Do you know the difference between a goal and a pipe-dream?

Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines!

(Wish I could claim I came up with that, but I didn’t.)

Some say depending on the type of goal this is not necessarily true.  Personally I have found that doing stuff ‘by when’ is the only way things get done. 

But how do you figure out by when you’re going to do something like launch a business, a webseries or buy a house?

The bigger the goal, the more deadlines matter, and the more of them there are.  

When a goal is enormous, we need to keep moving towards it, like sharks. Sharks literally sink if they don’t swim. Sinking can happen when the planning hasn’t happened to make the journey as ‘paint by numbers’ an experience as possible.

As my coach likes to say: ‘planning is the highest form of self care’. That’s because it frees you to relax, exist and act in the moment, rather than stay forever stuck in the decision-zone, which is exhausting and often fruitless. 

Decisions made-in-advance enable you to move and create momentum. And guess what? You don’t have to empirically deduce that they’re right. Just decide that they are. Because no matter what, their outcomes will give you more information with which to adjust your strategy. 

So what is the strategy for planning a big goal? I recommend Barbara Sher‘s method of reverse engineering.  Start from the destination, and keep asking yourself what has to happen before that, and before that, until you get to tasks that you could accomplish today.

In fact, I teach workshops and courses on how to do that such as my upcoming Goal Setter to Goal Getter program, but basically, by breaking things down into tiny, granular actions you are able to keep the big goal within your sights, which keeps you from feeling as though you’re just doing ‘busy work’. That’s because, with the big goal constantly visible, the ‘busy work’, or incremental tasks become undeniably purposeful.

Try this: What is a big goal you’re working towards this year? Everyday, I invite you to write it down. Then write out your tasks for the day. If at least some of the tasks for day don’t correlate to the big goal, you’re not putting your energy where it needs to be.  You should always be able to connect 1-3 actions daily that are related to your big goal. 

If you do only that, I believe that you will intuit your way inevitably towards what you want…. 

But that can take a while. Back to those deadlines.

Deadlines turbo-charge your progress.  Once you’ve broken the big goal down via reverse engineering into smaller sub-goals (that are achieved via cumulative actions; include everything in the reverse planning), then it’s time to ‘do the math’….

How long will it take to execute each step? 

I recommend doubling that time.  Add all that up, and you have a working deadline for your big idea.

But don’t take my word for it, get it done by enrolling in my Goal Getter to Goal Setter program!