RICH Tips on Goal Setting To RICHes with Bernadette Boas

Hi everyone, it's Bernadette Boas, and today's Bridge Tip is all about goal setting. That critical tool that if used each and every day will increase your productivity. Basically, you'll get more done in a day. It'll increase or improve your effectiveness of whatever it is you're working on. At work or at home, and it will enhance your success rate, your ability to actually achieve the goals that you're working on. So if you could learn this tool and if you can embed it into your everyday routine, I guarantee you within just the first week of using it, you will greatly, greatly improve your success rate in whatever big or small goal that you have. Alright, so the first thing is this, a very simple methodology. You might have heard, heard it out there about in the world, and it's called the SMART methodology. SMART, S-M-A-R-T. And it's a real simple process for defining your goals, because the number one thing people come to me with after they've either been part of my training or heard me speak or have been coaching with me or or in some other interaction, they'll say, Bernadette, I don't even know how to set a goal, or I don't even know what goal it is that I should be setting. And I can't help you with what goal it is that you can be setting, but I can help you that once you have decided on a goal, that this methodology, this process, and these tips that I'm going to provide you will certainly get you in a place that you're gonna be very focused, very clear, and very motivated on to work hard toward achieving. I guarantee you that, okay? Alright, so the SMART methodology helps you frame what that goal is that you might have. So, for instance, say you wanna lose weight. Stating that you wanna lose weight, or I'm gonna lose weight this year, is not a goal. It's a dream, it's a nice wish, but it's not a goal. A goal is very specific and very measurable and very time-bound and a number of other things that we'll talk about. Alright? So you need to get as specific as possible. You need to put out in the universe not that you want to lose weight or you want to earn a lot of money or you want to meet the man of your dreams or the woman of your dreams or you want to become the President of the United States. Well, that's a lot more specific than the rest of them. Um, it needs to be very, very detailed. All right. So then anytime you're talking to somebody, anytime that you do put it out there in the world, anytime you're thinking about it, anytime you're taking action on it, you know very clearly what it is that you're working so hard to achieve. All right. So the SMART methodology, S stands for specific. Be very, very specific about what it is that you're trying to do. You don't want to just lose weight. You want to lose, lose 35 pounds, and you want to lose 35 pounds by working out, eating healthy, getting your cholesterol down, making sure your blood pressure is under control. Those all are specifics that make that goal of losing weight a lot more tangible. You know, you can kinda see it now and you can see the result and the impact and the reason why you wanna lose weight. It's not just, "I wanna lose weight." Alright? So get as specific as possible about what it is that you wanna do. Now you can even throw the 35 pounds into the M, which is measurable. So you don't wanna just lose weight so you can improve your blood pressure, lower your cholesterol. To get more fit and more healthy, eat a good diet. Now you want to do all those things because you want to lose 35 pounds. Very specifically, I want to lose 35 pounds, maybe 3 inches off my waist, 2 inches off my boob, whatever the case might be. Now you're getting very measurable. Say you want to earn money. I want to make a lot of money this year. Well, great. How much money do you want to make? That's much more measurable than I want to make a lot of money because to me a lot of money might be $5, to you it might be $500,000. So you want to be very, very specific and have it measurable. And you could do a measurement on anything and everything and, you know, you can challenge me on that. Send me your goal and I can challenge that I can't come up with the measurement of that goal for you, okay? So you have specifics and measurable. It needs to be action-oriented. It needs to then be able to have tasks and to-dos and activities applied against it. So you want to lose weight, you've defined it as 35 pounds and you've defined it specifically as being something to help you get your blood pressure, your diet, your cholesterol, so forth and so on under control. Money, you want that money, why? I want that money in order for me to be able to save, invest and have a fudge account. And now the A, actions or actionable are going to be, what do I need to do in order to achieve that weight loss or in order to earn that set of money that I've determined? Okay? And there's tons of actions obviously for both of those things and for any goal. You want to climb Kilimanjaro, you know, you want to take something off your bucket list. Okay, great. What are the actions that you're going to do in order to do that? Okay? So that's the A, action. The R is relevant or realistic. Sometimes I like to use relevant. At the same time, realistic, a lot of people can relate to. So R has to be relevant. For instance, if you define that you want to lose 35 pounds by the end of this year, and yet you've, you know, your head's not there, like you're kind of like, going through this process of using this methodology, but your heart's not really there, then you want to make sure that you're being relevant or realistic to whether or not you can lose that 35 pounds by the end of the year. Okay? Because you don't want to disappoint yourself. You don't want to set yourself up for failure before you even get started. Same with the money. If you want to earn $100,000 so you can save, invest, and have a fudge account, that might be realistic if you're already earning something similar, now you want to just up it to $100,000. But if you earn $20,000 right now, what are you going to do and what's changed, what's different to where now you think you can earn $100,000 before the end of the year? If you want to climb Kilimanjaro but you've never put on a pair of sneakers, is that realistic or relevant that you're going to be in a position that by the end of the year you can climb Kilimanjaro, especially if they tell you it's takes 2 years just to get training for it. Relevant or realistic? Alright? And then the T is time-bound. Making sure that you have a limit or a deadline as to when you want to achieve that goal. You don't want to just say, "I want to lose 35 pounds." "I want to earn $100,000." "I want to climb Kilimanjaro." That doesn't mean anything. When do you want to do it? If someone were to ask you, "That's great, when?" Well, you want to be realistic and relevant around what time you want to be able to lose that. If it's not realistic because you've never lost 5 pounds, let alone 35, to do it by the end of the year, then give yourself 2 years. If it's realistic for you to earn that $100,000 within 3 months versus 6 months or a year, make it 3 months. Give yourself a challenge. If you are fit and you are in a good place, based on standards that are set, or at least put out there, for climbing Kilimanjaro, then maybe you can do it by the end of the year. It just has to have a limit to it because you certainly don't want it just floating out there as a goal. Alright, so the first step in this goal setting rich tip that we're offering up is the fact that you get smart about your goal setting. You get specific, you get measurable, You get actionable, taking actions. It has to have actions. You have to do something in order to achieve a goal, right? It has to be relevant or realistic, and it has to be time-bound. Those things will ensure that you have a very well-crafted goal that should anybody ask you, or that you want to put out in the universe, or that you just want to make sure that, you know, you're embedding into your soul so you believe it. 'Cause a lot of people, they think that they have to be in that place already in order to then, you know, start working on that goal. Well, you know what? It doesn't have to. Dreams can be turned into goals by simply defining them like this. So if you have a dream, that's great. Establish it as a goal by getting smart about it and then go and start pursuing it. Okay? Now, the next piece that people have asked me to talk about when it comes to goal setting is this is all great. And you can find this SMART methodology, just Google SMART methodology for goal setting or SMART goal setting, and you're going to find a lot of material on this process. Alright? So that's kind of like a known best practice out there around goal setting. The other part that people always ask me about is, okay, I have this goal and I have all the actions listed out, I just don't know how to get my head around then actually taking the action and, you know, pursuing that goal. And that's what I'm really, really good at. So, I want to help you with that. Okay. So, here we have our SMART goal and we're going to lose 35 pounds by the end of the year. So, that's my measurable goal and I'm going to do it through the gym and, you know, through fitness and health and calorie counting and a number of other things. All right, so what I like to do is— I want to make sure this is going to get captured properly. Okay, what I like to do is I like to set that yearly goal. Now, the one thing I immediately do after I've set it for a year is I bring it down to a month immediately, because I don't know about you, but I set a yearly goal and say it's February or even January 1st I sit there and say to myself, "Well, I got 12 months, so maybe I'll wait a couple months." Can you relate to that? "Maybe I'll wait a couple months because then I'll have 10 months left, and then it's 6 months, and then I'm like, okay, I can still wait because I can lose 35 pounds in the next 6 months." So then I, you know, I kind of continue to push off. Next thing you know, I haven't made my goal. Can you relate? So as a result of that, I still like to always know when I kind of kick in and welcome in the new year that I have my next year already defined. Yet what I'm going to do with that next year goal is I'm going to break it down to having just to look at a month. What do I want to accomplish this month? So I take it from a month— or I'm sorry, from a year to a month. So I say, okay, I want to lose 35 pounds by the end of this year. If I were to divide that by 12, that's 2. But I really want to get— oh, 2, that's close to 3. Math was never my best subject, okay? And then, so I need to lose 3 pounds a month, but I am just really psyched up and I want to get a jump on things, so I'm going to target 5 pounds this month. Okay? So I define my month as 5 pounds. But quite honestly, There's a lot of days in the month and all I really want to focus on is this week. What am I going to do this week? Because what is the statistic? You know, with the number of people that get a gym membership on January 1st are out of it by, you know, end of February or I'm sorry, end of March. You know why? Because they had all these big goals and all these big dreams that weren't realistic and what we talked about with the SMART methodology. They didn't have it defined, it wasn't actionable or they didn't take action. And therefore they've lost momentum, they lost focus, they lost, you know, all their energy behind it. I don't want you to do that, alright? And if you follow this process, you won't do that. So now we have this month and I have 30 days to accomplish it roughly, and yet that's still a little bit too opportunistic to get lazy. So now I'm going to break it down to a week, and I tend to look at things in a week. Weekly calendars, week at work, so forth and so on. That's a digestible amount of time to set a goal and stay very focused and motivated that by the end of the week, you know, if I make it, woohoo, I can party. If I didn't, I got 3 other weeks to make up for what I wanted to do that month, right? Nice way to look at it. So now for the week, I just determined that of that 5 pounds I want to lose this month, I'm going to lose 2 pounds this week. Okay, so that gives me an opportunity to get— jump on it, do it in a very realistic, healthy way. And should I falter a little bit, I have 3 other weeks to make up to get to that 5 pounds for the month. So I have my weekly goal. Now, I talk a lot about the fact that you literally want to take that goal and now you want to look at your week and look at it by day of what are all the tasks and activities you need to to do in that given week in order to accomplish the goal. So the next thing I would tell you to do is to make the laundry list of all the things that you need to do in order to accomplish that goal. And you're looking at it purely by the week. Okay? Now, we talked about over here that it has to be action-oriented. So now I'm putting that A into motion. So now I have a, you know, my journal or legal pad, and I'm listing out all the things that I need to do. Don't take it for granted that you know, and don't take it for granted that it's just going to be, you know, that you have to work out, you have to, you have to go to the gym. No, let's say you have to work out, you have to eat right, and you have to track calories. All right, but those 3 things can be broken down into a lot more tasks that you have to do. So for instance, eating right, well, that means that you need to go to the grocery store, you might need to go to the, um, the produce market, you might need to go and get gym clothes, buy a pair of sneakers. So there could be a lot of little tasks within the bigger tasks that you actually need to do. So you want to make a laundry list of all the things that you're gonna need to do in order for you to be able to achieve even that weekly goal. So, the money, you wanna earn $100,000 for the year, you say that it's a salary. So, you know, now you don't earn $100,000 today, you only earn $70,000, and yet your skill set will allow you to get to $100,000, but you have to find that job. So, what are all the things you're gonna need to do to find a job? It's not just picking up the phone. You might need a resume. You might need to get career counseling. You might need to spend time researching and Googling the companies that— and the jobs that have that $100,000. You wanna make sure that you're identifying all the different tasks that you need to get done in order to contribute to that goal. Alright? So just make a laundry list of all those things. Now, What I like to do initially is I like to take that laundry list and I like to map it out into my week. Now, we're not going to spend a lot of time on this because I'm going to have another Rich Tip video around time blocking your calendar, time blocking all the to-dos that you have on your list. So we're not going to get into that heavily. All I'm going to tell you is get the laundry list of the things that you need to do, look at your week and plot them in as to when are you going to go and do the things that you need to do throughout the week. Personally, professionally, around your goal. Because you're still working, you're still living, you're still taking care of the family, you're still taking care of yourself, your friends. So you need to ensure that you're looking at everything that you— every obligation, every commitment that you have. And then guess what? These are extra. These are things that you might not have already been working on, and now you're adding. So you need to get very focused in order to, to be able to achieve this goal. Okay, so you make the laundry list. Now what I like to do is take— now take that week and take it down to a day. What do I need to accomplish just today? I happen to be the type that starts the week on Mondays, okay? What I tend to do is I sit on Sundays, Sunday nights specifically, I sit on my couch and I look at my week and I look at my goal, and then I look at the goal to see if it's been realistic so far and do I need to make any changes. But say, say all is good, And now I know that I need to do whatever I need to do to get 2 pounds off this week. And now I look at the week and I actually plot it out on the week to make sure that I am realistic that I can get it all done before the end of the week. Then what I do, that Sunday night, then Monday morning and every day throughout the week, every day I'm then waking up, I'm taking that long list of to-dos and I'm identifying the 2 or 3 things in the day that are— have the greatest impact on my goal. And making sure I only focus on those 3 things. Okay? So now I've taken my year down to a month, down to a week, and down to a day. Because I can really feel really good about myself or I have a lot of time to make up for whatever I might not get done in a day. But as you look at the week and the month and the year, it might get a little bit discouraging and overwhelming. So looking at things one day at a time, take one day at a time, the old saying, is very applicable here. And it is a really good way of ensuring or at least increasing your probability of success if you just look at it one day at a time. Because guess what? You've defined your 3 things that you need to do today. Say you only get one of those 3 things done. Guess what? You got 33% of your goal accomplished. And you can then look at tomorrow and look at what you didn't get done and see what you need to do for the rest of the week. That is much better than having 100 things on a list of which you don't get any of it completely done, or you only get 3 of them. Then it's only 3% of the 100. Eh, I'd rather go for the 33%. So if you take your goal from a year to a month to a week and then down to a day, Define 3 things out of the whole laundry list of things that you need to do to accomplish that goal. Pick 3 things a day to focus on. Then go ahead and, you know, go and start pursuing and acting on those 3 things. And even if you would only get one of those 3 things done, you're that much further along than you probably were yesterday. Okay? So goal setting, it is a smart tool to use in order for you to improve your effectiveness, increase your productivity, get more things done in a day, and to raise the certainty of you achieving your goal. So that is our Rich Tip around goal setting. And of course, come back again because we have Rich Tips to cover just about anything that you need from business and life. Thanks everybody!