Posts Tagged ‘goals’

After Articulating Business Goals, Create a Plan

By Jim Noh-Kuhn, Dream Business Coach

Garden at Versailles

A well thought out goal and plan resulted in this

In my last entry, I wrote about the importance of articulating business goals. After writing your goals down, you may find yourself filled with energy, and want to do something about your newly articulated goals. So, what next?

The first thing is to notice the energy you feel. You may think to yourself that you don’t want to loose that energy, and may even become fearful that you will loose it. Have no fear: you will. Inspiration is great – I highly recommend it; I find it a necessity for a balanced and successful life. But it is very rare to carry the energy of inspiration 24/7 throughout your entire life. It’s been done before, but mostly by people who have a title (two letter hint: St.)

Don’t despair, once inspiration is found, it can be found again. The key at this point is to use it while you’ve got it. That’s why many (most?) successful writers don’t rely on and wait for inspiration to do their writing. The schedule their writing like appointments and keep going.  When inspiration does strike they will recognize it, and use it to write words that inspire or to come up with ideas for the next project.

Use your inspiration as if it was a tool that will help you further on down the road, not just for the particular task at hand. You could use this new found energy to start the work, or you could develop the plan that will lay out the path towards achieving your goal.

For example, let’s say that the goal you articulated was to plant a garden in the back yard by the end of next month. After waking up full of energy you could grab tools and start the digging. There may be a semblance of a plan in your head of what will go where, but you want to “just start”, so you begin tearing out the weeds and debris. By lunch time your back hurts, your hands have blisters, your neck is sunburn, and you feel miles away from the completed garden. You may also notice that the energy of inspiration has been used up.

Or, the other thing you could have done as inspiration dawned is to sit back down with your newly articulated goal in front of you, and write out a plan – a set of objectives: the first is to clear away the debris. The second objective is to start seed germination, which you also note will require seeds, and small seedling containers. The third objective is to create a detailed map of what will be planted where. The third objective is to develop a budget for expenses. The fourth and perhaps most important objective is to develop a time line: how long will it take to clear the debris? What specific day will you be free to go to the nursery to get the seeds and containers? Tomorrow? Next Saturday? Make the time line specific, for all of the objectives, all the way to the celebration of the achieved goal. See the pathway to completion laid out in front of you.

This planning stage is about taking the inspiration and using it to help carry you through not only the next step, but many steps. From personal experience, just having a plan for business goals is inspiring, which I can then use to start working, but with realistic expectations as to how long and how much energy it will take me to clear the debris. With that, I’m now on my way towards achieving the goal.

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Goals Written = Goals Achieved

by Jim Noh-Kuhn, Dream Business Coach

With a practiced eye, I feel that the answers to my question of “what are your business goals, what is it that you want to achieve” become articulated right there on-the-spot. Usually the answer had already been a thought, perhaps even for a very long time. But it all-to-often had never been spelled out, literally.

Is this you? Do you have an idea as to what your goals are, thoughts, but have not committed to writing them down?  Or, perhaps those ideas, those goals are new: “how could I have written them down when I’ve only just now thought of them” you say. That could be true, but what about the last set of thoughts/goals – how successful were you at achieving those?

The inferred commonality is that these business goals were not written down. The other inferred commonality, equally important, is that these goals were not achieved.  There is a direct correlation between those two inferences: if you write down your goals, you are much, much more likely to achieve them than if you only think your goals through. If you don’t write them down, you are much, much more likely to not achieve them.

This sounds so silly, so easy, that it can’t possibly be true. But it is. So what to do about it? Take advantage:

Start with a comfortable medium: pan & paper, MS Word, a post-it note, the back of a napkin, it doesn’t matter. Then write down what it is that you want to accomplish. Don’t worry if it’s the most important thing, or if it’s realistic. Don’t worry about knowing how you’re going to achieve it. Don’t worry about punctuation, or getting it just right. Just write.

Then put the pen down, or back away from the keyboard, and look at it; take it in and notice how you feel. Then, do not, under any circumstances, delete it, nor crinkle it up and throw it away.

The third step is to write a second version. No matter how well written, the first version needs a rewrite. That’s why you stopped in the previous version to notice how you feel, because there will be something about that first version that is gnawing at you, and you need to fix that. Spend some time in this next draft to make the goal specific; Also, apply a time element to it – don’t just say “own my own house”, make a commitment, like “own my own house within five years”.  You may not yet know what all has to happen in those five years, but don’t worry about that yet. Establish a time frame, and if it later needs to change, then it can change.

Beyond this step, there are many possibilities. There will be another blog on this in the near future. At this point, you are already more likely to achieve your desired outcome than in the past. So take your newly re-written goals and do something with them: put the post-it note on the fridge, make it your screen saver, or even just chuck it in a drawer and ignore it – you’re still more likely to achieve it.

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