SMART Goals Are Specific

Welcome to the first work day of the first week of the first month of the first year of the new decade. 2011 is shaping up to be the best year for us and the reason I can say that is that we've set some goals that are really exctiting. With the new year comes the time to plan out the upcoming weeks, months, and years. Goal setting is something that needs to be done for the short term, medium term and long term. Time frames are important when you start planning massive action. Some of your goals are more immediate or short term goals while others are a little broader and far reaching long term goals. We encourage you to write them all down; big and small alike. There's a saying and I don't even know the source, because I've heard it put hundreds of ways by hundreds of people; "People who fail to plan are simply planning to fail."

We at Dream Outfitters like to set SMART goals - Goals that are:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Realistic
5. Timely

This week, I'll be tackling each one of these items and elaborating just a little bit so that it makes a lot more sense than just a snappy little acronym for goal setting; which means that today I'm going to get down and dirty with specificity and talk about making our goals very specific.

Everybody has goals whether they realize it or not. Every time we get a thought in our mind such as, "I need to buy some groceries", the thought is merely a desire, however, all of our desires are, in reality, goals. Whether we write them down or spend a lot of time dwelling on them or not, they are still considered goals. If you truly want to start designing a new life for yourself, or improve upon the great life that you're already living, you need to have goals. This is how we measure success. Success is measured, in most part, by the achievement of our goals.

The goal that we've set for ourselves in the previous paragraph is great. We know that we need to go and buy groceries, but that goal is a little vague. In order to get the absolute best results for the goal, we need to make it more specific. So how do we go about making it more specific? Easy... We start to ask ourselves questions about it. Questions that more clearly define what it is we really want to get out of the goal. For our example, we might ask the following questions:

• What store do we want to go to in order to buy our groceries?
• What specific items are we looking for? (this is an iterative process)

If we now begin narrow down our specific grocery items we'll see that each iteration gets us closer and closer to our true desires. Let's say we have a pretty short list:

• Milk
• Meat
• Potatoes

I'm from Minnesota originally, so this is primarily my diet (which I'll be improving this year by the way). We still have some narrowing down that needs to be done. We continue looping through this process of narrowing down until we've left nothing to chance. What kind of milk? There's buttermilk, whole milk, 2%, 1%, skim. And meat, well, we have pork, beef, fish, chicken and so on. Now we pretty much nailed milk down (except for possibly the size - Gallon, half-gallon, quart, pint), but the meat is still wide open. There are many different cuts of beef, many different species of fish, etc.. Potatoes too can be further narrowed down unless you're the type of person who only eats russet potatoes. So we go further and further, narrowing our originally vague concept of purchasing groceries until we have a very detailed list of items that we plan to pick up at the store we decided to shop at.

I realize that this was a fairly laborious way of getting at being specific about our goals, but I think that some of us have a tendency to leave our goals just a level or two too vague and this leads us to moments of decision making that could have been avoided had our goals been set up properly in the beginning. Sure we need to make decisions, but the best time to make those decisions is in the earliest possible planning stages, not when we're in action mode. Massive action requires clarity if its to be done efficiently. Keep your goals specific and we'll talk about the other areas of SMART goal setting later on this week.