Plan of Action vs. Goal

For many people, early January is always a time of goal setting. For many of those same people, by early February, those goals are set aside only to be tried and failed the next year. And, so the cycle continues.

I'd argue that the main reason people don't accomplish their goals is because of focusing too much on the goal itself, rather than the action plan to reach that goal. They simply focus on their goal which seems far away and with "plenty of time" to achieve until one day, the deadline is upon them and they feel like a 5 year old about to clean their bedroom. The goal seems unreachable and they don't know where to start.

Example: Steve may set the goal of getting up at 5:30am each morning to spend thirty minutes in quiet prayer with God. However, if Steve doesn't make a plan of action which might include setting the alarm clock for 5:20am (so he can hit the snooze button once), he will likely oversleep thus not reaching his goal. When this happens, people begin to focus on the goal and how they will "cram" the end result into their schedule. At that point, they may be "working in" thirty minutes of prayer, but, how likely is that thirty minutes to focus on and honor God?

Another example: Company ABC sets a first quarter sales goal of $500,000. Company ABC should then figure how many sales that breaks down to, the number of sales per sales rep that equals, and how many sales per week each rep would have to make to reach individual goals that the company goal would break down to. Furthermore, to keep the sales rep from focusing on that large individual goal, show them how many phone calls per day to make to sales leads to average one sale. Show them how many potential customers to drive out and personally meet to average one sale. On a company level, how many fliers must you mail to average one generated lead? Do it. How many leads will $5,000 in Internet marketing bring your company? Buy it.

Do your task list plan of action and pre-set only periodical times to compare your actual year-to-date numbers to your pacing for your goal. Other than those times DON'T FOCUS ON THE GOAL! Focus on the things to do each day. If you take care of those things, the goals will happen.

JC