Achieve Your 2019 Goals Episode Show Notes
We are not going to talk about how to write your goals for 2019 as you get that a lot. We’ll discuss how to actually achieve the goals you pegged down.
Some of you may resonate when I say that there are those who would write down goals year after year but by the end of it, could not remember if they had accomplished a single one.
Yes, the struggle is real.
Accomplishing your goals comes down to three different things:
1. Having well-articulated, well-defined goals – There are frameworks which you can use to come up with clear goals and the most popular is the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Attainable, Timebound) framework. Basically, you need to understand exactly what it is that you are trying to accomplish and how you will accomplish it.
Poorly-written Goal: I want to lose weight this year.
Well-written Goal: I will run the 5k marathon by November 2019 by losing 20 lbs.
It is also effective to have these goals written out by hand.
2. Having the right mindset – This spells the difference between the 12% of the people who achieve their New Year's resolutions and the 88% who don’t. You need to know why you are doing what you are doing. You are going to lose weight not because somebody told you to but because you know what it is that you are going to benefit from or achieve or avoid by doing so.
It's one thing to write a goal down but it's another thing to be pursuing that goal based on a mindset that will give you the fuel you need to achieve it.
So the first thing is have great goals, and the second thing is know why you are chasing after them.
3. Having a framework for achieving the goals – Break your goals into smaller chunks for it to be more achievable. If you want to lose that 20 lbs., you can target 5 lbs. every quarter and plan the activities that you are going to do within those 3 months.
If you want to start a new blog and your goal in the first three months is to get the blog launched with 15 pieces of content — in the first week, get a domain name; the second week, build the site; the third week, come up with a content plan; the fourth week, write the first three posts; the fifth week, write the next three posts and so on…
You can break these activities down so you are not overwhelmed with this big goal and it actually helps as it becomes a habit. If you'll religiously execute this system, you'll find that day by day, you'll make these small progress and you will be shocked at the amount of progress that you'll be able to accumulate at the end of your timeline.
It also helps to keep track of your progress by using tools such Michael Hyatt’s Focus Planner.
Links Mentioned In This Episode
- Michael Hyatt on Goal Setting
- Cliff's Free Goal Webinar
- Hyatt's Full Focus Planner
- Apollo 8 on NOVA
- Subscribe in iTunes
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Achieve Your 2019 Goals — Transcript
I hope whatever part of the world that you’re in that you had an amazing end of the year. For a lot of parts of the world the end of the year is a special time, you get together with family, you celebrate. For some of you in Asia, I know that’s coming, Chinese New Year is coming, so happy Chinese New Year to those of you that will be celebrating that in a few weeks. That’s also a very exciting time of the year.
I know if you’re like me, a lot of times at this time of year I’ve got some extra time on my hands, I’m taking some vacation, and I’m doing a lot of thinking about what I need to do in the coming year. Today, I’m actually recording this on New Year’s Day. Normally I release my podcast on Thursday, but this year I want to get off to a big aggressive start and help you as soon as I possibly can.
I wanted to tell you about my thinking about how to not just articulate your goals, because we’ve talked about that many times, but how to actually achieve them. I read a post on Facebook from my friend Leslie Samuel and he confessed that over the last several years he has written down his goals every year at the beginning of the year and he couldn’t even remember one single goal that he had actually accomplished. I totally resonated with that.
You see people like Leslie from BecomeABlogger.com that are achieving so much, and you just assume that these people have it all together, they’re writing down their goals, and they’re achieving them all and everything is absolutely perfect and fantastic. The truth is we’re all struggling. Me probably more than anyone. I have had a tremendous amount of success online over the years, but the truth of the matter is it’s nowhere near the success that I feel like I’m capable of and nowhere near the goals that I’ve set for myself. You have to ask the question, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, why haven’t I achieved my own personal goals? Maybe you say I set my goals too high. Somehow there’s this gap where every year I set a goal and, Like Leslie, by the end of the year sometimes I can’t even remember what they were, I have to go back to look.
There are reasons for that. What I want to do with this episode is talk about three things that I want you to think about with your goals this year for 2019. It’s not too late, it’s January 1st. Maybe you’re listening to this sometime in January. I give you permission to make some adjustments to your strategy and to your goals based on what you hear in this podcast episode. It’s okay to make some course corrections along the way.