3 Quick Tips for Goal Setting & Strategic Planning

Ever wonder why you fail at achieving your goals and why your New Year's resolutions fail? It is probably a failure to strategically plan your goals in a step-by-step way toward the ultimate vision. Many people are never taught this process and it leads to feeling like a loser. Or you might be a person who is achieving your goals, but feel like you are making no progress.

I have been in both camps, but have studied and researched the most effective ways to help you with goal setting, strategic planning, and achieving your goals. Oftentimes I hear people say they don’t like planning or they don’t understand how to do it or its value.

However, when these same people start to get intentional and strategic with their planning, they usually admit the more structure they added to their plans and days, the more productive and in control of their lives they become. For high-achievers, being out of control, ineffective, or inefficient is tantamount to ultimate failure.

Once I got my plans, vision, and strategies aligned, the whole world opened up to me and the feelings of anxiety, lack of control, and failure started to slip away. I began to understand the value of structured days, and having specific daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals. I saw the positive outcomes from having a morning and evening routine along with the negative effects of decision fatigue.

Strategic planning and goal setting can help you achieve those goals you thought were out of reach and actually get you way past your initial idealized finish line.

Here are 3 Tips for Effective Strategic Planning:

1. Analyze your past successes and failures. This is not always a fun part of the processes, but it is essential. Take two hours one day and sit down and map out your past year and what successes and failures you had. They can be big or small, but it is essential to look at them and write them down. Then you want to analyze why it was a success or failure.
   
   Did you get lucky? Was it a set of factors outside of your control? Can you harness those factors and systematically create success? By asking yourself these questions for both the failures and successes, you will begin to see patterns.
   

2. Craft strategic daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals. So often individuals and businesses focus on one lofty yearly goal. However, the smaller goals are vitally important because they are the milestones to the bigger goals. If you are given a revenue target to hit, but don’t set up smaller, controllable goals then you will probably get overwhelmed and not reach the goal.
   

3. Create step-by-step metrics and instructions on how to get there. Just like a house needs a foundation and a cake needs a recipe, your goals needs guides as well. Setting up a list of metrics and instructions on how to reach your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals is another tool in your strategic planning toolkit. Crafting a goal along with major milestones on the journey to that goal is a great first swing at strategic planning. Then, under each milestones you want to put the three most immediate tasks that need to be completed in order to reach the milestone. You then keep adding tasks under the milestone until you reach it. Then you set another milestone.

These tips might sound obvious, but when was the last time you set goals for your team or life in this way?

For more information, check out my book on Goal Setting and Strategic Planning and take a listen to my podcast series on Goal Setting and Strategic Planning which is Series 6! Also join my Goal Setting self-paced course. If you want to schedule a consult with me to go over the Goal Setting & Strategic Planning trainings and assessments I have for individuals and businesses, contact me today.