When you set out to tackle a new project or embark on a journey of improvement, start on the right foot by setting SMART goals. SMART goal setting will help guide you toward success and further accomplishment.

Video Transcription

We’re all trying to accomplish things in our life. Maybe you want to improve your health by going to the gym, or you want to 10X your business’s sales. But we all struggle with the idea of setting goals that motivate and stretch because they may seem unrealistic or unclear. This is something I’ve struggled with in my business and personal life.

What I want to share with you today is this acronym that I learned—SMART.  It stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. When you look at your goals, whether it’s for your personal life or your business, you want to look at them through the lens of this acronym.

Are your goals specific? You want them to be crystal clear in what you’re trying to obtain.

Second, are your goals measurable? Vague isn’t going to work. If you want to grow your sales, define by how much.

You need your goals to be attainable. Be realistic, but at the same time, don’t go easy on yourself. Set a goal, and then set a stretch goal. You might set out to increase your sales by 50%; great! Now can you stretch that a bit to 60%? You can celebrate meeting your first goal, but why not use that momentum to go after that BHAG, that big hairy audacious goal?

Next, you want to make sure your goals are relevant. This is really a twofold criterion—goals that are relevant to your life and those that are relevant to your career. Operational goals will get you to the life you want to live. Goals relevant to your skill set, to your expertise, further your career.

For managers and leaders,  you want to set goals for your employees that are relevant to their skill set, to their expertise, so they can have complete ownership. The last thing you want to do is set a goal for someone to get a new title and promotion and all of a sudden they don’t have control over that goal because it’s not in their wheelhouse.

And then last but not least you want to set a goal that’s time-bound. You have to set a deadline to achieve your goal to create urgency for you. It’s always said that the fuel of creativity is procrastination. Once you put a deadline on something, it gets that urgency and allows you to reverse engineer how to proceed: to meet your goal in a year, you have to do X in a month, Y in a week, and Z in a day.

So that’s the SMART acronym. When you set your goals, design them to be specific, measurable, attainable relevant, and time-bound.

The takeaway

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