Stephen Scoggins breaks down five principles for setting goals that actually work: start small with 6-12 month targets, get specific by visualizing and writing down what done looks like, map backwards from the outcome, take daily action, and measure progress to adjust when stuck.
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Hey there. Welcome back. If you're like me, you probably get pretty frustrated when you actually don't achieve any of your goals you set. Well, in this episode, we're going to give you five principles that you can use to actually get results. Stay tuned.
You know, one of the biggest troubles I ever had in going from stuck to unstoppable in my own life was unfortunately trying this mythical goal setting thing. It seems like the beginning of every single year someone was talking about, hey, you should goal setting. What's your resolution? Well, the problem with goal setting is if it's not written down and a few other things, it becomes a problem to actually accomplish those things. So I actually think of this a little bit differently. I actually don't do goals. I don't focus on goals at all. I actually focus on outcomes. I focus on what the result looks like. Finished. An outcome is a result when it's actually finished, right? If you were to go into the dictionary today and look up the word outcome, an outcome has already got a predetermined finish. It's already finished. So I want to start there. I want to make sure you understand that you really shouldn't do the proverbial goal setting as much as getting clear on the actual result you want to see. And I also think that you should probably do it using these five steps, or five principles, if you will. First principle I like to talk about is actually start small. One of the biggest mistakes I made is and trying to get my own journey going, going from goals or outcomes or whatever you want to, whatever you want to use. One of the biggest things that I messed up there on specifically was I focused on the five year goal, the 10 year goal, the 20 year goal, which left me frustrated, aggravated, and well, for lack of a better word, stuck. Look, if you want to actually achieve an outcome, actually get the result you're looking for, you've got to start small. You've got to think in terms of six months to 12 month increments, right? You also have to make sure you take the time to really kind of lay out that process. So when it comes to starting small, don't say to yourself, I want to be a millionaire. When? How? Why? You've got to answer some basic questions to get super clear on where you start. Now, if you say one of the outcomes I want to do is I want to raise my income. Great. By how many percent? 10%, 15%, 20%? Okay, great. Now what? Well, that's where the be clear comes into play. I actually like to say that for me, when I'm trying to set my outcome or trying to define where I'm going, one of the first things that I do is I try to use all five of my senses. I try to envision my mind, what it looks like finished. I try to anticipate or imagine the sounds I'll hear, the things I'll taste, right? The things I'll be able to do with my hands. Those are elements to help you paint a clear picture. The clearer the picture is in your mind, the more apt you are to achieve it. If you say I just want to raise my income and there's nothing else around it, how can you possibly determine the steps to get there? However, if you say I want to raise my income, I'm willing to get a part time job to make that happen, or part time income stream to make that happen. And this is the way in which I'm going to focus on it. You've got to be clear and to do so you need to use all of your senses, right? I like to think you should do kind of what we're doing today. Take the time to write it down.
Describe to yourself why you want it, describe to yourself what it looks like finished, and you will stand a far better chance of actually making that happen. Alright? The third thing.
Create a roadmap. Create a roadmap.
One of the goals that I personally have or my team has is they want to transform a million lives. Now we want to do that before I pass away. So hopefully we have some time left for sure. But in order to do that, we have to create a plan. I had to build a website, I had to create free ebooks, I had to create free resources for you. I had to create a YouTube channel, I had to invest in a production team. Right? These are different steps to make that long range and even short range things come to pass, you know. So for example, let's use the raise my income example we talked about earlier. So we know why we want it, right? Now we're determining the how, right? Maybe it's a part time gig. Okay, so part time gig, I want to make minimum of this amount of money per hour or per project for that. Why? Because if my goal was to be here to raise my income, but yet I settle for less pay that it's going to help me get there, then why should I take the role in the beginning with you see, I'm saying you want to be clear, because that's part of creating the roadmap. Part time pay. And now I want to look at how I'm going to manage that. And excuse my funky end there, got a little carried away from me. But we will act like it's a lowercase mistake, right? You want to determine, you want to manage that expectation. Okay, so when I get to the end of the month, what have I got left? What do I, what am I going to do with that money as it comes in? These are different ways or different items into creating the roadmap itself.
When you go to create a roadmap or actually build a plan, we like to say you're going to start with your outcome and then you're going to work backwards.
The reason you're going to work backwards is because you're going to see the different steps you need to take along the way. And then you just focus on taking the daily steps, which is number four, what we like to refer to as doing the push ups.
You could spend all the time in the world, I mean all the time in the world, starting small, getting clear, developing a plan. But if you don't take action on the plan, how are you ever going to get the results? Only actions lead to results. Thinking about it, analysis paralysis is not going to produce a result. There has to be an action in the middle. Which is why we start from the place we want to end up and work backwards. Because over time, if we take the time to be clear, that will actually tell us what actions to take. Now I like to say it's daily actions. There are daily actions that you can take day in and day out. That it's like taking one step and one step and one step.
Think about it like this. There's 365 days in a year. If you took one step a day, by the time you're at the same time right here, next year you'll have taken 365 steps. I invite you, when you get done with the video, to put on your shoes and walk 365 steps and see how far away from your original starting point you are. This works, but only if you put work behind it. So daily action which comes from your outcomes working backwards, does that make sense? Alright, final thing. Measure and adjust. Measure and adjust. Growing up in the construction industry, specifically that I grew up in, there's a lot of this construction terminology, right? Measure twice, cut once. Why? So you avoid needless mistakes, needless roadblocks and needless frustration. Far too many people set a goal that is again, I like to call it the outcome because it's clearly defined. A goal is kind of a revision. But they set that they may be starting to work towards creating a plan. Maybe they're, maybe they're kind of clear on why they want to get there. But the first time that they hit a major roadblock, right, they don't know what to do. So what do they do? They stop. They just, they just, they just go downhill. What I want to help you understand is by the time you actually measure some of your variable results, when you hit a roadblock, it helps you go over, around, or even through those roadblocks. So you're constantly making progress. We like to say go from stuck to unstoppable. Stuck means that you're not making progress. Unstoppable means you're always making progress. If you'll follow these five principles, you'll actually start to see results that you've actually wanted for yourself all this time. But don't give up, because you're worth it. You can do this, and we'll see you again on the next video. Take care. I hope you enjoyed that lesson about goal setting. You can click the link in the description to grab your free ebook, which will teach you the five principles you must have for a personal breakthrough. This is a must read if you want to take your learning to a whole other level. Also, do us a favor like and comment and subscribe and we'll see you on the next video.
