Let's Talk About Goals - Are You Short-Changing Yourself?

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How's it going everyone?

I wanted to take a moment today to talk about setting effective goals and the power they have over your overall motivation, perseverance and success.

I've been a member here for several years and the most common type of goal I see are outcome goals. You know the ones. The "I want to make money online" goals.

And those are great. Don't get me wrong. But there is so much more to goal setting than that and if that is the extent of your goal then you are truly missing out on the power of goal setting.


Make Your Goals SMART

Many of you have probably heard of SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Time-bound

All of your goals should include these 5 factors. Whether they are Outcome, Strategy or Process - make sure they are all SMART.

Specific

Don't create vague goals. What exactly is it that you want to accomplish? Why does this goal matter? How much of it do you want to build, earn, grow, etc?

Measurable

Similar to specific, you need to be able to measure your goals. After all, how are you going to know what needs to be improved if you can't tell where you fell short with your goals?

If your outcome goal is to make money online, put a number on it. How much money? Is it monthly? Is it yearly?


Achievable

While it is great to reach for the stars, it isn't always wise to make those your goals. If you set unrealistic expectations for yourself, you may find yourself disappointed and discouraged pretty quickly.

Here at Wealthy Affiliate we often stress that this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. And more often than not I see members leaving because they aren't making good money after 1 month, 2 months, or even 6 months.

It is important to understand that your goals need to be achievable. Make that "get rich" goal a 5-year goal or a 10-year goal. Give yourself room to breath and you will lessen the risk of burning out or failure.

Think about how much time you have to invest into your goals. If you're only planning on putting an hour or two a day into your goals, can you really expect to achieve the same level of success as someone putting 8 hours a day into those goals?

Anything is possible. Just make sure your time frame makes sense.

Relevant

This is all about weeding out goals that either don't make sense to your overall goal, or goals that don't make sense at the time. You want to make sure the goal aligns with the overall objective.

Let's say your business focuses on helping college students make money online (like mine does). It would not be a relevant goal for me to want to grow my audience to target successful financial advisers.

Time-Bound

I think next to measurable, this is the most important of the 5. Give yourself a deadline. There is something about having to have something done by a certain date that triggers the fight or flight response emotion.

Once you know you have to achieve something by a certain time, 1 of 2 things will happen:

  1. You'll buckle down and work hard to get it done
  2. You'll shut down and get nowhere on your goals

Make sure you're the former, not the ladder.


More on SMART Goals:

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/smart-goals.htm

https://www.smartsheet.com/blog/essential-guide-writing-smar...

The 3 Types of Goals

  • Outcome
  • Strategy
  • Process

You can think of each type of goal as a stepping stone to the next. Your Process goals build up to your Performance goals, and your Performance goals build up to your overall outcome goals.

Let's dive a little deeper into each type of goal.

Outcome Goals

As I mentioned, this is your end result. An example of a SMART Outcome goal would be:

"I will earn $1,000 per month through (Insert specific website) by the end of 2019.

See, I created a realistic, measurable goal and gave it a deadline that is more than achievable.

There is something to be said about crushing your goal deadlines. You'll find that when you accomplish a task sooner than you thought it spikes your motivation and keeps you pushing.

However, balance is also important. Don't give yourself crazy long deadlines just to be sure you accomplish them on time.

Strategy Goals

Your Strategy goal helps your build up to your outcome goal. An example of a strategy goal that would lend itself to the above Outcome goal would be:

"I am going to grow my organic traffic to 1,000 visitors per month in the next 6 months, and then increase my traffic by 10% each month thereafter until I reach 5,000 unique visitors per month."

With the above goal you have one method for increasing your traffic and, in turn, your goals. You have an initial goal of hitting 1,000 visitors a month, and then several smaller goals within that of increasing by 10% as well as a final goal of hitting 5,000 uniques per month. If you wanted to take this one step further you could attach a deadline to it as well.

Process Goals

Your process goals are the building blocks of everything we've discussed thus far. Think of each task in a lesson here at Wealthy Affiliate as a strategy goal. Each task helps you build up and get closer to achieving your overall goals.

An example of a process goal for the above Strategy goal would be:

"I am going to publish 3 articles to my website per week, every week."

or

"I am going to create 2 training videos every week for the next 6 months."

Process goals have a bit more flexibility than Strategy goals because of their smaller scale.

Especially in the internet marketing realm, you don't really want to have a deadline on when you'll be "done" with content creation, because you never should be done!

More on these 3 types of goals: http://thepeakperformancecenter.com/development-series/skill...

I owe my knowledge on the 3 types of goals and using them to my advantage entirely on the above post. I highly recommend checking out the author, Todd Herman, and his work. He is a very motivational and inspiration person.

Bonus Tip #1: Add Emotion

I am going to create a new lesson soon about visualization but until then I will leave you with this final tip: Add emotion to your goals. How are you going to feel once you accomplish that goal? Never forget the emotion you are reaching to achieve alongside that goal.

Will you be ecstatic once your website starts making enough money for you to quit your day job?

Relieved?

Overwhelmed?

When writing your goals, start them with "I will feel _____ when I _______". This strategy mostly applies just to your Outcome goals, but its alright to try to apply it to your Strategy goals as well.

Bonus Tip #2: Write Them Down

When I learned about proper goal setting i learned a very valuable tip: write your goals down...and often.

Now, I don't expect all of you to be as OCD as I am, but I would write my goals down in a journal every single morning.

When you put something onto paper it helps commit it to memory and help makes it "real". Have you ever heard (or experienced) the impact taking notes in a class on paper has vs taking notes on a laptop?

More often than not, when you take notes on paper it helps you retain the information much more effectively.

Failure IS An option

Finally, I want to quickly touch on failure. While setting strong goals is excellent for developing a successful business and lifestyle, failure is inevitable. Everybody fails at some point. It is important to take those failures as learning opportunities.

How did you fail?

Did you not reach your goal in time? How close did you come by the deadline? How much more time could you have used?

When you fail, ask yourself questions about the failure and use those answers to help develop even stronger goals.

Now that we've discussed the best ways to develop strong goals, I want you to revisit what your goals are. Go through and revise them to make sure your smart. Then I want you to share them below.

If you are only comfortable leaving outcome goals that's fine. But if you're really up for the challenge - then I challenge you to post your process and strategy goals as well. Show me how much of this you have a grasp on. Let's crush those goals together!

As always, should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to leave them below as well. I am always happy to help out as best I can!

Until next time,

Dev

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Recent Comments

6

Hi Deven

Great post - It encouraged me to rewrite my goals and here they are.

I will feel relieved and excited when I earn £1000 per month by September 2019 and can give up my job and concentrate on my WA work.

I will feel a great sense of achievement and pride when my site reaches 500 visitors per month at the end of 2018 through SEO and social media promotion.

I will feel encouraged when I complete 1 post a week for my WA website. This will be a priority so that I will continue my training and social media promotion after this post is completed each week.

I will keep an eye on my progress by posting monthly blogs here on WA.

Thank you for the post Deven -it's got my brain working this morning!

Best Wishes
Hazel

Excellent work, hazel! I'm very happy to hear you found the post helpful and implemented the techniques. I'm sure you'll find they are far more effective in generating motivation that writing out generic goals. Best of luck and, of course, reach out if you have any questions!

Hi Dev,
Excellent tips are the ones you bring, Recently I just left you a private message. In my case I say:
Want is power
Persevere and triumph
Do what you like
Thankful
It is my small contribution.
Claudio

Thanks for reaching out Claudio! I'm glad you found my suggestions helpful in SiteFeedback.

So timely for me Deven so thanks so much for sharing this with me. I will revisit this as I really want to sit down and think seriously about my goals and be truly realistic about the time I can put forth to this awesome business, but plan what I can do daily/weekly as well.

Again, thanks so much for sharing!
Cheers, Sharon

Hi Sharon,
I'm glad you found the post helpful. If you have any questions or want feedback when you do sit down to has out your goals, please feel free to reach out!

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