🎯 Goal: Strategic Thinking

⏰ Time: 90-120 minutes

⚠️ Difficulty: 5 (Difficult)

Summary:

If you’re an ambitious person, your goal-planning process probably looks like this:

1. Look at what your largest competitors are accomplishing
2. Set a large, number-based goal with an aggressive timeline (e.g., $10 million in revenue in six months)
3. Write it down in a notebook or on a white board
4. Forget about it

When setting goals for our businesses or personal lives, we tend to pull big numbers out of thin air. I know I’ve done this dozens of times.

These goals are exciting, but have little or no grounding in reality. The only thing these types of goals do is set you up for disappointment.

To set the right goals for your business, use a technique called ecological goal-setting.

This is an exercise I learned from Peter Shallard, a business psychologist and founder of Commit Action, a coaching service for entrepreneurs.

P.S. Want to try Commit Action’s Productivity Coaching for 50% off? Sign up here.

Instructions:

Start by setting a BHAG: a big, hairy, audacious goal. Then ask yourself these twelve questions to get clear on why you want to achieve that goal and how you’ll get it done:

1. What, specifically, do you want? Consider what your ideal future looks like: What you’re doing, with whom, and the impact you’re making.
2. Where are you now in terms of achieving this goal?
3. What will you see, hear, and feel when you succeed? Try to imagine this moment as vividly as possible.
4. How will you know when you achieved it? What evidence do you need?