Why Set Goals

Background

What motivates us to do anything in life, how do we really know what we want, how do we know we have got there? The truth is that the vast majority of people on this planet are drifting from one day to the next with no clarity as to what is important to them and what they want out of life. There are those that will say I want to be rich, or have more time with the family, yet these are so generalised that they are little more than wishes.

Of those that have at least got an idea of where they want to head with their lives, who are already in the minority, only a fraction actually commit their goals to paper and regularly review them. Which leads us on to the topic of this article, why set goals?

Knowing What You Want

Tom Hopkins a master coach and sales trainer, said that setting goals is easy, it is knowing what you want and committing to it that is the problem. By determining what Brian Tracy terms your major definite purpose is, you have a barometer against which you can measure all your actions and determine whether it is helping you or hindering you in the pursuit of it.

If you don't know what you want, how will you know how to get it? The majority of people go through their lives stuck in a rat race, unprepared to commit to any goals for the fear that they may fail. One of the important reasons to set goals and go through a structured process in doing so is to actually understand what is important to you in life. This self actualisation can be very powerful and many a person has made major changes just by knowing for the first time in their life what they truly want.

As the saying from Alice in Wonderland says, if you don't know where you want to go then any path will do.

Goals Keep You On Track

It is often said that the only thing certain in life is death and taxes. Truth of the matter is that you can add set backs to this list too, virtually every day you will suffer some sort of setback, something that did not go according to plan or as well as you expected it to. Goals are the thing that keep you on course, that help you dust yourself down after a setback and go forward to achieve again. In so doing they help you achieve what you want far quicker than you would do otherwise.

Success Stories

Of the top executives in the Fortune 500, the majority practice the art of written goal setting. It is no surprise that these people have been driven and motivated to achieve vastly beyond what was thought capable of them. Indeed many of them got poor school reports saying they would not amount to anything. What they and many others have recognised is that to achieve success you have to carry on through failure, to stand firm and not deviate from where you are looking to head. Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement, as Tom Hopkins would say.

Goals Allow You To Measure Your Progress

You should have a mixture of short, medium and long term goals. Your long term goals are merely a culmination of your short and medium term goals, which are the milestones for you on your path to success. By effectively practising goal setting you have the ability to measure your progress against your short term goals - which you know achieving sets you on your way for your medium and long term goals. Being able to measure progress in this way will let you know if you are ahead of or behind the curve in what you are trying to achieve.

Goal Setting And MLMs

What is success for you, is it achieving a certain rank in your MLM system? Is it a certain income level?

Once you have established this, you can determine your activity levels, how many people would you need to sponsor, and would they need to sponsor and so on? How many customers would you each need and how much product would you need to sell as a team? In what time period do you need to make this happen?

Is this realistic, do you need to re-evaluate your goals? This is where you need to work closely with your sponsor - as success in MLMs is only achieved through duplication.

Once you have decided what is realistic in terms or achievement, you need to set yourself activity goals, as our friend Tom Hopkins says - productivity only follows after activity. Lets say you decide that you want to have reached a rung in the reward structure that requires you to have sponsored 6 people and have X in volume, you could set yourself activity goals such as:

Speak to 10 family, friends or people I know each month about the opportunity
Speak to 10 people I don't know each month about the opportunity
Invite 5 people each month to a seminar or home meeting
Sponsor 1 person each month
Teach that person to sponsor 1 person each month
Secure 2 new customers for my products each month

The above is just an example, but it shows how you define what you want, then you break it down to achievable activity goals. Its these bite size chunks that make it more achievable, as they say how do you eat an elephant - one bite at a time. Work with your sponsor to set your goals, read the articles on how to set goals and measure them closely with your sponsor.

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step - Confucious.