Kathy’s Home & Garden Tips – Defining and Refining Your Goals

Last week we talked about setting your goals up in a little different way than in the past. The old goal template was to set a yearly goal, whether it is business or personal. More often than not, by the time we would get three to six months into the year, we either give up entirely as the goals seem too difficult to achieve. Or we think we have much time left, so why worry? We usually end up at the end of the year far short of where we wanted to be.

A better way to approach goals is to limit them and better define them. You should first rate yourself on several of your life’s basic aspects, such as your physical health, relationships, and spiritual life. Then your business life, including finances. Rate each one through ten, with ten being perfect. Determine where you are today and where you would like to be after one year. Then rate each aspect one, two, or three according to importance in your life. Pick your top three areas you need to work on. 

Think of your year in quarters. You will concentrate on what you need to do to move yourself to your quarterly goal, which will work towards your yearly goal. Each one of your three priority goals for the quarter should have three to five strategies for you to work on. 

Say you are looking to lose weight, your plan might be to work out three days a week, add three servings of vegetables per day, and do 10,000 steps a day. Or you may want to spend more time with family in your personal life, so schedule a family activity time and/ or date night weekly. In business, your goal may be to obtain a certain number of paying clients or other pieces of business. Using your past performance, determine numerically how many contacts are needed for one client. That will be one of your weekly strategies, X number of prospecting calls or X number of appointments. 

So, consider the aspects of your life and where you need to work the most. Choose three priorities and break these down to the tasks you need to perform to reach that quarterly goal. Score yourself weekly as to your completion of these tasks.  As you do this weekly, it will keep you on track, and you will see by your progress if you need to course correct. Perhaps you need to make more business contacts weekly, or workouts need to be perhaps four instead of three per week. By breaking these goals down to weekly tasks, you have a much better chance to get that much closer to those yearly benchmarks. 

KATHLEEN WEAVER-ZECH AND DEAN’S TEAM CHICAGO