Have You Achieved Your Goals?
We are nearing the end of the year and it’s a good time for reflection. Have you achieved your goals this year? Have you come close to achieving your goals? What has gotten in the way of you achieving your goals? What have you learned in pursuit of your goals this year? What has been your biggest challenge?
We believe in goal setting at Two Degrees Marketing, it’s integral to achieving our objectives as a company and helping our clients achieve their goals and objectives. You will notice in our Business Consulting, Strategic Marketing and Product Planning pages we always mention goals. We believe you need to start with the end in mind and we use a variety of goal setting techniques with our clients to achieve remarkable results.
Many of us have been to goal setting workshops, made New Year’s resolutions or have attained goals. But what makes goal setting work? Why is goal setting a critical component in achieving success personally or in business? A wise man once said, you would pack differently if you knew you were traveling to New York rather than Hawaii. An obvious fact, but why do some people achieve goals while others seem to take a slalom course through life?
Psychology, attitude, and aptitude are discussed in many books from Richard Bolles’s What Color is Your Parachute to Stephan Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and how they influence attaining your goals. But, it is Mark McCormack’s book, What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School that explains the 1979 Harvard Business School study with students in the MBA program at Harvard, outlining the critical difference goal setting makes in attaining goals.
Gain a Critical Edge in Achievement
Students were asked, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” The results were startling from a MBA program, only 3 % of the graduates had written goals and plans; 13% had goals, but not written, and the majority, 84% had no specific goals set at all.
Fast forward ten years and the members of the class were interviewed again, and the findings, while predictable, were astonishing. 13% of the class who had goals were earning on average, twice as much as the 84% who had no goals. You ask, what about the 3% who had clear written goals. They were earning, on average, 10X as much as the other 97% who either didn’t have goals or they weren’t written goals.
Seems pretty open and shut, we should all have written goals, but it’s not that easy, most people don’t have clear, measurable, timely goals that they are working toward. From Zig Ziglar to Brain Tracy motivational speakers pronounce the importance of goals; Brian Tracy in his book, Goals teaches how to identify in the clearest terms what you want out of life, then how to achieve those goals. Brian Tracy says there are four reasons why people do not set goals:
- People don’t realize the importance of goals. Take a look at the 5 people you spend the most time with, do they set goals, what is their altitude? The people we spend the most time with greatly influence both our attitude and our altitude.
- People don’t know how to set goals. Goals need to be measurable, specific, attainable, relevant and timely.
- People fear failure. Failure hurts, but many successful people will share how they failed themselves to success, ferreting out a system that will lead them to their goals. Every person or company has their hit rate, including Google, from Jaiku to Google Print Ads they had their misses, but their successes have outweighed their failures and have kept them number 1.
- People fear rejection. People are often afraid if they miss a goal, people will be critical of their mistakes. Some the worst criticism comes from people that don’t set goals, so share your goals with other goal setters, that know that none of us usually hit 100% and will savor your successes with you.
Goal setting is like anything else. The more you do it the better you get at it. Practice sharpening the saw, as Stephan Covey says and soon you will see through consistent habits of goal setting that progress is being made. Two Degrees Marketing has seen time again with clients the power of goal setting in action. We want our clients to gain a competitive edge and have the satisfaction of achieving both their personal and business goals. So share with us on Facebook some of the goals you have achieved this year. What has made the critical difference for you?
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