Goals that work
Five steps for building your 2025 plan of attack
“Ease is a bigger burden than progress.” 7k chief sales and marketing officer Blake Davis shared this sentiment during the Goal-Getter Workshop Dec. 7. 7k members know personal growth is a must for getting ahead, but there’s a right way to set yourself up for success when dreaming about the future.
“(People) think about goals, they have dreams, but they don’t really craft a plan. They don’t craft a strategy. And so whatever it is they have doesn’t stick,” said Ryan Chamberlin, 7k’s chairman of field leadership counsel who led the workshop.
For two hours, members walked through tried-and-true methods for making a solid plan for their 2025 goals. Here are a just a few of the highlights:
- Trust your gut. Don’t overthink things! When it comes to goal setting, trust what comes to mind first. “Whatever is on the forefront of someone’s mind is generally their most important goals,” Chamberlin said. He also cited a study where a test group who wrote down the three most important tasks that came to mind immediately identified the exact same most-important tasks after eight hours of consideration. Focus early and start tackling these goals.
- Identify your top five values. Values are your highest priorities—what matters most to you and the qualities you want to develop. Love, relationships, work, morality, integrity—the list goes on and will be unique to you. Then write a statement explaining how you are going to live each of those five values. Why write down your values early in the goal-setting process? Because you must hold those goals against your values to make sure they don’t conflict. Otherwise, you’re going to face a lot of inner turmoil as you try to accomplish goals that don’t resonate with you on a deep level.
- Divide your goals into short term and long term. A short-term goal takes less than 12 months to accomplish; a long-term goal exceeds that. Completing short-term goals will boost the stamina needed for long-term goals.
- Ask yourself who you spend your time with. Usually, we become a product of those we are around. “We want to be around people that stretch our thinking,” Chamberlin said. “And if we write big goals, but we hang out with small thinkers, guess what? My friends, our goals shrink to the environment that we’re in.”
The good news is each of us can be the person who lifts others to a higher plane. So consider yourself the leader. Assume the role of mentor and share your successes with others so they, too, can have hope for successfully accomplishing big goals.
- You’ve likely heard it before, but as CEO Jayson Arfmann summed up in the workshop, you’ve got to get those goals on paper for them to become reality. Success lies in “specific, measurable, and actionable goals. So picture where you want to be in one year, in five years, in 20 years, (and) break it down into actionable steps,” he said.
The time is now to put pen to paper and get cracking for 2025. The world is your oyster, and we believe in you. Happy New Year!
