5 things you can do to reach your goals before the end of the year
This is an adaptation of the little snippet episodes of the Born to Fly Podcast.
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When I started as a solopreneur, I created a couple of goals for my branding business.
I got excited, but as I struggled along, the goals weren’t met and eventually, I forgot about them altogether.
Then, when the new year was about to start, I set new goals. And to do that, I looked at the ones from the previous year, realizing I never actually bothered to reach them.
It was pretty pathetic. What’s the point of setting goals if you are not intentionally trying to achieve them?
I wanted to change that because I knew integrating goal setting in my work was gonna be beneficial for my business. Within the Born to Fly community we adapted the system mentioned in the book Redeeming Your Time by Jordan Raynor. What I’m going to share next is based on that.
Limit your number of goals
Try to limit the number of goals per calling or topic to 5. The goals that I have set for the Born to Fly platform don’t exceed that number.
For my freelance writing, I have 5 goals.
Motherhood 3.
Family 3, Spiritual 1, etc.
More goals are harder to achieve and harder to remember. Of course, you can always add more goals if you reached them after 6 months or so but don’t add more before achieving the set goals.
After setting those goals, how do I make sure I reach them?
5 steps to reach your goals
Let’s take a spiritual goal such as “reading the entire bible in one year,” as an example and apply my tactics to this goal.
1- Chop up the goal into digestible chunks.
Meaning, tinier steps that I can accomplish within a week or 3 months. If I want to read the Bible in one year, how much do I have to read each day? If I know I need to read for 15 minutes a day, then it’s easier for me to implement it into my schedule. The same is true for instance for increasing your newsletter subscribers. What you need to do might be to post about it on social media at least once a week.
2- Track your progress.
What comes with checking progress is looking at your goals regularly. How can you remind yourself about your goals? For instance, by putting sticky notes around the house and writing down your progress, or creating a habit of checking your goals weekly, or becoming part of an accountability group as I did.
If I have neglected reading the Bible for 15 minutes a day, I know I’m behind and I need to up my game.
3- Be held accountable.
It works well to share your goal with others. This could be in a group at church, with your partner, with other solopreneurs, or with a friend. I was lucky enough to be able to share my goals with my Born to Fly community and discuss our progress weekly.
For our example: tell a friend that you are reading the Bible in one year and ask if your friend can ask about the progress every other month or so.
4- Schedule time to work on your goals.
Nothing gets done without planning. The Bible gives a perfect example in Luke 14:28. It says:
“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?”
You can’t build a tower without a plan. The financial aspect is just one of the things you need to look over before you know if you can continue with the project.
So, if I want to read the Bible in a year, I need to plan when I am going to read the bible. Before going to bed? In the morning? During lunch break? During the kids’ nap time? If I don’t schedule, I won’t get further than saying I will read some passages this week. That’s not very specific and it means it just won’t get done. There are always too many things going on, distracting me and leading me away from doing the task or even thinking about it. It’s easy to forget what I need to do so, long story short: just plan time to do it.
5- Fight to overcome negative thoughts.
At some point, I might not even be halfway through the Bible and it’s already October. It starts to look like it’s impossible to have read the entire Bible by the end of the year. It would be easy to give up now or adjust the goal to “read the bible in 2 years”.
So I can go too gentle on myself.
Or I could go the other way: I start punishing myself by calling myself names and talking myself down.
I have a tendency to do the latter, but I know that God wouldn’t talk me down.
Negative thoughts can only come from the enemy.
So what I do is I tell myself I can still do it. I look at how far I’ve come already, and I ask others to help me. A friend could read along with me.
I could ask my husband to watch after the kids for half a day on the weekend so I can catch up on reading.
I could re-divide my goal into digestible chunks again, adjusted to the time I have left in the year.
You'd be surprised what you still can get done in a few months.
To summarize: these are 5 tactics you can use to accomplish your goals before the end of the year:
chop up the goal into digestible chunks
track your progress
search for accountability
schedule time to work on your goals
fight negative thoughts
Conclusion
Eventually, I have to acknowledge I’m dependent on God, therefore I have to surrender my goals to Him. I cannot accomplish anything of eternal benefit on my own strength. I may set my path and make plans, but God will direct and determine the steps.
It means that at the end of the year, I might not have reached all of my goals, but that is fine. I have full confidence that when I give it my all, God will help me achieve what is important. After all, I’m working for His Kingdom, following His lead.
So dear reader, let’s hope this blog helps you in accomplishing your goals before the end of the year. Pray about your goals, which ones are important to God? Then give it your very best, your full commitment, and enjoy whilst working on them.
There are definitely more steps to make sure you can achieve your goals, but these 5 work very well.
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