 There's so much information out there about setting goals. Today I'm going to switch it up and give you some things you can do to follow through and achieve your goals. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step for becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. If you're watching this you've probably set a goal or two for yourself lately. Today I'm going to give you four tips on how to follow through and smash through those goals so you can achieve them and move on to even bigger and better things. And stay tuned to the end I'm going to give you a link where you can download the goal tracking spreadsheet I use in this video and as a bonus you can also download our free leadership development plan and workbook and that'll help you set your goals for the next two, five and ten years and make a plan to achieve all those goals you've got for your career. One of the really cool things that happens as we grow as leaders is that we start to set goals for ourselves and for our team and this can be a little bit of a learning experience because once we start becoming the one who sets the goals we don't have anyone checking up on us or chasing us to make sure those goals are followed through on and achieved. I ran into this in the Air Force as I started to grow in more responsibility and have more people working for me in the Air Force they were looking to me for guidance on how to go achieve what they were working on and I was the one setting the goals and trying to organize everyone to go achieve those goals and no one was really chasing or checking up on me to do that. I also ran into that when I was starting my own business and I had this goal to write this business plan and get it done but no one else was looking for it was just something I thought was a good idea to do so I had to figure out a way to get that business plan done without anyone chasing me or checking up on me. So today I'm going to give you four tips once you've got your goal set once you've got an idea of what you want to go achieve these four tips are going to help you follow through build some tools and systems and get to those goals achieve them and smash right through them so you can go on to even bigger and better things. So tip one is just a little bit of review and that's to have well written goals and when I talk with people about setting their goals and writing their goals down I like to make sure they have three things that they're clear they're measurable and achievable and I won't go into all the details of what that means I've got another video that I did a long long time ago so you can go watch that to get really the details on what clear measurable and achievable mean but don't laugh it don't laugh at my video it's one of the very first ones I did so please go watch the video but please be kind as well and there's a lot of different things out there people talk about smart goals and all kinds of other methods to achieve goals but I like the idea of clear measurable achievable it's simple it's easy to remember and if you've made your goals clear measurable and achievable it'll help as you start to build tools and systems and start to track your goals which are some of the key components of achieving them. Next you've got to build tools and systems that are that are going to help you achieve that goal in the case of my business plan a couple of years ago when I was writing that if I had just said well I'm going to work on the business plan whenever I feel like working on it or when I you know whenever I have time it probably never would have gotten done so I built a little system for myself I made a little contract with myself where I said okay every night after dinner after dinner I like to have a cup of coffee at night if it's not too late every night after dinner when I have my cup of coffee I'm going to make my cup of coffee I'm going to go take it upstairs to the office and I'm going to sit down and I'm going to work on the business plan for an hour it doesn't matter how much I get done it doesn't matter if any of that work was productive it doesn't matter if I decide I'm going to throw that all out the next night when I work on it but that was this contract that was the system I put in place I made a contract with myself that four nights a week Monday through Thursday after I got home from work did my run had dinner and was having my cup of coffee for the evening I would work for at least an hour on that business plan and that finally got that business plan done and I actually knocked it out in just a couple of weeks just working an hour a night and there were a lot of nights that I would go oh I'm really on to something here I'm going to work for a little longer so when you're when you're trying to achieve a goal once you've got your well written goals you've got to build those tools and systems that are going to keep you focused on what you're going to do for me that was the I'm going to dedicate an hour a day for you it might be a whole different set of things but you've got to figure out what works for you and if something's not working if you've tried a tool or a system for a little while for a couple of weeks and it's not working don't be afraid to reevaluate maybe throw that out and try a new tool or system that's going to help you get to your goals tip number three is you've got to track your goals everyone talks about this everyone hears about it we all know we need to do it but it's one of the things that often doesn't get done and tracking your goals doesn't need to be elaborate it just needs to be appropriate for what you're trying to do so rather than get into a whole long talking to you and speculating on what you could do to track your goals I'm going to show you what I'm doing for tracking my goals this year one of my goals this year is to expand my social media audience so I built a little spreadsheet to do that so I'm going to go over the computer right here and I'm going to show you what I've been doing and what I've been working on over the last few months to track that goal so like I said one of my goals this year was to expand my social media audience so that I could reach more of you guys and hopefully help out more people so what I've done here is I built a spreadsheet that tracks a whole bunch of different things and I'm tracking quite a few things and tracking things on different platforms and I won't go through all these numbers because that's really not important but what's important is I'm tracking the number of subscribers on my email list I'm tracking some of my youtube statistics what I'm going to show you here just because it's fresh in my mind because I did this one this morning is what I'm tracking on LinkedIn and so what I'm tracking on LinkedIn because I found some data some analytics on LinkedIn and that's that's one of the things you want to do you want to make it easy to do this you want to make it easy to do this tracking so if you can find this data out there already like in this case of social media this is already on the social media platforms I'm just bringing it together to kind of create a snapshot so I can look at it all at once and see how I'm doing I'm not going out and really doing research and collecting data and doing all that kind of thing your goal may require you to do that but if you can find the data somewhere go ahead and get that data and pull it in and then do some some of your own analysis and draw your own conclusions from it but you don't need to reinvent the wheel if someone's already collecting the data out there now the thing I will say is if you're using other people's data very rarely is there a one to one correlation between the data that's collected out there and the question you're trying to answer the goal you're trying to achieve so you may have to pull in different sources of data and you may have to do some analysis and make some assumptions on what it all means but try to make your data collection easy when you're tracking your goals and if you have to go collect your own data again build a tool and system and try to make that easy whether it's writing things down in your journal building a spreadsheet where you're tracking some you know some if you're how many push-ups you're doing every day or something like that but try to make this as easy as possible and see that you don't have to be spending a lot of your time working in the spreadsheet or whatever it is so looking at what I'm doing with LinkedIn I found three three analytic pieces of data on my company page that I thought were pretty useful and I was able to go back and they had this data going back for six months so that was helpful to me because I started some of the rest of these back at the beginning of the year and so having that data going back six months I'm actually able now to go populate this all the way back to the beginning of the year and see how I did your year year long even though I wasn't actually tracking this until just really this morning so I'm looking at a desired monthly impressions growth of 10% a desired monthly engagement growth of 10% and a desired monthly follower growth of 5% so those are my goals those are clear they're measurable and they're achievable right so what I've done rather than look at a bunch of numbers and you can if you want but that's not really what we're after so what I've done is I've created a projected line I've created a graph that follows the projected so starting where I started at the beginning of the year or December of last year and growing 10% a month this gray line shows if I grew at just that 10% a month where my followers would be the yellow line and you see how that tracks that in the beginning of the first month takes the actual of what the last month was and then actually multiplies by that that by 10% and you see as far as it came to LinkedIn reach I actually was exceeding that fit that 10% goal by a lot for the first few months like I said you're welcome to have this spreadsheet I'll put a link so you can download it but again this doesn't need to be complicated it doesn't need to be time consuming you want to try to make this as easy as possible for you when you're tracking your goals and what you want and that's why graphs are great because if you just plug in the data maybe once a month that's what I do with this is I go in at the end of every month I plug in my social media data from all my different platform analytics I go plug it in and I can look really well so how am I doing let me look for an example in here yeah so here is an example on my Facebook reach every month and I use a metric that's easy to pull down there so it's not exactly the whole month but on my Facebook reach what I what you see is my actual was below the goal for April but it's still well above that projection if it had just grown by I think it's 15% I was trying to go reach on Facebook every month so you can see I'm still well exceeding my what my goal for the year would have been projected but I'm not you know I'm not doing as well as I could and what's what's going to be interesting about all this is I'm going to reevaluate this probably after June I'm going to reevaluate this and you see I've got some kind of broken formulas here in the spreadsheet that will tell me what my growth rate was over each part of the year but at the end of the year that will really tell me when all this is populated this will tell me what my average monthly growth was and if my goal was realistic or not or maybe I shot too high so that brings us to tip number four assess and adjust you saw all the things I'm doing all the things I'm tracking and like I said it looks complicated but it's really not I've tried to make it as easy as possible for myself and for you to follow in this video so assess and adjust like I said at the end of the year what I'll do is I'll assess was 10% monthly growth for LinkedIn for my LinkedIn reach my LinkedIn engagement and 5% growth from my followers was that a realistic goal did I achieve that goal well maybe that based on what I'm doing right now to try to grow my audience the actions I'm taking to grow my audience maybe that goal was too high and those are the things I'm doing I'm assessing monthly and I'll assess at the end of the year what changes do I need to make if I want to make that 10% growth goal every month so that's the that's the final tip I have for you is assess and adjust and that doesn't mean adjust your goal it means adjust you maybe you do need to adjust your goal maybe that goal was way too lofty right and that's okay but what it really means is adjust your actions and that can be a little bit of an iterative process take some new actions try to in my case try to do a little more posting post a few more groups so I can get more reach and more followers on my LinkedIn depending on what your goals are it might be you know take some different actions or up the level of intensity on your actions so assess and adjust not just your goals not don't don't go changing your goals adjust your actions on the steps you're taking to get there so there are your four tips for following through on your goals and being able to smash right through them so you can get on to even bigger and better goals later on remember it's important to make sure that your goals are well written that clear measurable and achievable have a plan build tools and systems that help you follow through on those goals try to make your life easy try to set yourself up for success don't just leave it to chance that you be able to make your goals or not and then track them so that you can see if the tools and systems you built are working and once you've tracking them after you've been doing that for a little bit of time and I don't think I mentioned this in the tracking part don't look at this stuff every day look at it on a regular interval and that's important but don't look at it every day because it'll make you crazy it's like looking at your stock market portfolio every day right it's going to drive you nuts watching what's going on so track it don't look at it every day but track it and then as you start to see the trends in what's happening assess and adjust was your goal too lofty maybe maybe not what actions can you take what adjustments can you make in the things that you do in order to achieve those goals and maybe meet those numbers if you're not and maybe you're putting too much effort into one area as you saw there sometimes you're you're blowing a goal out of the water and another one is is coming in low maybe you just need to adjust to where you're putting your efforts instead of making radical changes to your goals or your life plan if you found this helpful please like comment and share it with a friend or co-worker click on that link below actually there's two links below this week you can get that goal tracking spreadsheet and use that as much as you want put in your own goals there you're welcome to have that and we've also got the link to our free leadership development plan workbook and again that'll help you set your goals for the next two five and ten years for your career and now you've got the workbook and you'll have a you'll have a spreadsheet that'll help you track those goals all you've got to do is just kind of change some of the words and plug in some of the numbers for your goals if you have any business or leadership questions give us a comment here we love to hear from you or email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com evilgeniusleadership.com is also where you can find out about our coaching and training programs so if you want to work with us in a little more one-on-one capacity get a little help with your leadership style and your leadership skills contact us there and we'll set you up with a free consultation thanks for watching today I really appreciate it and remember the future is out there lead the way