There’s a lot to be said about getting specific when it comes to your goals. Having specific goals, and a specific plan to meet them, only increases your chances of reaching them. By reaching these goals, you can begin living out your mission.
Once you learn to specify your goals, the simple act of tracking your progress may be helpful enough to ensure you hit these specific goals without additional effort.
In the business world, organizations in the habit of tracking their metrics regularly double their chances of meeting their goals. Research has also shown that simply setting a goal and tracking progress towards it can help a business grow up to 30 percent faster than businesses that don’t track metrics at all.
This goal-setting and tracking doesn’t have to be complicated either. There’s actually a simple way to start breaking it down. Let’s take a look.
How to Identify your Mission Categories
Getting more specific with how you’re going to achieve your goals is going to help you prevent overwhelm and work more effectively. You’ll want to start by dividing your life into different parts. At Arootah, we usually identify these parts as Personal, Professional, and Business.
You can then divide these parts into different areas of your life. You might find yourself opting for areas such as health, family, career, growth, technology, and leadership.
Now it’s time to divide these areas of your life down further into categories. Take a look at what’s important to you in each of these areas. It may look something like this:
Health
- Exercise
- Nutrition
- Medical
Career
- Training
- Certifications
- Job
- Networking
Family
- Kids
- Vacations
- Date nights
Leadership
- Education
- Networking
Dividing these areas into categories helps give you a more specific view of your life. It will allow you to focus on one goal at a time, while always keeping one eye on the big picture.
Divide These into Subcategories
If you’re able to do so, break down the categories further into subcategories. Let’s take the category of health for example:
Health
- Exercise
- Cardio
- Weightlifting
- Walking
- Stretching
- Nutrition
- Protein
- Vegetables
- Limiting sugar
- Supplements
- Medical
- Doctor’s appointments
- Chiropractor
Now that you have an idea of which subcategories you’re responsible for, you can set measurable and realistic goals for each of them. If your value is simply to “take care of your health,” you’re less likely to feel overwhelmed by the process. You’ve broken it down enough to know what you need to do and now you simply need to treat the subcategories as action items.
Breaking categories into subcategories also makes it easier for you to live out your mission statement . You can specifically plan how you want to show up to each area right down to the subcategory and its action items in accordance with your values and mission statement.
Let’s say you’ve committed to the following excerpted mission statement in the area of health:
“…to steward my health, so I can live my life to the fullest.”
If living life to the fullest is important to you, you’re going to set goals within each of your categories that help you align with that mission. Your action pieces for each category and subcategory may look something like this:
Health
- Exercise
- Cardio: Train diligently to be able to run a full marathon within the next two years.
- Weightlifting: Weight lift three times a week to build and preserve muscle mass.
- Walking: Walk to lunch every day instead of driving. Take the stairs instead of the elevator every day.
- Stretching: Stretch for five to 10 minutes after every workout to prevent injury and maintain a full range of motion.
Ensure that each goal you set within your subcategories aligns with your mission: to live life to its fullest potential. You do this by creating goals that are challenging (such as running a marathon) but sustainable over long periods of time (such as stretching after every workout.)
All the goals you’ve set for your subcategories are simple enough. However, it’s making the goals simple and measurable that really ensures you’ll be achieving your mission.
Set SMART Goals that Align with your Mission
As you’re setting your specific goals in each of your subcategories, it is important to make these goals SMART. Here’s a brief overview of what a SMART goal includes:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
If you examine the exercise category above, you may notice that each of the subcategories aligns with the SMART goal format. By the end of the specific timeframe, you should be able to easily determine whether or not you’ve hit your goal.
This is useful because breaking something like a mission statement down to specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals isn’t always crystal clear at first. It may take some strategy on your part, but the payoff of meeting your goals is well worth it.
READ: The Success Formula You Need For Results
The Bottom Line
There’s a lot to be said about getting specific when it comes to your goals. Having specific goals, and a specific plan to meet them, only increases your chances of reaching them. By reaching these goals, you can begin living out your mission.
When you break your life down into smaller categories and assign a SMART goal to each subcategory, you can easily outline the path you’ll need to take to meet your goals. After that, all it takes is consistent work toward your goals to begin living out your mission statement.
We want you to be successful in living out your mission. If you need help breaking down your plan for success, grab a copy of our free eBook, The 10 Step Arootah Success Formula.
Sources:
https://www.liveplan.com/blog/tracking-metrics-makes-you-2x-more-likely-to-reach-your-goals/