How To Set Smart Goals You Can Actually Achieve

With 2018 coming to an end, it’s time to learn how to set smart goals.

You can set goals throughout the entire year, but now is the perfect time to start for the new year if you haven’t yet. You don’t want to just set any kind of goal, but I like to do a set of what I call “SMART goals.”

What are SMART Goals?

SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. You want to be super specific with your goals. If your goal is to lose weight, well how much weight are you going to lose? 20 pounds? Are you going to lose 2 inches? What is the specific goal that you are looking to achieve and is it measurable and attainable? You want to make it something you can actually attain and you want them to be super relevant. Therefore they should line up with your vision, overall mission, goals in life, and talents. Figure out what you really want to achieve and then time bound. Putting a deadline on your goals is super important and will definitely help you get them done along the way. Setting your SMART goals and your end goal is just the destination. Then how you’re going to get there is your strategy, otherwise known as your GPS.

How To Set SMART GOALS

There are a number of tricks that you can use in your strategy. 1. Reflect. I like to reflect on the past year, the past quarter, and the past month. Whenever you’re looking at the time, you want to do a little bit of reflection. The key here to remember is it’s okay if you actually don’t hit everything on your list. Don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t achieve the goals you have planned. You might find that things might come up or that something is not as important anymore. This is where you recalculate your GPS. If you’re headed down one path and you realize that’s not the best path, don’t just stay on that path. Get off the path and go the way that you know is a quicker, faster, shorter – whatever way that’s going to end up getting you where you want to ultimately be. If you don’t reach all your goals in one time frame, add it to the next. Really see where you’re at with everything and what’s going on. 2. Go to God. I’m a firm believer that everything comes from the Lord. I believe that he has given us each individual talents, gifts, and a calling over our lives.  Really my entire business Fashion Angel Warrior, was birthed from a conversation with God. I downloaded from him my logo and everything, so that’s my take on things. If you are a believer, just ask God – he will reveal it to you. 3. Pay attention to the overall larger picture. What is the overall larger goal? If your overall larger goal is to lose weight, don’t put something on your goal list that doesn’t make sense. You want your goals to align with your personal vision, your overall vision, your overall calling – whatever that is. So, what’s the larger picture, and I write it down. After you’ve written down your larger overall goal – whatever that is like lose weight, start a business, all these types of things –  then you want to also start to segment your goals. 4. Segment your goals. You might have personal goals, business goals, and family goals. If you have different goals, keep them all in separate segments. Then from there, you want to start to break down your goals into even smaller segments. Let’s say your goal was to redesign your entire website or create a website. You can break that larger goal down into smaller, more attainable goals. Your first step might be to hire a website coach. Your second step might be to decide on what platform you want to host on. Then you might want to hire a web designer, design the layout for the website, do a photoshoot for the website, edit the photos, upload the photos. etc. There’s a number of different things – there’s a process that goes on to achieve that larger goal. Therefore, you want to break everything down into smaller goals so that those can be more attainable. You can try to hit one every single week so on and so forth. 5. Create deadlines. We already talked about things being time bound, so you definitely want to have deadlines with everything. A deadline will help you stay on track and not lose track of time.  Time will go and pass no matter what, so you want to have deadlines for everything. 6. Post it. How I said before, I love to write stuff down. I love to post it on the wall, and you should post it somewhere where you can see it. Put it on a Post-it note, put it on your desktop, on your laptop computer, whatever it is. That way you can see it in front of you every single day and you know what your goals are. 7. Reevaluate. Every month, quarter, and year, you need to reevaluate things. You definitely want to reevaluate where you are at, what you have been able to achieve so far, and what you still have left to achieve. That’s going to help you tremendously to review what you did so far. Are you at where you wanted to be? Are you not at where you wanted to be? I always say at the end of the day I may not be where I want to be, but at least I am not where I used to be, right?  Maybe you didn’t reach your goal for the month or maybe you didn’t achieve everything you wanted to achieve. However, you probably are at least still a little better off than you were in the beginning, so don’t beat yourself up too much. Just try to remember that you’re always going to be one step further. As long as you are taking one step every single day even if it’s just a small step, you will achieve your goals. 8. Reward yourself and throw a party. My favorite of all is to reward yourself and throw a party. You are not really going to throw a party, but you know you are going to have your own little party, right? You want to reward yourself – you worked really hard. Whatever that is for you, whether it’s a spa day or getting your hair and nails done. Those are my tips on how to set SMART goals. To achieve these goals at the end of the day though, you need to be productive. Thus, here are my top 10 productivity tools. I hope that you enjoy them!

Top 10 Productivity Secrets

1. Get in the zone. Dress the part and eliminate distractions. Don’t look around at what other people are doing and don’t look at your phone. Listen to the type of music that helps you focus and get excited. Whatever your thing is to get in the zone, do it because you definitely want to get in the zone. 2. The power of 90. I like to say, 90 minutes and 90 days. Studies have shown that your brain can only handle 90 minutes of information, so you want to work for 90 minutes straight. No interruptions, turn off the text, turn off the Facebook, turn off everything. Work for 90 minutes straight and then take a break and then work for another 90 minutes and take a break. If you set a timer on your phone, this is very helpful for this. Then the 90-day aspect is it typically takes 90 days for you to create a habit. So if you’re looking to do something different – you’re trying to lose weight, go to the gym, post on social media, write blog posts, whatever it is – it usually takes 90 days. Your goal should be to do it for 90 days straight and then reevaluate and see where you are at and see what’s going on. Give yourself that time, and that’s the power of 90. 3. Focus. Focus stands for follow one course until successful. You want to focus and stay on one path until you become successful. You don’t want you start something and then say “oh it’s not working, let me just stop this.” Everything is a game and you need to figure out the system. If something is not working, figure out why it’s not working – don’t just give up. You know quitting is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Whatever problem you have right now is temporary, and if you quit, you’re never going to be able to solve the problem. So don’t quit – stay in the game and I promise you will achieve your goals. 4. Plan your day ahead of time. My husband makes fun of me because I will not go to bed at the end of the day before planning my day for the following day. I even plan my week ahead of time on every Sunday because I’ve got crazy stuff going on. I cannot relax until I know my entire day for the following day is planned out, mapped out, and I got everything figured out. I always say if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, so keep that in mind – you definitely want to do that. 5. Know your strengths and weaknesses. There are probably some things you’re really good at and some things you’re probably not so good at and that’s fine. Understand what you’re really good at and what you’re not really good at because it will help you tremendously. For me, I’m not that good at designing websites. I know what I want and the layout, but I do not know how to write code and I’m not very technical. So creating a new website, I hired someone since it’s not a strength of mine. If you are trying to lose weight, you might want to hire a personal trainer. If you’re trying to start a business or a fashion line, you might want to hire a coach. You need to get help where you have your weaknesses, so know your strengths and weaknesses. 6. Do the hardest task at the beginning of the day. I would say either do the hardest thing first in the morning or do the easiest things first. If you do the hardest thing in the beginning of the day, once it’s done, it’s done. You feel so much better because you are like “Holy cow, that hard thing is finished and now I can do all the easy stuff,” right? So, do the hardest thing first and then you can do the easy stuff. The flip side of that is to do the opposite. Do the easiest thing first and save the hardest thing for later. The psychology with is that you’ll be able to check off more of your list if you do the easiest things first, which will make you feel more productive and help you be able to achieve more throughout your day. My challenge to you is to try both of them and see what works best for you. 7. Create a system. System stands for save yourself time, energy, and money. I love systems and live for systems. I create systems everywhere I go because systems save you time and money. Time and money are probably the most two valuable resources on the planet. Money at least you can make more of it, but time once it’s gone – it’s gone forever. You can’t go back in time, so you want to save it. You want to save your money and you want to save your time, so that’s why you need systems. One of the most important systems I can tell you that I have implemented is email templates. I probably send close to a hundred emails a day and have now started to also talk to text.  If anyone hasn’t done that yet just start doing it because you’ll love it. I talk to text for everything now, because it’s just so much easier. Of course you have to go back and make sure the spelling and all that stuff is correct, but if you talk pretty clear Siri will get it and she knows what she’s doing. Additionally, you should have email templates made for everything. I send a ton of emails every single day and the majority of them all have the same similar formats. Therefore, I’ve created email templates that I can just copy and paste into the body of an email. I keep them on the note section on my phone and on my computer, and they are synced right to my laptop and my phone. So, start creating templates and start saving certain things. If you send a text message that you often send to other people save it in your phone, that way you can just copy and paste it right in there. Start creating systems! 8. Be accountable. Whether you have a coach, best friend, a husband, boyfriend, or partner, be accountable to somebody. Tell them what your goals are and make them your accountability partner. I dare you to do this – whatever goals you don’t hit, you will pay them a $100. I guarantee you will hit all of your goals because nobody wants to pay $100, right? So tell your accountability partner that you’re going to pay them $100 for every goal you don’t hit. Give them the list of the goals, the dates, the due dates, quantify them, and let’s see what happens. Who’s up for the challenge? 9. Stay committed. Like I said before – just don’t quit. Quitting is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. If you stay committed, you will not fail. The only way to fail is to literally stop. Every failure usually leads to success, so I don’t know a single business owner that hasn’t failed. Usually the more times you fail, the more success you actually have. Think about that the next time you think you failed at something. Just think that means you’re one step closer to actually reaching your goals. 10. Pray. The last productivity tip is to pray. I would be nowhere without God, for God is everything to me. When I feel like I’m weak, tired, or exhausted, I go to God and he gives me the strength. If you are a believer, I definitely encourage you to go to God, go to the Lord, and he will provide everything for you. So those are my top 10 productivity goals and tips on how to set SMART goals! I hope that you liked it. And for weekly fashion biz tips, join our Fearless Fashionpreneur Facebook Page!

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