MBA1470 Q&A Wednesday: I never hit my goals. Am I setting them too high?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100 arm. Taking the confusion out of business every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and a Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omarr.net Today's question is from Pat and Pat asks I never seem to hit my goals. Am I setting my goals too high? I'm a freelance graphic designer and personal development junkie. I'm big on goal settings and I set goals for myself every single month. But more often than not I do not actually hit my goals and it gets me asking am I setting my goals too high? Thanks for your help Omar. Love the podcast Pat. Thanks Matt and thank you for submitting a great question for today's Q and A Wednesday. This is a very interesting question because goals are one of those things that we all want to achieve. We all to get better and have that sense of accomplishment, especially when it comes to our business. But it can be very demotivating if we don't hit the goals that we set for ourselves month over month. So what do we do? Do we scrap goals altogether? Who do we chalk up the blame to for not hitting the goals? And how do we prevent this demotivation from happening on a consistent basis? That's what we're going to cover. In today's episode. We'll talk about how do you know if you're stretching too much or, or if maybe your implementation needs work? Or how to set several goals that you could try to achieve throughout the month. We get into all that and more. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Pat asks, I never hit my goals. Am I setting my goals too high? Well, one of the things I learned about goals is that in order for you to set realistic goals, goals that you can achieve that are a bit of a stretch but can be achieved, you have to reverse engineer them. You have to actually figure out, is it even possible? For example, if I set the goal that, you know, next month I want to have 3,000 new customers, but last month I had 10 customers, how am I going to make up that difference of 2,990 customers? How is that going to actually happen? How many customers do I need every day? How am I going to get those customers? This will give me a better indication if this goal is far fetched or actually doable. You got to reverse engineer the goal. And you can't reverse engineer any goals without any metrics. What are you measuring this outcome, this goal against? You can't just say, next month I want to have a bigger business. That just means maybe one more customer than last month. Right. So be specific about the metric you're following about your goals and then reverse engineer and find out what do I need to do to hit that goal this month. Is that something that I can do? Is it something that I've done in the past or maybe come close to and maybe can push myself a little bit more? What's my plan of execution? This is very important because if you're just setting goals out of thin air and just hoping that it's gonna happen by a pure miracle, then you're asking for disappointment. But for example, let's say I have a fitness goal and I wanna be able to bench press 200 pounds. And let's say I bench press right now 160 pounds. So that means that I need to increase my weight at least by £10 every week to hit that 200 mark. So if I'm going to work out four times a week. That means every time I work out, I got to add two and a half pounds to my bench to hit that mark. Is that doable? Can I actually do that? Can I, you know, bench press two and a half more pounds every time I work out this week? It sounds pretty doable. I think I can do it. It's not so far fetched. I'm not asking to bench press £400, right? It's doable. I have a breakdown. It sounds like something that I can achieve. But having said that, you need to set three different goals and this is called good, better, best. So in the bench press example, the best would be being able to bench press 200 pounds. A better goal, which is the medium goal, would be 180 pounds and good would be maybe 175 or 170. I've increased my weight. It's not the 2, 100, it's not the 180. But hey, it's a goal that I'm happy with because I'm making progress. So always set your goals with good, better, best results. Why? Because you might hit the good goal early. You might, hey, I got 10 more days in the month and I already hit the good goal. Let me try to go for the better goal or maybe even the best. The other reason why you should set good, better best goals is that if you are reaching the end of the month, there's a few more days and you're not even close to your good goal. You know you're setting them too high. You're not really setting realistic goals that have a game plan that actually can be implemented. This is what I love about good, better, best is because it allows you to really break down what, what is actually achievable and it's trackable because you can really quickly see are you setting it too high or even too low. What if you're hitting your best goal and you still have two weeks left in the month, you know you're not setting them ambitiously enough. Also, make sure you have milestones in terms of time to your goals. So if you're setting monthly goals, then have a weekly goal, what do you need to hit this week by the end of the week in order to be on track? Because you want to catch things before you fall behind. If by the end of your first week you haven't completed the weekly goal to get you to the monthly goal, which basically is your monthly goal divided by four, whatever that result is, then you know you need to make up for lost time. You need to make sure before Week two begins, you're on track, or it's just going to get harder and harder as time goes on. My advice to anybody who's starting out and is setting goals for themselves is to make sure you set goals that are totally achievable at the start. The thing about goals is that you're going to be setting them month after month, year after year. So what I like to do is get some wins under your belt, get some goals that get achieved, gain some confidence, and learn how it feels to accomplish a goal so you can use that momentum and then start upping the ante a little bit more. So maybe if you feel like the goal is a little bit weak, that's okay. Get the win, accomplish the goal, and then next month, you know, raise the stakes a little bit more, make it a little bit more challenging. A lot of us, we try to accomplish impossible goals when we haven't accomplished one goal yet. Get some wins under you, okay?

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What I love about Pat's question today, about feeling like he never hits his goals and maybe he's questioning if he's setting them too high, is that he's hungry for improvement. He wants to push himself, he wants to get better, and that's a good thing. But that can be very exhausting if you don't reverse engineer your goals and your results based on data based on facts. So I want to give you one more example. If I want to get 40 new customers to sign up for my thousand dollar plan this month. How am I going to do that? Well, I know that If I get 300 people to register for a webinar, about 120 people attend, maybe 150. But let's just be conservative. 120 people will attend that webinar. If I know from the past, I can convert 10% of my attendees into buyers, into customers. I know that I can get 12 customers every single time I do a webinar. So to hit my 40, I need to do at least four webinars. Now I'll be a little bit ahead, but it's better for me to do enough to hit the goal than to do just a little bit less. So I want to make sure I run through that finish line. So I know I have to do four webinars this month with 300 registrants and 120 attendees. And I gotta confer at 10% for each webinar to hit my goal. These are real facts, These are real numbers. So I know along the way when I'm. Before I even start my first webinar, before I even get on the mic and on camera and do my presentation, I know if I'm gonna be on track. I know. Do I have enough registrants? Do I have 300 registrants? Great. I do. I have more than that. Wonderful. Did I work on my email notifications sequence so I can get people to attend? Yep, I did. And I got the 120. But what if I get the 120 and only seven people bought? Okay. I know now where I need to improve to hit my goal. I know that I need to do better with my offer. I need to do better with maybe the way I present my product and the value it offers. Maybe I need to do a better follow up sequence so I can actually make some sales after the webinar as well. I know where to focus on.

Okay.

I need to continue to do the things I did to get those 300 registrants and attendees. But now I gotta really focus on improving this area. See how when you break it down with actual numbers, you can actually say, yes, I can hit this goal. So in this case, my good number would be 30 new customers. My better number would be 35, and my best would be 40. Okay. So remember, my best is like the really the goal I want, but I need to kick it back a little bit so I can make sure I have a little bit of leeway for the unexpected as well as the fact that and I want to get a win under my belt and I can know quickly after the first iteration in that month if this is an easy goal, if I'm taking it too easy myself or I need to make it a little bit more, you know, ambitious. Thanks, Pat, for asking that question on Q and A Wednesday. If you have a question you want to ask on the show, just email me over at omar@100mba.net. I'll answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday, right on the show. If you love this podcast, hit subscribe right now. That's the best way to show your support. It also gives you access to over 1400 business lessons or archive episodes. It's absolutely free to hit subscribe and you can do it on any device on any platform, whether you're on Spotify or Stitcher Radio or Apple Podcast or Overcast or on them all. Just hit that subscribe button right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I just spoke about webinars and if you want to see how to run a webinar just like I've been doing, I've run over 500 webinars. Check out my Live workshop. You can join me live online in my own webinar over@webinarninja.com workshop. You can sign up. It's absolutely free. You can learn a ton and I guarantee it will be worth your time. At the very least, you'll learn what a professional webinar looks like so you can do one for yourself. Also, when it comes to goals, if you don't have a strategy to get the goal, to get that result, to achieve the goal, then the goal is just a whim. It's just a wish. It's a dream. We don't do that as entrepreneurs. As entrepreneurs, we set things up that we know that we can win at, we can achieve. And the only way to know that is to reverse engineer the info, to reverse engineer the data, the numbers, and really see what we can achieve in what amount of time. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. See you then. Take care.

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