As 2017 draws to a close, it’s time to think about 2018. What will this year look like to you? What do you want to achieve?
We all have things that we want to achieve, whether that be growth within our business, monetary targets, a new job, a promotion, education and learning that we want to do but have never made time for, or something as simple as being as being able to organise yourself in your daily activities.
To get to where we want to go we often need to set goals.
Goal setting has been an integral component of success for as long as anyone can remember. It remains one of the most important skills taught to high-performance athletes and is integral in helping them achieve optimal performance.
Michael Jordan famously wrote about his use of goal setting and documented that this approach was starting small, with achievable and realistic and short-term goals which would ultimately allow him to reach his end goal.
My career as a recruiter is no different and setting goals and targets for the year ahead is integral. It’s easy to set a goal, but the challenge lies in ensuring that you break it down into realistic step-by-step mini-goals thus ensuring that you can celebrate the small wins along the way whilst knowing that you’re on track to achieving.
It’s easy to say “This year I want to make x amount of Monday” but knowing what you need to actually do to get there is the challenge. The most important thing for me is to write these goals down, agree on the time frame of when they should be completed and provide 200% energy into reaching them!
The Real+ ‘SMARTER’ goal setting principal is well known and highly-used and for good reason. Let’s take the time to review the simple steps to setting your goals so that 2018 becomes your year of achievement!
- Specific: Define the goal you want to achieve and why
- Measurable: Be able to quantify the goal
- Achievable: Determine if you can realise the goal
- Reasonable: Is the goal worth your time?
- Time-based: Establish a timeframe for reaching the goal
- Energy: What energy is required to achieve your goals?
- Risk: What is the risk of achieving or not achieving the goal?
If you reach your deadline and you’ve failed to achieve your goal, so what? Keep going. The first step to success is failure. Silicon Valley lives by the motto “fail early, fail often”. Failure isn’t a stop/end, it’s a rehearsal. Assess what you did right and what you could do differently, develop a new plan and keep going. You can do it!
Find out more about SMARTER goal setting on the podcast where we chatted to Real+ CEO Fiona Blayney about why you need to add the energy and risk factors to your goal settings.
