“If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.”Robert Fritz
By visiting our blog for another lesson that can help you generate the results in your business that you are truly counting on you showed me that you are serious and committed. Today we will cover goal setting criteria, as well as basic models to use within goal setting. This is also the best opportunity to rewrite some of those goals you have created, setting the groundwork for improved results you are counting on. I prefer the SMARTIE acronym in goal setting and planning, because they cover the elements of this strategic process in ensuring goals are adequate, appropriate, and able to give the performance tracking that you need for an optimally structured business.
SMARTIE Goal and Strategy Creation for Your Success
When you start a business, the first thing on your mind should be setting the meaningful & desired destination for your business in a form of challenging goals. This is going to dictate your business’s direction and focus throughout all you do and become. Some people call it goals setting; some people call it planning. The truth is that whatever you call the process it is essential to have it.
This is planned direction through meaningful and structured milestones. This means you will have to break down the functions, desirable results and outcomes of your business to specify what it is that you wish to carry out and the ways for achieving it.
Your intentions, perceptions and attitudes in business mean everything to your long-term vision and ultimately results. Goals that you want will make your purpose vivid and reachable; and your work towards the overall result you wish to get more structured and focused.
Creating SMARTIE Goals
Creating SMARTIE goals is the key strategy to creating those goals that are going to guide the business successfully and result in the long-term success that you envision for the business.
- Specific: Goals shouldn’t be broad, ensuring specific wants for the business, therefore offer better focus and cannot turn your path astray.
- Measurable: Your progress in reaching your goals can be measured regularly to ensure that you are on the right path and aren’t losing focus.
- Attainable: Goals are important and should be reachable. Otherwise there is difficulty in reaching these goals and staying focused and motivated.
- Realistic: Realistic goals are more likely to spark the motivation needed for you to reach them, allowing the business to achieve progress that is likely.
- Timely: Your goals should be able to be reached in a specified time frame, and shouldn’t take so long to complete as to deter your focus.
- Inspiring/Interesting: Your goals should inspire you towards the greatness that you seek. They should be truly and genuinely yours and provide the motivation to do better within your business.
- Evaluated: Your goals should constantly be evaluated, revised, and even reviewed and rated frequently and regularly from time to time as you progress within your business.
- Overall it is essential that you can identify your purpose and goals, as the operations, functions, and tasks completed in the business will be aimed towards these goals for your full on success.
What Are Your Strategies?
The strategies that you chose in reaching all your goals are just as important as the creation of goals themselves. Goals, no matter how effective, precise, or inspiring, or even how smart or measurable and rational they may be, will not truly materialise if the effective support structure and proper mechanisms aren’t in place to make sure both superior accountability and execution that is necessary.
You see, you should be able to identify precise strategies that can constantly be assessed to track progress and determine when you reach specific milestones on your journey.
Creating strategies, just like the goal setting, is a process that must be taken on appropriately and with the full understanding of your options, to ensure success. When you define goals of the business, you can determine and attach to them the best strategies possible to ensure that big goals are met appropriately, are able to be tracked for progress evaluation, and are completed in the time frame indicated.
Your goals need nurturing and your devotion.
You need to provide just about right supporting structures and mechanisms, or they will end up poorly in a mediocre way.
You have to utilise the resources that are available to you to make sure that your strategies are crafted with precision and your intentions materialised and safeguarded.
Effective and Well-Crafted SMART Strategies Are in Place to Ensure PROGRESS…
Do you know what you really want to do in all the functions and responsibilities of your business?
Are you even sure of what it is that your business aims to do?
There are several businesses that meet the dilemma of unclear goals, leading them into various directions that become harder to track and watch, subsequently inhibiting their success.
Knowing where you are at now, knowing where is it that you wish to be in the future, and knowing all the necessary steps in between that must be taken, each is prerequisites for your business and even personal success.
Your desired outcome and the most necessary steps to get you from where you may be now to where it is that you want to be, is only possible if you are sure where your starting point is and if you have the effective ways of reaching the objectives.
Your lasting success relies on your ability to create and identify clear and appropriate goals – goals that are geared towards the vision that you wish to reach through all your efforts.
Your strategies are the techniques employed within the business to ensure that the goals are met sufficiently, successfully and consistently allowing you to enjoy the fruits of your labour and that you have something important to work for.
Without proper clarity, your GOALS become fuzzy; you lack the proper direction and focus, and your tasks will typically take much longer. Your GOALS end the mystery within your mind and in the minds of your team as a whole. No more wandering around. We are all on the same page. And you are on the same winning page because both; the desired outcome you are inevitably striving for, and most importantly, the END outlook are clearer and defined.
Without clearly communicated goals, you have to explain more often than not, repeat and enforce, and sometimes even lose voice. Everything changes when aim is known. Business focus is safeguarded with well-crafted strategies which are the true key to the success that you want to reach within and throughout your business.
Action List for This Week
- State your specific objectives, GOALS, Vision, and your Mission in writing!
- Why are these things important to you?
- What is it that needs to be unpacked in this case?
- What are the 3 most important GOALS you have for the year?
- What is it that you are actually doing about it?
Work on each of these questions and if needed, work longer, smarter, and harder. We are talking about your overall future here, and you should be taking it seriously.
Until Next Time…
Stay positive and smart; grow your business influence as wisely as possible!
Vladan
Image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net