How to Set Yourself Up to Successfully Achieve Your Goals

With a new year comes new goals and plans to take your business to the next level. In this episode, Crista Grasso shares the most important thing you can create in your business to effectively achieve the results you want. You'll also learn about the most common mistakes people make that keep them from crushing their goals, and you'll be given insight to the 3 things you need to say 'no' to in order to set your business up for success this year.

In this episode, I discuss:

• Two different places you may be with your goals 
• Which are you?
• Root Causes of not achieving your goals
• Why you need to 'Or' instead of 'And'
• Determining what to let go of
• Committing to your goals
• What to do next

Tune into Episode 3 of the Lean Out Your Business Podcast or keep reading below.

The Most Important Thing You Can Create In Your Business

When you want to take your business to the next level and achieve your goals, the most important thing you can create is space.  As you built out your plans and set your goals for 2021, I'm sure that you took a good look at what some of those strategic things were that you wanted to be working on, and that you wanted to add to your plate to help you grow and scale your business. 

As we're now 1 month into the new year, you're going to be in one of two places, crushing it and on track to achieve your goals, or overwhelmed and at risk of achieving your goals.

Let's dive into both scenarios to evaluate where you're at and explore how you can make sure that you are setting yourself up for success so that you can achieve the results that you want and scale your business. 

Crushing It Versus At Risk

Scenario A: Crushing Your Goals:  If you're in scenario A, you are crushing it when it comes to your goals and your sales and growth targets.

You already are starting to see some big wins this quarter. Things are going according to plan and you've got a lot of confidence that you're going to be able to continue to achieve your goals and targets before the 90 days is up.

Most importantly, you're able to do it within the time that you have allocated to your business.  This means you are not overworking, you're not overwhelmed, and you're not taking time away from those other non-business things that are important to you - whether that's self-care or self-development, or family or friends, or community, or whatever those specific things are to you. When you look at what you consider balance or alignment between your life and business, you have got that. 

If you're in this scenario, you are totally rocking it and you want to keep on doing what you're doing!  Keep reading for some tips that will help set you up for success for your next 90-day period, as well as give you a little bit more space in this 90-day period in case anything unexpected happens.

Scenario B: Goals At Risk:

If you're more in Scenario B, and this is the one that a lot of people find themselves in, you might be in a place where you're recognizing that you over committed yourself, and there's no way to achieve your goals and your sales and growth targets without putting in a lot of extra effort. 

At this point, you are likely taking away from those non-business activities that are important to you and sacrificing your personal time to double down and try to hit the goals that you've set or to try to deliver the projects and the marketing campaigns and those things that you said you were going to focus on for these 90 days. 

You may even be in a place where you're recognizing that even with the extra hours and the extra work that you and your team are putting in that your goals and targets are simply not going to be feasible.

If you're currently in scenario B, don't feel bad or allow yourself to dwell in the coulda, woulda, shoulda's.  Simply recognize where you're at and keep reading for some tips to help you achieve your goals and get the important things done that are going to help you grow and scale your business. 

Where are you currently?

Which scenario are you currently aligned to? 

Are things right on track and with a good amount of balance, or do you feel like you're overworked, overwhelmed, and not quite sure you're going to hit your goals or if the goals are even possible at this point?  You may find that your goals and targets might not have been super feasible in the first place upon further reflection. 

Root Causes of Not Achieving Your Goals

It can help to understand why far more people end up in Scenario B instead of Scenario A. The first reason is a lot of times people simply aren't very realistic when it comes to planning. They don't know what it's going to take to deliver something. 

When you think about creating a plan, there's three different categories. 

1. There are the things that are known. Those are things that are relatively easy to plan for. 
2. Then there are known unknowns. You don't know something, but you're smart enough or skilled enough, or have done enough research to know that you don't know it.  Those are things that you can usually build some sort of buffer in for.  For example, you plan for a little extra time because you know that you've got some things to learn, or some things may go a little different than you planned.
3. The third category is unknown unknowns. The nature of those is you simply can't know what they are because they're unknown. Those are the ones that usually get people and cause their goals to be unattainable and are one of the root causes of a plan not being realistic. You always want to create space in your plans so that you can account for unknown unknowns and not over-commit yourself. 

"People simply aren't very realistic when it comes to planning." - Crista Grasso Click to Tweet 

In addition to not accounting for unknown unknowns, another root cause of not achieving your goals is not creating the space that you need to in order to take on something new. 

When you want to do new things in your business, and you're thinking about all the ways that you want to grow, it's an exciting place full of possibility and it is easy to get caught up in the new without thinking about what you already have committed to in your schedule.  

Create The Space That You Need in Your Schedule

It can be hard to let go of what you're doing, but it's essential that you let go of something anytime you're adding something new if you want to have a lean business. That's what helps you avoid that overwork, overwhelm and burnout. It's what sets you up for success.

Let's say you want to work a 40 hour week. You would only plan for around 30 hours to give yourself some space for the unknown unknowns. If you are adding something new that would exceed 30 hours, you need to take something else away. It becomes an 'or' - this 'or' that, not this 'and' that. That's important because if you don't, you're adding more and more to your plate or more and more to your team's plate and this will keep you from consistently achieving your goals and can eventually lead to burn out. 

Three Things To Say No To

There are three types of things that you're going to want to be removing or saying no to in order to create the space for the new thing that you want to add and say yes to. 

1. The first one is the easiest and that's the things that aren't working. 

You should regularly be looking at your business and reviewing all the things that you're investing your time, energy and money into to determine:

• Which are the ones that are not giving you a good enough return?
• Which are the ones that simply are no longer serving you, even if at one point in time they worked?
• When you think about that next level of growth and where you're trying to take your business in 2021, which are no longer in alignment and are more of a legacy thing that it's time to move on from or evolve?

Those are the easiest ones to recognize and to say, “This has to go, it's not working.” 

2. The second one is something that's working, but not in alignment with your next level of business growth.

If it helped get you to where you are today but it won't help you get to where you want to be, it's something you should let go. 

3. The third one is saying no to something that is working in your business but you choose to say no to it because the new thing that you want to do is more important. 

This can be the most difficult and challenging to do but you have to make those trade-offs in business all the time. If you want to respect the boundaries that you set and work within the time constraints that you set, the only way to do that and to have that true sustainable success is to fiercely protect your time. 

Letting Go

At this point, you've hopefully figured out what you're letting go which means you now need to commit to letting them go.  

It's not usually as simple as snapping your fingers and saying, “Okay, never doing that again.”  You're going to have to figure how to phase something out.

If you're doing any automation, you're going to have to take the time to automate it. If you're delegating something, you're going to have to get somebody trained up for it. 

You do want to plan for the transition and the phasing out of those things that you are getting rid of to create the space that you need. 

Takeaways

Let's talk about your takeaways and circle back to our two scenarios.

If you were in Scenario A and you're crushing it... you're hitting your goals, everything's going according to plan, you've got some nice balance going on, you're not overworking, and you're not overwhelmed... keep that going. 

You can leverage the techniques above for planning for your next 90 days, or making sure that when you look at the entire year, you have enough space carved out.

You may also find that you have no wiggle room in your schedule whatsoever and you are at max capacity, so if anything unexpected comes up, something's going to have to slide or you're going to end up in that place of working more than you'd like to. Quite often, that's the case. 

If that is true for you, go in and look at a couple things that you can free up to give yourself a little bit of buffer and a little bit of breathing room so that you continue to be on track and you continue to crush your goals and your sales and growth targets. 

If you were in Scenario B and you are realizing that you're not on track to hit your goals at all, or you only are if you overwork, or your team ends up putting in a whole lot of extra hours, then this becomes a little bit more of a timely activity. 

You're going to want to go in and identify what you can let go of.  When you think about that transition time, you're going to have to be realistic about it. You may end up having to slide your current goals into the following 90 days, or you may have to put in a little bit of extra time in order to keep things moving. 

If you do that, do that, knowing that you're investing the time now to set yourself up for success for each 90 days going forward and acknowledge that you're putting extra in to create the space so that you have it for the rest of 2021. 

While you don't want to consistently be putting in extra time, sometimes you do in the short-term to gain long-term impact and benefit and you can ultimately hit your goals and sales and growth targets for the year even if you don't hit them for the quarter. 

How will you be creating space to set yourself up for successfully achieving your goals this year?