.
- Revise. Things change — the marketplace, your clients, your marketing plan, your focus. Your world has changed since you initially wrote your goals. So, too, do your goals. Maybe they were too lofty or not ambitious enough. Some people think ‘revision’ means failure. Not so. If you want to succeed in life, you’ve got to be flexible and adapt to the change around you. You’ll also need to adapt to the change within you. Maybe you don’t believe in these goals. Revise might mean a complete revision.
- Plan. Create your plan, including your major action steps. I like to break my plan into quarters, then into months and weeks. It keeps everything from feeling like an insurmountable chore. It also makes the plan more friendly to use and refer to weekly. Make sure action steps contain action words: create, build, activate, etc.
You’ve still got time to reach your goals by the end of the year — whatever they may be. Remember what Katherine Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post, said:
Love what you do, and feel that it matters — how could anything be more fun?
