The Key To Achieving Your Goals – Create An Inspiring Vision

How often do you spend your life fantasizing about the way things could be? 

You may picture sitting with a limoncello on the Italian Riviera or starting a family and moving into your dream home. You’ll likely spend hours of your day imagining exactly how the limoncello tastes or which color paint you’ll use on the walls of your dream home. 

But when it comes to some of our most important goals for work, academic, or personal life, many fail to take the same approach. 

Rather than imagining exactly how our fun new workout will look at the gym, we’ll simply say we ‘want to lose weight.’ Rather than planning to set a time aside to meditate every day, we’ll simply say we ‘want to be more mindful.’

Unfortunately, achieving a goal is challenging if you don’t have a clear vision of how the outcome looks or the steps you’ll take to get there. That’s why only 30% of the ⅕ of people who set goals actually succeed in meeting them. 

While setting goals in itself makes you more likely to achieve them, failing to create an inspiring vision is the missing part of the puzzle for guaranteed results.  

Here’s how you can enjoy greater success both inside and outside of the workplace using vision-driven goals. 

Create A Vision Before Writing Your Goals

Creating a vision before writing your goals is crucial because it helps you shape your goals and encourages buy-in from other key stakeholders. 

Imagine you’re trying to invigorate your team for a project in the workplace. You could simply say, ‘the purpose of this project is to make more money for the business.’ 

That statement is vague and doesn’t exactly excite or inspire your colleagues. 

Now imagine the same situation, but you replace the above statement by creating a vision. 

You encourage your colleagues to imagine a world in which the company increases its profits by 20% this year, allowing everybody in the business to have a bonus. 

Within this vision, your business works with some of the biggest clients in the industry and specializes in a range of services that help to maximize income generation. 

By creating an inspiring vision, not only have you got buy-in from your colleagues (who doesn’t want a bonus?), but you’ve also established the goals you need to meet for the vision to become a reality. 

You’ll need to attract some of your industry’s biggest clients and diversify your services to maximize your company’s income. You’ve used your vision to come up with some actionable goals. 

Once you’ve established your goals, you’ll need to write them using the CLEAR model. If you’re new to using this approach, here’s how it works. 

Related reading: Accomplish your Goals by Avoiding these 3 Common Mistakes

How To Write A CLEAR Goal 

The best way to write a goal you’ll actually stick to is with a CLEAR approach. You’ve heard of SMART goals, but there’s tons of information online about them. 

We prefer CLEAR. And no, we don’t just mean easy to understand. 

CLEAR stands for the following:

• Collaborative – Goals should encourage you to work together with others in a team.
• Limited – You should limit both the scope and duration of those goals to give yourself a clear remit. 
• Emotional – Your goal should feel emotionally important to yourself and those you work with. 
• Appreciable – Large goals should be broken down into smaller goals that can be accomplished more quickly and easily. 
• Refinable – While goals should have a key objective, give yourself permission to refine and adjust them as new data or circumstances arise. 

Working within a CLEAR structure ensures that your goals are reasonable, easy to tackle, and adjustable when necessary. 

Taking a flexible approach to your goals and understanding that success comes in many forms is vital. After all, very few of us manage projects that go by without at least a small hitch. The most successful people refine their approach as new information comes to light. 

Three Things You Can Do to Guarantee Success

Write It Down

People who write down their goals are 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to achieve them. The positive impact of writing down your goals has to do with how our brains work. 

If you just think about your goals, you only use your brain’s right hemisphere, the part responsible for imagination. If you write it down, you also tap into your left hemisphere, which is responsible for logic. 

This blend of imagination and logic can help you not only picture how the goals will look but clearly define the steps you must take to achieve them. Your brain works in perfect harmony to set you up for success. 

Share It

Sharing your goals with somebody helps to hold you accountable. If you only have yourself to answer to, you’re more likely to take a week off or skip necessary steps if you’re short on time. 

Sharing your professional goals with a higher-up at work has been shown to be especially effective. In fact, those who submit weekly accountability reports achieve 40% more than those who don’t. 

Not only can a workplace leader keep you accountable, but since you care what they think of you, your desire for them to see you as successful can light a fire that spurs you on. 

Coach Bill Schuffenhauer adds that these individuals not only offer guidance but also serve as consistent sources of motivation and encouragement. The key is to find someone positive, insightful, and genuinely invested in your success.

Report Your Progress Regularly

Keeping track of your steps toward your goals is paramount for long-term success. You can also use these reports to analyze what you’re doing right and what actions should be adjusted to maximize your chance of success. 

Define key metrics you’ll use to measure your progress and assign a trusted individual to report back to, whether that’s a friend, family member, or colleague in the workplace. 

It is also important to set quantifiable goals, according to coach Bill. By tracking progress through tangible metrics, you can keep yourself accountable and better equipped to sustain momentum even when the going gets tough. 

A Vision-Driven Approach For Real Results

By combining a CLEAR approach, a strong vision, and written confirmation of your goals, you can set yourself and those around you up for success.

Lost for inspiration?

Try creating a vision board or vision statement to transform your goals into a visual medium. Keep this visual medium near your workspace or in a prominent place inside your home to serve as a reminder of what you’re working toward. 

Then see where it takes you. You’ll be amazed how quickly everything seems to click into place once you’re moving forward with direction and purpose.

Happy goal-setting! 

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