Two reasons people fail to achieve their goals & how to avoid them
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Good morning and happy Wednesday. I wanted to continue our conversation today about crushing your 2025 goals and how to do that.
At the end of this week, I will be releasing a bit of a guide that you can walk through to create a plan for yourself. But first, I want to outline two of the biggest reasons I see people not accomplish their goals, whether this is an individual goal, or if you're leading a team, team goals that need to happen. The two biggest mistakes I see people make are not being clear enough, And not creating some infrastructure some processes or steps to track your progress and really stay on track.
So let's talk about the first one. Getting really clear on your goals. I have worked with a lot of teams. I've been on teams Where I've seen goals like, in 2025, we want to develop leaders. Okay. So first of all, what the heck does that even mean?
How are you going to do that? Especially if you're leading a team or this is a goal for a department or a group. If you are not clear on what it means and how they are going to develop leaders this year, you're going to get to the end of the year and people are going to go, hmm, did we do that?
How did we, did we? You want to avoid that. So here's what you need to do. Let's say you're a team in the organization that has a hand in developing leaders and your goal is to develop the leaders in your organization this year.
Are you creating a leadership development program? Do you want to internally develop and promote at least three leaders? You need to get clear on what that means so that people on your team understand what they're working towards and can make actual progress towards that.
The same holds true if you are creating an individual goal for yourself. It's so easy to kick the can down the road if you haven't actually identified what that is.
An easy example is I want to get healthier in 2025. Okay, well what does that mean? Do you want to increase your fitness in 2025? Do you want to lose weight in 2025? What do you mean by that? So the more clear you can get, the higher your chances are of actually achieving it, because you know what you're working towards.
It's kind of like driving a car with no destination. If you're just driving, you don't really know if you've gotten to where you're going because you don't really know where you're going. So let's figure out where we're going so that way we can plan for how to get there, but also know when we've made it.
So the other biggest mistake I see people make is to not create or implement some processes or some ways of tracking how you're doing to your goals. So let's talk about for teams first. One of the easiest ways I see to do this is to integrate some sort of progress check into team meetings or one on ones or somehow continue to stay on top of how are we doing towards that?
Do we need help with it? Are we hitting any roadblocks? Where are we crushing it? And let's keep going. So staying on top of it and continually talking about it is going to help keep your eyes on the prize. And make sure that people know where they're going and how they're doing and what needs to be adjusted in order to meet the goal.
Same thing for you personally, how can you integrate this into your own processes where maybe weekly you are reviewing and giving yourself a bit of a status update, like, yeah, I'm really doing well at that. Or Oh no, I haven't actually started that.
I see so often that people do not integrate this very tiny step and then they get two months into a three month goal and they're like, Oh my gosh, I haven't even started it yet. So don't let that be you. And let's find some ways to really integrate some processes to stay on top of it.
So as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, at the end of this week, I will be releasing a quick guide. And to help walk you through and give you some space to outline what the goals are, break those things down, create a plan for staying on top of it so that way you and your team can be successful in 2025.