How to Set Your Goals for 2017

Are you ready for 2017? Are you ready to win? Have you set your goals? I began thinking about it some weeks ago. I’m more than ready to sweep 2016 into the Hall of Go Away and move toward an exciting new year with all new possibilities and opportunities. 

So what are your goals? Goals motivate us and give us signposts to signal where we want to go. Without goals most of us are just kind of haplessly doing and not necessarily thinking about what we’re doing.

My advice for goal setting is to do these steps (please feel free to use this as a template for your own goal-setting activities):

1.    Set at least 1 audacious goal. My audacious goal is to make my forthcoming book The Abused a top-selling thriller.

2.    Set at least 5 BIG goals for your professional life that are just solid goals. So here are my 5 goals:

1.    Get our gross income increased three-fold

2.    Attract 2 corporate clients who provide project work.

3.    Hire a new assistant to keep me organized.

4.    Increase my networking.

5.    Attend at least 4 key book festivals

3. Now under each of the 5 BIG Goals set micro-goals, which is are tactics for how you’re going to achieve those bigger goals. Micro-goals should be executed: 

1. Daily

2. Weekly

3. Monthly

Let me give you and example of my BIG goal and micro-goals to support it.

BIG GOAL: Increase our gross income three-fold

• Micro-Goal: Do 5 marketing activities each morning before I do the project work. (You would have to decide what marketing activities work. I do things like blog, check project boards for projects and contract work, post to all social media at least once a day, write this newsletter, etc.)
• Make 1 phone call per day to a perspective client.
• Follow-up with at least 1-2 prospective clients per day.

BIG GOALS + Micro-Goals = Weekly Success = Monthly Success = BIG GOAL Achievement

Here is the take away from this lesson: 

Micro Goals are the most important part of achieving BIG Goals. 

You cannot try and carry an elephant upstairs all at once. If you’re trying to do something BIG then it needs to be broken into smaller parts. After all, skyscrapers don’t get built in a day. We mentally set ourselves up to fail when we don’t think BIG and understand that the inverse of achieving the big things is ACTUALLY (and here it is) a formula like this:

ACHIEVING BIG = ACHIEVING SMALL THINGS DAILY

Set aside instant gratification. Unless you’re in the grocery line and you want a Snickers Bar instant gratification is unlikely when you’re targeting a BIG Goal. Most big dreams and big goals get accomplished with slow, steady goal achievement. Sometimes it might not even happen in your prescribed time frame, but it will happen. The main lesson I’ve learned is to stay focused. I lose focus all of the time. Daily distractions and demands can turn my head as fast a speeding car. Yet I have to continually remind myself: FOCUS! Keep my eye on the goal.

I hope my lesson plan here has helped you! Just sharing it with you and writing it down helped me! So I thank you for reading!