5 Key Steps to Set Goals and Crush Them Effectively
Goal setting allows you to live fully and intentionally with a sense of direction and purpose. The right goals that are meaningful are the best way to motivate and inspire you to achieve success in any area of life. To be proactive, these are the 5 Key Steps to Set Goals and Crush Them Effectively.
Whether you have personal goals or business goals, the best thing you can do to achieve them is to establish a plan of action and timeline to make it happen.
It’s human nature to remain in our comfort zone, but to experience professional or personal development we need to set goals that stretch our imagination and bring us joy and contentment.
Setting both short and long-term goals is important. So is having the right mindset.
But how do you see and set goals so that you can live life to its fullest while pursuing bigger things? As we dive deep into the 5 Key Steps to Set Goals and Crush Them Effectively, you’ll change how you set goals and learn to create habits in your control so they are measurable.
You’ll understand why the go big or go home isn’t the best practice and how to reverse engineer your goals by starting from the big vision and working your way back to actionable steps. Are you ready to be consistent, focused, and motivated in crushing your goals? Let’s dive in!
5 Key Steps to Set Goals and Crush Them Effectively
The New Year brings with it a fresh start where we come up with new goals that we want to achieve. But by the end of the year, most of us feel discouraged and lose momentum along the way. When the next year comes we do the process all over again and at the end of the day, we don’t have results.
This doesn’t mean the process of goal setting doesn’t work. But we just need to have a different approach. It’s definitely important to set goals for the different areas of life. These could be financial goals, spiritual goals, social goals, or professional goals.
You do not have to live and breathe your goals to bring them to fruition. You just need a personalized game plan that works for your capacity this season, and you need to shift your expectations to meet that capacity.
Instead of having only a vague idea of what you want to achieve, these are the 5 Key Steps to Set Goals and Crush Them Effectively.
When you intentionally set meaningful goals and take the steps outlined here, you’ll steer your life in the right direction where you’ll have purpose and success. Let’s get started!
1) Start with the larger vision in mind
The first essential step you want to do is to choose only one of your dreams (big hairy audacious goals) to focus on at a time.
When you focus on too many big goals, you spread your energy on too many things, end up overwhelmed and stressed, lose focus and momentum, and end up making little to no progress.
Look at your most important goals and prioritize which one means most to you at this moment and season in your life. So the best way to do this is to pick that larger goal that produces the most passionate WHY in your life. The best goals are those that matter most right now.
Which of your bigger goals, if you were to see it to the finish line, would change your life the most? Relevant goals resonate the deepest so that you’ll be more apt to put the hard work behind them.
Clarifying the end goal is the first step, this is your big vision or overarching goal you want to achieve. Vague goals are difficult to pursue so make sure it’s clear, specific, and inspiring to you.
Then I want you to take a minute and have a clear picture of what it looks like to hit that major goal. What will you have achieved? How will you feel? What impact will it have on your life or others’ lives? You can use a vision board here so that the north star is clear.
This visualization will help solidify the big specific goal in your mind and make it feel more tangible to you. It steers you toward success and keeps you motivated along the way.
2) Reverse engineer that larger vision with major milestones
The next step once you’ve clarified your end goal and pictured what it means for you to achieve it, is to move into the reverse engineering of those ambitious goals.
You want to reverse engineer that stretch goal you chose so that you have a clear path to follow with smaller goals along the way. This will aid in keeping you motivated and going when the going gets tough.
If you only focus on that big dream and work toward that, you’ll quit because you won’t truly see the progress or different results along the way. That’s why breaking it up into doable, realistic, actionable, smaller steps is a good idea. It’s key to success.
To reverse engineer your dream, the first thing is to identify major milestones. Divide your big vision into key achievements that need to happen along the way. These are significant checkpoints that indicate progress toward your larger vision and help you see the physical results.
I like to call these type of goals stepping-stone goals. Think about it as 3-5 smaller achievable goals that you need to hit along the way to your bigger, ultimate goal. For example, your annual goal could be broken down into a monthly goal or a quarterly goal you need to reach.
For example, when I was training for my own goal of running my first marathon, my larger vision was running 26.2 miles all at once. Well, I’d never done that before, so it felt like a daunting task. But, when I broke it down to the different progressions along the way, it felt more doable.
To run 26.2 miles I knew I’d need a training run of 20 miles. But to get there, I needed to run a half marathon (or 13.1 miles). And to get there, I needed to run a 10K (6.2 miles). And before that, I needed to run a 5K (3.1 miles). And even before that, I needed to run my first mile.
I had that larger vision of a marathon in my mind, but I worked on one piece of the puzzle at a time. Focusing on daily action steps such as running 1 mile and then 3 miles was way more achievable to me than to wonder how I’d get to 26.2.
At the end of the day, these realistic goals were actually important steps to reaching my big goal.
3) Determine the timeline for each of these stepping-stone goals
Once you set these major milestones or stepping-stone goals, then you’ll want to think about giving yourself a specific time frame to hit each one. Estimate just a rough timeline for when you expect to achieve the small goals.
When you set deadlines, it helps in planning, gives you a clear direction, and provides you with a more structured path to follow.
4) Break down the major milestones into even smaller sub-goals
All right, the next key step to set goals and crush them once you have the major milestones figured out is to break those stepping stones down even further into smaller, intermediate goals or projects that lead up to the result.
These should each be a measurable goal that’s manageable so that it makes the stepping-stone goal even more approachable and doable for you.
The more you break your goals down, the more confidence you’ll have to achieve them. Think of these sub-goals more like projects, they should be very action-oriented with daily tasks which are more in your control.
Doing this helps you review and adjust your goals on a regular basis. It makes the tasks less overwhelming and stressful. Goals become achievable and progress becomes more visible. Consistently working toward your sub-goals will ultimately lead you to achieving your big dreams.
The other thing to think about here is the sequence of events. Are any of these sub-goals prerequisites to others? Do any need to be achieved in a progressive order toward that major milestone? Or are they independent of each other and can work in any order?
5) Develop an actionable step-by-step plan
Okay, so we’ve gone from the larger vision, broken it up into major milestones, and broken it down further into sub-goals. Now it’s time to turn those sub-goals into actionable steps.
One of the most important things effective goals have is an actionable step-by-step plan with smaller tasks that are fully in your control.
For example, as I was working on my marathon training plan, the first major milestone was to run a 5K, so I broke that down even further to sub-goals of 1 mile without stopping, 2 miles without stopping, and then the 5K itself.
My actionable steps were things like running 5 times a week, fueling my body for energy, have a before and after stretch routine. My run 5 times a week started as run 1 minute and walking for 30 seconds, and progressed so that I could run straight through.
After determining actionable simple steps, prioritize them based on their importance and urgency. Focus on the high-impact activities and take daily actions that drive the most progress.
One of the best ways to ensure you crush your goals is to have an accountability partner with whom you share the action plan and can ensure you achieve it.
Setting goals that are numbers-focused is a very popular approach we use. For example, we say:
“I want 10 new clients in my business this month.”
“I want to earn an extra $50K this year. “
“I want to lose 20 pounds in the next three months. “
Monetary or numbers-based goals are hard to measure because much of the time, those monetary results are out of our control.
I want you to shift your mindset in how you set goals.
That larger vision may be monetary or numbers-based, and those larger milestones or stepping stone goals may even be numbers-based, but all the things in between, the smaller sub-goals, need to be projects or tasks or habits within your control.
There are different ways to set goals but that go-big or go-home mindset is the wrong mindset for finish-line goals.
If you only focus on that larger vision and try to go big all at once, you will get frustrated and quit sooner because it’s just not easily attainable. You’ll only be looking at the summit rather than the necessary steps all along the way.
The right mindset is to break your vision down and reverse engineering your goals into manageable steps and doable tasks. This will help you stick with it and see the results and progress all along the way.
One of the great things you can do is to reward yourself and celebrate the pit stops along the journey.
My story of how I changed the way I saw and set goals
I’d like to share with you how these principles I now believe have played out in my own life. When Josh and I were newlyweds, we partnered with a multi-level marketing company and thought it was our ticket to retirement. We surely had ambitious goals.
Now, I’ll preface this story by saying MLMs can work for you so I’m not downplaying them as an option for owning a business, but you don’t actually own the business if you’re in one.
In the first place, the larger company makes the overarching decisions for what stays, what goes, pricing, your commissions, and even if it’s going to continue being a company.
You are a contractor doing work for them, you don’t own the thing. This is one reason I’ve shifted to my own thing online so that I can make the calls and take the shots.
Anyway, that’s not the point of the story. From day 1 we went all in and were sold out to the dream that was seeded in our hearts. The dream of financial freedom. The dream of being able to give more and be successful entrepreneurs. The dream of time flexibility.
And we worked hard. Really, really hard. We went to weekly meetings, we spent our evenings pouring into the business after our full work days, we went to quarterly conferences out of state, and we spent thousands of dollars on products and conferences and all the things. We did what we were told would produce the results.
And we started building a successful business straight out of the gate. It grew and it came back down, and it grew and came back down.
We learned so much about who we were as people, we grew in our faith walk and in our marriage. We learned success and business principles we may have never known. I am forever grateful for the leader I became through it all.
But the one thing that I was taught that I no longer agree with (well, there are a few things, but I am sticking with this one idea for today), is that I needed to go all in and sacrifice everything else to see this thing through.
Then, once we had what we wanted, and the business was built, then we could have the time for our families and have the flexibility to work less and have the finances to do good things.
Because of this, we lived and breathed the business – leaving our kiddos with parents so we could go to conferences, not really getting the quality time we wanted with them, and not even really seeing each other in the process. Delayed gratification is a good thing! But delaying life itself is not.
This mindset eventually burnt us out and left us feeling less than.
And I’d like to say it was only a few years before we dropped our egos and shifted where God was calling us. But it was 15 years before we made the change.
We didn’t want to quit because we were told life would be worse, and we had too much pride, not wanting our friends and family to tell us they told us so. So we kept working, we kept plugging away, we kept going around the circle. With little to no results.
Looking back, like I said, I learned a lot and am grateful for certain aspects of growing that business. But we stayed too long and we actually were further back than we were ahead.
I tell you this story because I want you to throw out the idea that it’s either your goals or your family. As you go through the steps to set goals and crush them effectively remember that you do not have to sacrifice everything or delay everything to go all in on your goals.
You can incorporate them into your lifestyle rather than making them your life because that’s not true alignment!
Alignment is God first, then family, then business. And you need to shift your mindset to this idea otherwise you’ll be left frustrated and burnt out, just as I was leaving that first business behind.
The 5 Key Steps to Set Goals and Crush Them Effectively are to start with the larger vision in mind and then reverse engineer that larger vision with major milestones so you have a clear path to follow.
If you try to go big all at once you will get frustrated and quit sooner because they are not attainable so baby steps first.
You then need to determine the timeline for each of these stepping-stone goals, break down the major milestones into even smaller sub-goals, and lastly develop an actionable step-by-step plan to follow.
If you do this, if you shift your mindset on how to see and set goals, I have no questions about you hitting the finish line.
Finish Line Goals Course
Are you tired of quitting on yourself and your goals? What if you could create a personalized game plan that works in the season you’re in with the capacity you have without sacrificing precious family time?
In Finish Line Goals, Gabe will show you how to think backward so you can spend less time worrying about where to start and more time taking action that works.
Breaking those life goals or long-term goals into an action plan is how you can incorporate your goals into your life without them becoming your life.
This is how you can work on reasonable goals without sacrificing everything else to achieve them. This is a great way to be inspired, motivated, and accomplish more as you get closer to your ultimate goal.
