Corrina Cross shares some pointers for setting and achieving goals, which – when followed – will help you to lead the life you are looking for, both personal and business.

Most people set daily, weekly or monthly goals without looking any further, and wonder why their lives do not improve.  You must have a long-term vision that acts as your ‘lighthouse’… always steering you in the right direction.  This ‘vision’ is about how you want your organisation (or your life) to look like in the ideal world.

As you can see with some of the most successful companies in the world (Amazon, Apple, Google and so on), their vision drives people forward and helps them to work together because they all know where their company is heading to.

With a vision in sight, it becomes easy to set goals, which in turn support that  vision and lead you towards achieving it.

‘Values’ will keep you on track

In recent times, it seems everybody is talking about ‘values’.  Put simply, ‘values’ are what’s important to you or, for corporate goals, important to your company. Once you determine a set of values that are important to your company, these will act as guidelines to help members of staff to keep on track, behaving in a way that is true to the company.

Break goals into stages

Most people have heard of ‘SMART’ goals… Goals that are:-

Specific: No use setting ‘vague’ goals such as ‘earn more money’.

Measurable: Without a measure, you won’t know you’ve achieved your goal.

Achievable: Setting goals you can strive towards.

Realistic: Totally unrealistic goals will only cause disappointment.

Timed: You need to know by when you want to achieve your goal.

But, even with ‘SMART’ goals, there are generally only two options: success or failure.

If you break your goals into stages, starting with something you are absolutely guaranteed to achieve, it will give you momentum, will give you something to celebrate, and will push you to go on and achieve the next stage, each time pushing you that bit further.

Make yourself accountable

Many people I work with want to keep their goals to themselves.  I recommend not only sharing your goals with someone, but asking them to help you achieve that goal. You can assign a different person to help with each of your goals.  Someone you trust and someone you know will agree to help you.

‘Help’ can come in all shapes and sizes. You could ask a friend to simply remind you about your goal. You could ask somebody to work on it with you.  Or you could pay somebody for a service – such as an outsourced accounting firm – so that you have more free time to work on your core business.

See it!  Hear it!  Feel it!

Many people these days use ‘vision boards’ so they can actually see how life will look once they achieve their ‘vision’.  It has been proven many times that this helps people to achieve their goals as they can ‘see’ what their ideal life looks like.

I suggest people take a few minutes each day to close their eyes and visualise what they will see, what they will hear, and what they will feel once their goals have been achieved.  The unconscious mind is very powerful.  By adding feeling to your vision, it ‘tricks’ the unconscious mind into believing the goal has already been achieved and, thus, works on helping to turn that goal into reality.

Corrina Cross, a learning and development and personality profiling consultant, runs powerful interactive workshops for both corporates and individuals that deliver results with improved communication and motivation and increased productivity. Check out the website www.the-people-people.com or email her on Corrina@the-people-people.com to find out more.

The Intelligent SME, the business magazine for small and medium enterprises.