Ambitious goal-setting is an essential piece of both personal and professional success.
“Making big goals means you’re playing full-out and striving to reach them. You’re pushing yourself to discover new limits and find new avenues for your potential. And that is an amazing zone to live your life in,” writes Natalie MacNeil in Conquer Your Year: The Ultimate Planner To Get More Done, Grow Your Business, and Achieve Your Dreams. I think about this question all the time: What zone do I want to live my life in?
MacNeil is the founder of She Takes On The World, a website that helps women build their own thriving businesses and establish influential personal brands.
The key? “You do need to learn how to break your massive dreams into doable, actionable micro-goals along the way.” (Read: She even has you mark off how many glasses of water you drank each day in the planner.) Now, that’s what we call living a Nutritious Life.
Here are three tips MacNeil shares to turn your shoot-for-the-moon desires into manageable goals you can actually meet, whether you’re just starting out as a personal trainer or health coach (and are thinking of signing up for The Nutrition School?!) or are simply trying to develop a few healthier habits.
3 Goal-Setting Tips
1. Set an intention word for your year.
MacNeil advises you choose one word (or a few) that spells out your overall intention for the year. If you need inspiration, “look through magazines and photos to find a word or intention that resonates with you.”
2. Map out big-picture goals.
Choose around five “Bigger Picture Goals” for your whole year to make your overall intention more clear. For each of those goals, identify “strategic milestones and actions” you’ll need to hit to accomplish the goal.
3. Organize your year into 12-week sprints.
Now, to set the actual actions that will lead you to those goals, organize your year into 12-week sprints, each of which is focused on achieving one of those goals. “Switching out of ‘do it all, all the time’ mode frees you up to fiercely focus on one major goal in your business per quarter,” MacNeil writes. So you’ll be sprinting all year, but only in one race at a time.
Quotes excerpted with permission from TarcherPerigee, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright Natalie MacNeil. 2016. Top Photo: Frontline Creative via Unsplash.