Achieving you Dreams - Planning Your Course of Action
Creating and defining your SMART goal is important. But you don’t just stop there. If you do, then who’s to say your goal is actually smart?
A SMART goal is accompanied by a smart action plan. An action plan that doesn’t stop at 2 sentences or a single paragraph. Instead, you need an action plan that will outline all the major steps you need to take so you can get to your goals, your destination, your point B.
If you don’t want to get lost on your journey, you need a solid plan. It’s going to be your roadmap to success.
A sense of direction
Imagine for a moment you’re going away on a road trip to a destination far, far away. Say, a thousand miles away. You’re holding a map in your hands. You circle your current location, and you draw a second circle for your destination.
Then you connect the two circles. But you don’t just draw a straight line. What you do instead is you look for the closest distance between the two circles because there’s probably more than one way to get to your destination.
You choose a good route – one that goes through highways instead of back roads. You put a star next to each major city or town you’re going to be passing through. You’ll probably spend the night there.
Planning a 1,000-mile road trip is the same as planning your path to success. You can’t just say you know the general direction of your destination. You need to plan ahead if you want to reach your destination faster. If you don’t plan the details, you’ll be wasting days on the road.
It’s all about the details
Success is a lot of work, isn’t it? First, you have to define a goal that meets the SMART criteria. Then you have to create a detailed action plan that will show you exactly how you can get from point A to point B, a thousand miles away.
Most people won’t have the patience to do all these steps. They’d think doing all this planning is silly and a waste of their time. They’ll think, “I already know where I’m going. That’s all I need to know.” So, they’ll skip the planning part, jump into their cars andgo on their thousand-mile road trip.
Funny thing is several miles later you’ll see them by the side of the road. Their cars have broken down (nope, they didn’t check if their cars could actually survive the long journey) or they’ve run of fuel. You, on the other hand, will be happily driving along until you get to your destination. Your thorough planning has paid off!
Now, your dreams and your goals need to be planned out the same way. You can start by breaking down your main goal into smaller chunks. If you’ve given yourself 10 years to achieve your goals, then you need to break it down into 1-year goals, 2-year goals, and so on.
By the end of the first year, you should have accomplished milestone 1. By the end of the second year, you should have achieved milestone 2, so on and so forth.
While annual goals are great, they’re still a little too big to be easily accomplished. So, you need to break your goals down into weekly or monthly goals, keeping in mind what you need to achieve by the end of the year.
It’s much easier to tick off a daily or weekly to-do list than a yearly to-do list. When you’re crossing items off your list, you feel a rush of satisfaction. You feel productive. You feel proud of yourself.
If you don’t break your big goals into smaller, easy-to-achieve mini-goals, you may lose motivation. You’d feel like you’re not taking enough action. Your fears and insecurities will start creeping in again, and you could potentially undo all the hard work you’ve put in so far.
