3 Hacks for Baby-stepping Your Goals

Women set goals all.the.time.  And, so many of them are left behind.  Or shoved under the rug.  Or written in a journal to be kept secret forever.  Because we don’t reach them.  The intent is there, but we don’t DO the work.  The big reason we don’t?  They’re not broken down into baby-steps.  We try to make massive shifts in our progress, but we set ourselves up to fail by chunking the goal into impossibly hard tasks.  Here are some hacks to help you break your goals into smaller steps, and increase your success rate!

1.       Make the baby-Steps FAST.

Seriously, we don’t have time to do something for an HOUR each day.  We have too many obligations.  Instead of saying you’ll read that book for an hour, say you’ll read a chapter.  Or even a few pages.  Adding in a new activity in your day can really feel like you’re having to give other things up when it takes too long.  Small progress is better than NO progress.  If you’re going from “I don’t journal” to “I’m writing a book” maybe writing three morning pages isn’t manageable.  Start with a paragraph, or even a page.  Stop trying to overachieve when you’re starting at ground zero.  It’s hard, and you have a high chance of feeling discouraged, and giving up.

2.      Make the baby-steps things you are OK with doing.

If you’re starting something new, don’t make tasks for things you HATE to do.  Just don’t.  Because you’ll talk yourself out of them.  For example, if your goal is to eat 5 servings of vegetables each day, eating broccoli with your breakfast probably isn’t going to work when your normal breakfast is a Pop-Tart.  A compromise goal is more like eating a piece of toast with peanut butter instead of the pop-tart.  Meet yourself in the middle.  If you HATE doing live facebook videos, a compromise is to record yourself on regular video, and then post it.  You’re in business for yourself because you’re a creative, so I know coming up with creative solutions to problems is really going to work for you.  Stop doubting yourself.

3.      Make your baby-steps realistic.

This sounds arbitrary, but really it’s not.  It IS subjective, because you and I have different talents and abilities.  The point of making your goal realistic, is not to justify a smaller goal.  Your goal itself still needs to be a stretch, or you’re not growing yourself or your business.  Visualize this: your goal is to sign three new clients this month.  Depending on your conversion rates (yes, you need to know them, and if you don’t let’s chat!), you may decide to make 3 new contacts per day to achieve the goal.  Meeting three people each day for a month is so much easier than telling yourself to go meet 45 people in one weekend.  (Unless you’re heavily into new networking events – then you might actually achieve that…I’m an introvert, so that’s definitely NOT realistic for me.  I’d be exhausted 8 people in!).  The real key to this one is to know yourself.  Know what you can accomplish without setting yourself up to fail.

Now tell me, have you sat down to make yourself a baby-steps plan for reaching your goal?  If not, you should check out GoalSlayer.  You’ll learn EXACTLY how to make your goals happen, every time.