Making 2023

How did you spend your festive break around Christmas and the New Year? I hope it was full of good things: family, friends, food… It might not have been a great time for you. It can be a painful and worrying time instead. Either way, I hope you took some time to think and plan. What can you do to make 2023 better? If 2022 was good, how can you improve on it? If it was a terrible year, what can you do to make it a distant memory?

If you are going to have effective plans it implies you are going to have goals. If you have a vague destination set then you will end up just there as you planned, in a vague place. You know you should set goals. But most of us hate setting them. It’s like you are setting yourself up for failure. For example, if you set yourself the goal of having gone to the gym three times a week you can be pretty sure by February it’s all over, the goal is abandoned and you feel worse than if you hadn’t set it because you’ve not made the fitness improvement and you’ve added in a feeling of failure as well. Far better not to set the goal in the first place!

It gets even worse when you set business or money goals. The graph so quickly goes wrong that the whole goal-setting thing is disempowering.
So how can you set goals that will give you what you want; something positive to aim at that you know will work? I’ve found the answer, ironically, is to set more goals, not less. Keep with me on this one. I used to hate goals and now I find them inspiring.

The most important thing is to set a goal that is enjoyable to do whilst you are doing it. If you only get joy from having done it, but it has had no positive feelings attached to it whilst it’s being achieved, then, being human, you’ll ditch that goal at the first excuse. “Enjoyable” is part of the mnemonic “SMARTER”

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Time-bound

Enjoyable

Resonating

Setting goals just for your business life will probably mean you will sacrifice other parts of your life in the meantime. And let’s be honest, business isn’t the only thing that’s important in your life (or at least it shouldn’t be). So you should think of setting goals in all areas of your life. You could easily count seven areas:

Business/Money
Family
Social
Health
Education
Spiritual
Personal

So that makes setting at least seven goals. If you think about it, you are likely to hit, or get close, to at least a few of these. Which will give confidence that maybe it’s worth trying to hit or get close (exceed even?) some others, particularly if you remember to review your goals regularly throughout the year.

And now comes the really empowering bit. In each of those seven areas, set yourself a “dream” goal. Put the timeline out as long as you need, but make that dream goal a “SMARTER” one still. Now add in an interim goal for each area of life, maybe three or five years out. That goal is often a “steppingstone” to that dream goal, great to hit in itself, and a great indication that the dream goal is likely to be achieved. Now see if your annual goal reflects that interim and/or dream goal. Quite often it does. So that means your dream goal has a pathway to hitting it. What you do next will have direct impact on the interim goal and be a step towards the dream. That dream is no longer fantasy, it’s just going to take time and effort. And that dream goal, full of aspiration, is directly powering your annual goal. Instead of being a dispiriting list of dry targets, you have a matrix of twenty-one goals that is filled with inspiration. Chances are you are going to hit at least some of those goals and when things are not going according to plan, you can take heart that at least some of your plan is indeed working.

If you’d like more help with your goal setting, let me know and I’ll send you details of my Goal Setting Workshop on Zoom. (I have still have some free guest seats.) So, if you are based in Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex, Hampshire or Kent, contact me pglynn@sandler.com and let’s make this year full of goal-inspired activity.