In this solo episode of the Overgivers Anonymous Podcast, host Angela Mondor (the Geeky Girl) challenges the traditional SMART goal framework by swapping “Achievable” for “Actionable.” She explains why merely setting goals isn’t enough; execution matters. Using a concrete example—writing 52 blog posts in a year—she walks listeners through how to translate a vague ambition into a Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time‑bound (SMART) goal. Angela then demonstrates a step‑by‑step decomposition: yearly vision → quarterly targets → monthly milestones → weekly non‑negotiable tasks (title, outline, draft, edit, images). This hierarchy makes large goals feel manageable and provides clear checkpoints for measuring progress. She stresses the importance of tracking actions versus outcomes, adjusting actions when results fall short, and keeping goals aligned with broader business objectives. The episode concludes with a promotion of the Rockstar Success Circle and the Rockstar Business Planner, resources designed to help listeners implement this planning system, and provides contact information and links to show notes and a community Facebook group.
Chapters
Welcome to the Overgivers Anonymous Podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. In this podcast, we're going to be talking about some amazing things to help you get over overgiving. Hi and welcome to this episode of the Overgivers Anonymous Podcast. My name is Angela Mondor and I'm your host. Today I want to talk to you about SMART goals. They're a little different than what you're used to, I promise you. SMART goals typically are considered specific and measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. I'm going to take you down a different journey. Okay. Similar but different because spicy it is. You know me, I don't like the status quo. There's some different ways of seeing things, and I want to share that with you. So when we talk about setting and achieving SMART goals, I mean, it's one thing to set them, but achieving them is something completely different, right? I mean, there's some work that has to be done. You can plan all you like, but there's still action steps that need to be put in there. Remember that word for later. So, it is important to set goals in entrepreneurship because when we don't have goals, we're floundering. We're just sort of doing things on a day-to-day basis. And maybe we get lost in email replies or maybe we get lost doing the mundane tasks that are just sitting there waiting to get done. By setting goals, then you're constantly working towards those goals. The actions you take are constantly coming back to those goals. You're going to accomplish way more than just sort of floundering and hoping you're moving in the right direction. So SMART goals are going to help you to create a structured framework for success. And so this is important for you if you're looking at making sure that you're creating goals that are actually going to help you move towards the goals that you actually want to, that you actually want to achieve. Okay, you got to want to achieve these things too. You might make a goal and go, I don't care if that ever happens. Well, you're not going to work towards that. We want to make sure we want them. So SMART goals in my world, they're still specific, they are still measurable, but they are actionable, relevant, and time-bound. Why did I change that? Because Everything is achievable if we put the work towards it. But if you don't take action towards something, you're never going to get there. So to me, it makes way more sense to change it to specific and measurable. But we need a specific goal. What is the thing that we're trying to accomplish? I want to write blog posts this year. Fantastic. How many? Measurable. Okay, I want to write 52 blog posts this year. That's a big goal, right? And then actionable. Well, how are you going to do that? Well, I'm going to have a, you know, I have to write out the titles and we have to do this. There's steps according to how it requires. Is it relevant to the overall goals, right? Is your goal to have your blog as part of your marketing? Then it's relevant, right? And time-bound, within a year. I want them once a week. 52 makes sense, right? Okay, so that's how you look at that overall SMART goal. Having a SMART goal is better than vague or general objectives because you can actually say you did accomplish it or you didn't accomplish it, or here's what stopped you along the process. Okay. Having this laid out. So if you're saying, I want 52 blog posts, they're going to be once a week. They are going to be on topics that are going to be X, Y, and Z according to the goals of the business. We're using this for our marketing and here's how it fits into the marketing. Here's the action steps that we want people to take from the blog posts. All of that becomes now a SMART goal rather than just, yeah, I'm going to write some blog posts this year. Because now that's just general and it doesn't tie into all of the goals and it doesn't leave you with the ability to see how these goals are important to the overall goal of the business. So putting these together, the process of goal setting is I like to look at goal setting from a yearly perspective. You're right, making sure that your— the vision and mission of your long-term objectives are all included. You know where you're going for that year. But then breaking it down, breaking— because 52 blog posts is really overwhelming for some people. It's like, holy, that's a lot of blog posts. But if you break it down and say, okay, but in the next 3 months in this quarter, I'm using average numbers, not like these are actual numbers, but average numbers of I'm going to do 12 blog posts in this 3-month period of time. Oh, that feels a little easier than the 52, right? And then breaking it down yet again. So now you create your monthly goals like I'm going to do 4. Come on, that's easier, right? So when you're looking at creating these goals, you want that overreaching goal for sure, but you want to be able to break that down into smaller pieces and being able to do that into quarters and months is the best way I have found to break these goals down. Now, in your monthly goals, you can break these down into weekly non-negotiable things. So when you're thinking about that blog post, for example, if you're gonna write one blog post a week, what are the things you have to do? You have to have a title, you have to have the outline, you have to write the blog, you need it edited, you need pictures. Then now there's things you can tie that become non-negotiable tasks to the actual blog post, which ties it back to the monthly goals, the quarterlies, the yearlies. You see where I'm going with this? Making sure that you are able to measure your progress is really important. And by doing this yearly, quarterly, and monthly, then you're not sort of worried about these massive goals anymore. Now you're starting to be able to focus on smaller things, which makes things way less overwhelming. Because 52 blog posts is overwhelming. But one is doable. And 4 is pretty good, right? So you want to make sure that you're looking at these things, and you're able to say, did I achieve them? Or did I not achieve them? And what happened? And by being able to train it into an actionable portion rather than achievable. Because like I said, everything's achievable if you put the work to it. But I'm going to take these actions. Then you can say, did I take the actions or did I not take the actions? And then from there, you'll be able to see whether or not you were able to accomplish your goal, whether the actions made sense. Maybe you need to change the actions. Maybe you put a goal out there and you said, these are the actions I'm going to take. And you took all those actions and still didn't get where you wanted to go. You can change the actions, not the goal. Okay. So I appreciate that there's a lot of confusion and a lot of stress around these goals. But at the end of the day, if you do this and where you create yearly goals and then break them down into quarters, break them down into months, create your non-negotiables, it's going to be way easier for you to handle your everydays because you know you're always working towards those larger goals, even if you're just working on something small. Now, if you would like help doing that, the Rockstar Success Circle is a great place to start because this is what we do. We meet every year, quarter, month. We put together these plans for you. There's even a Rockstar Business Planner quarterly planner where you can plan out all these things together and make sure that you are taking the right action steps in order to accomplish your goal. I hope that this has been helpful. I hope that you liked my different transition for SMART goals, and I look forward to hearing from you again. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email us at clientcare@geekygirl.ca. Thank you so much for listening to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. Your support means the world to me. You can find show notes for this episode and other goodies at overgiversanonymous.ca. And if you enjoyed this episode or you enjoy the podcast in general, why not join us in the Overgivers Anonymous Facebook group where you can connect with overgivers from all over the world? Head on over to geekygirl.ca/group.
