Moving Toward Your Goal

by Doyne Phillips, Managing Editor

What is your goal? Are you moving toward it? Do you make progress each day? We all need to know what our goals are. Someone once said a goal without a plan is just a wish. We need to have a plan to move in the direction that will ensure success in reaching those goals. How do we get this done?

First determine your goals. In the business world we have a short formula we use to determine our goals and it has three steps. They are: “How Much? By When? The Details?”

Let’s say you are building your platform and you decide you want as part of your platform 1,000 Followers on Twitter and 1,000 Friends on Facebook. There is your “How Much?” question answered.

Now we move on to “By When?”. You want those numbers reached by the end of the year. This will coincide with the completion of your first draft and you can refer to these numbers in your query letters you send to literary agents.

Next “The Details?” step is more complicated. You determine the steps you must take in order to meet those numbers by that date. You know you can’t reach your goal in an hour, day or even one month. So you will need to determine what you will do and how you will do it consistently to complete your goal. You must break it down. An example: you have 200 days left in the year and need 2,000 new Friends and Followers. You need to add 10 a day for 200 days. How will you do it? You will need to say “I will reach my goal of 2,000 additional Friends and Followers by contacting 10 to 20 new contacts a day and request they become my Friend or Follower.” With that decided you must act.

I love the quiz; three frogs were sitting on a log and one decided to jump. How many frogs are sitting on the log? The answer is three. A decision without action has no results. In order to reach your goal you must act and do so in a continuous steady fashion. Jack Canfield, co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, calls it “sustained effort”. AndyAndrews, author of The Traveler’s Gift, The Butterfly Effect and The Final Summit said, “I persisted without exception.”  If Canfield or Andrews had made the decision and not moved on it we would not have these great works available to us today.

The only way to get nearer to your goal is to move toward it. Determine how much, by when and work out the details. THEN JUMP!