Now that the new year has arrived, it’s time to consider your 2024 goals. The reflection period of the past year, and its successes and shortcomings, is finally over, and it’s time to put that mental work toward the future and everything you want to accomplish this year. When setting goals, it’s essential to do so in a realistic and motivational way that puts you in the position to smash another year out of the park.
Envisioning Your Future
The first step in planning for any goal is figuring out what you want your future to look like and planning accordingly. You can do this in many ways. When it comes to business goals, creating a vision board can be a great way to help you visualize the objectives you want to accomplish in a physical form. You must picture where you are now, where you want to go, and address the steps you must take to get there. A vision board is a perfect way to establish what you want to achieve this year.
Break Down Your Goals
Whether you have a few or many goals for this year, it’s essential to break them down into digestible pieces. If you don’t do that, it could become overwhelming to keep up with the steps necessary to achieve it. You can break down your goals by creating graphs, charts, or other aids. For example, if one of your goals is to make more money, you can break that goal down by what you’ll have to do to increase revenue, what steps you’ll take to improve your bottom line, and attacking the smaller pieces of the goal one by one.
Hold Yourself Accountable
There is nothing more critical for success than accountability. If you set a goal to make more money through social media marketing, you must hold yourself to posting at the right times and as often as needed. You can’t let yourself off the hook because no one else will push you toward this year’s success harder than an accountable version of you will.
Focus on the SMARTER Goals Process
When choosing the right goals, you want to focus on ones that provide you with the best opportunity for success. These are SMARTER goals. These types of goals are:
Specific: Instead of setting a goal to use social media marketing more, establish how many posts you will dedicate to marketing using your socials each week or month.
Measurable: Once you have a specific goal, you can measure it easily. Using the social media marketing example, a measurable goal is your progress while following it.
Attainable: Setting your sights high is great, but you want to be reasonable with yourself. If you can’t post three times a day, don’t set a goal for that much.
Relevant: Returning to your vision board, is improving your financial success with social media marketing on there? You want your vision board and current goals to align in a relevant way.
Time-bound: Give yourself a time limit to reach your goal. Open-ended goals tend to get pushed down the priority list.
Exciting: You're more likely to follow through if you’re passionate about your goals. It’s that simple.
Routine-bound: Can you put posting on social media into your daily routine? If yes, then the goal is more likely to be adhered to.
Giving yourself a chance to reach your goals is as easy as ensuring that you follow the proper formula of setting the right goals, creating physical visuals to help keep you motivated, and holding yourself accountable. When you can do that, you can do anything.
Let's smash 2024 together!