Here’s a SURPRISE new year post and podcast episode for you! I’ve been having a lot of conversations on Instagram about setting goals and the questions you all have about them. Today, I’m breaking down how to set AND HIT your goals so that you can have the best year ever! This is my tried and true goal-setting method, and I’m so pumped to share it with you.
How to Set AND HIT Your Goals | Have Your Best Year Ever!
Want to listen to the podcast version of this post? I’ve got you covered!
So I typically “hibernate” during the holiday season, but I just HAD to record this episode! Goal setting and actually hitting your goals is crucial when you’re running a business, not to mention in life. I’m sharing my four-step proven method on how to set and hit your goals in 2022. Plus, I’m breaking down some goals that I have for this year!
Step 1: Set SMART Goals
The first thing you need to do to set and hit your goals is to set SMART goals. I don’t mean the word “smart;” I mean the acronym!
The SMART in SMART goals stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
Specific
Be specific! Don’t say, “I want more subscribers on YouTube.” Express exactly how many new subscribers you want so you can actually measure that goal. “I want to exercise more” might become “I want to work out three times per week.”
Measurable
Setting measurable goals go hand-in-hand with setting specific goals. You want to be able to measure the progress toward hitting your goal. Make sure you’re setting a goal that is tangible and specific! “More engagement on Instagram” is really hard to measure. A measurable and specific goal for Instagram might be “I want 30% of my audience to see my Instagram stories.”
Attainable
This is where I see SO MANY people go wrong! I want you to set big goals, but I also want you to set goals that you can meet. If you have 100 subscribers on Youtube right now, setting a goal to get to 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year isn’t the most attainable in that time frame.
You can figure out what goals might be attainable for you based on past behavior. If you don’t have any past behavior to base your goals on, look at other people who have hit a similar goal to see what might be attainable for you.
Realistic
If you want to learn how to set and hit your goals, you’ve got to make sure you’re setting realistic goals. Let’s say you want to lose weight, and you say you want to lose 100 lbs this year. It is safe to lose 2 lbs per week, but that means it would take you 50 perfect weeks to lose 100 lbs. That might be theoretically attainable, but not realistic when you account for life! Maybe you back that number down to 80 lbs in a year to make it more realistic.
Time-Bound
Give yourself a time limit! Deadlines are crucial in goal-setting. Give yourself a deadline of December 31 to hit 100,000 YouTube subscribers, for example. That way, the goal isn’t open-ended and you have motivation to hit it on a certain date.
Step 2: Add a Why to your SMART Goals
Instead of SMART goals, they’re “SMARTY” goals. Get it?
Why do you want to hit this goal? Your why is personal, special and more important than some frivolous number.
If you want to make $100,000 this year, that’s great! But why? It can’t just be “because I do.” Give yourself the reason!
Let’s say my goal is to make $1,000,000 this year. If all of my SMART goals check out but I don’t have a reason, I’m probably not going to try as hard and be as motivated to hit that goal. My why could be that I want to buy a second home somewhere, add new team members, or expand my business. When you hit the root of your “why,” you can make progress much more easily!
Let’s talk about weight loss. After I had my second son, I lost a LOT of weight – around 75 or 80 lbs in one year. It was a SMART goal, but the real reason I did it was because of my WHY. We were going to Hawaii, and I was absolutely going to wear a bikini and look great. And since then, I’ve yet to find another “why” that drives me to that level of passion.
Most people in the world need a reason behind their goals to hit them, even if they set a SMART goal. So set SMARTY goals instead!
Step 3: Reverse-Engineer your goals (this is the KEY to actually hitting your goals!)
So, you’ve set up a great SMARTY goal… Now what? We’re talking about how to set AND HIT your goals, and this is the KEY to actually hitting that goal.
Reverse-engineer your goals.
Let’s say you want to make $100,000. Setting a SMARTY goal is great, but if you carry on about your normal business, you aren’t going to hit it! You have to think through what steps you need to take to meet that goal.
Maybe you’re planning for a launch in June that you know will bring in $50,000. Now, you need to figure out how to make $50,000 for the rest of the year! I need to make more than $4,445 per month the rest of the year to meet that goal. Now, figure out HOW to do that. Does that mean bringing on more clients or launching a new digital product? Set the steps you need to take each quarter, month, week, and day to get there!
Step 4: Do Check-Ins with Yourself!
In reverse-engineering your goals, you’re breaking down the income you want to make, weight you want to lose, or whatever else into monthly increments. So do monthly check-ins with yourself to see your progress toward that goal!
How much money did I earn this month? What did I do to get there? What could I do better next month?
If you want to hit 5,000 new subscribers per month, check in at the end of each month and see where you’re at with that goal. Where did these subscribers come from? Which videos did best, and can I make more of those? Don’t just check in on progress – be strategic about reflecting and figuring out the best next steps.
Sharing some of my goals for 2022!
My income goal this year, which I won’t share specifically, is rooted in that SMARTY framework. I want to be able to sustain my lifestyle, pay my team, give myself and my team a raise. I also want to substantially contribute to paying off our debt and buying a second home that we can use as a short-term rental.
Like every year, I have “lose weight” on my goal list. I want to lose about 40 lbs, so I have broken that down into smaller goals. By March, I want to lose a certain amount of weight because I'm going to speak at Social Media Marketing World and I want to look and feel my best!
I want to hit 300,000 YouTube subscribers this year! You may look at my channel and say “woah, but you only have 120,000 subscribers and haven’t grown much this past year.” Both of those things are true! That’s a super big goal, but it is based in realism. I just have to break it down into smaller goals. I’m going to produce more videos this year and listen to what my audience really wants. And if this goal doesn’t work out, I have the ability to adjust it.
This year, I want to read 15 books. Which might sound silly if you’re the kind of person who wants to read a book per week, but this is a goal for me! I listen to audiobooks, and I used to hit that goal easily because I’d listen to books while I was traveling. Since COVID hit, it’s been harder for me to do that. So that goal isn’t pushing myself a ton, but it is a goal that I have!
I want to be on 25 podcasts this year! I haven’t focused on being a guest on other podcasts, and I’m excited to push myself here. Being a guest on another podcast grows my audience, which will help grow my income – that’s my big WHY!
I hope that this was helpful in learning how to set and hit your goals! I encourage you to go back and look at the goals you’ve already set to see how they fit into this framework.
