The 66-Day Challenge is officially complete! Congratulations, how does it feel? Feels good, right? That shiny new habit took some work, but now it’s making life a lot easier.
As we approach the New Year, goal setting becomes more of a focus. Achieving those goals usually requires adopting new habits to make them happen. Now that you have the tools and experience needed to form good habits there’s no reason to stop just because the Challenge is over.
This is the perfect opportunity to harness the momentum and launch your own personal 66-Day Challenge to start setting goals for all facets of your life. After two more months of building on your good habits and creating new ones, you’ll be well on your way to big changes in the year ahead.
Don’t worry, we’re not leaving you high and dry. The information below will help you kick start your personal 66-Day Challenge that’s centered on reaching your long-term goals.
Reach Future Goals by Goal Setting to the Now
Before we can build a habit we have to know what habit we need to build. That depends on the goal at hand. The secret to achieving big things is goal setting to the now.
Goal setting to the now is the concept of taking your long-term goals and breaking them down to understand what needs to be done at different stages. It’s a reverse engineering that gets you from the distant future to today.
- Step One: Identify your long-term goals – Where do you want to be in 10, 15, 20 years?
- Step Two: Bring it closer to the present – Where do you need to be in five years to reach your long-term goals?
- Step Three: Break it down to an annual goal – To get to where you need to be in five years, what goals do you need to reach within the next year?
- Step Four: Identify monthly and weekly stepping stone goals – What do you need to achieve each week to hit monthly milestones that will bring you to your yearly goal?
This strategy will help you move from a long-term goal that’s a decade or more away and determine what needs to be done this week to get you there. No matter how far away your long-term goal is, you can begin the journey today by using our goal-setting-to-the-now process.
Tools to Get You Through Goal Setting to the Now
Tools are instruments that help you accomplish tasks. In goal setting, tools help you hit milestones and make goals a reality. Remember, bigger is always better so set minimum goals rather than maximum ones.
Step 1 and 2 Tool: My Long-term Goals Worksheet
Setting long-term goals is all about getting them out of your head and onto paper. Use this worksheet and take your time visualizing where you want to be. Identify long-term goals for both your personal and business life, then break them down further into different categories like health, financial or relationships.
Once those are listed you can use the My Long-term Goals worksheet to identify five-year goals as well. Ask yourself, “Based on my long-term goals what is the ONE Thing I can do in the next five years such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” This Focusing Question will reveal the five-year goals that will get you to the bigger ones.
Step 3 Tool: My Long-term Goals Worksheet and the GPS
On the same My Long-term Goals worksheet you can break things down further into one-year goals. Just reframe the focusing question to ask, “Based on my five-year goals what is the ONE Thing I can do in the next year such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
Once those annual goals are identified you can use a GPS worksheet for each goal to set three core priorities within your goal and five strategies to achieve each priority.
Step 4 Tools: The 4-1-1 and My ONE Thing Tracker
This step is where the focusing question shines. After adding in the annual goals you identified in the GPS copy them over to your 4–1-1 worksheet. Then come up with monthly milestones for each goal by asking yourself, “Based on my annual goal, what’s the ONE Thing I can do this month such that by doing it everything will be easier or unnecessary?” Those answers get listed as Your Monthly Goals.
Follow the same process each week to set Your Weekly Goals. Ask yourself, “Based on my monthly goal, what’s the ONE Thing I can do this week such that by doing it everything will be easier or unnecessary?”
The beauty of this system is you don’t have to do everything at once. Start with the first month and the first week, then update the 4-1-1 at the beginning of each week. This allows you to make goals depending on how things progressed in the week prior. When the new month rolls around start a new 4-1-1.
Original Source: http://www.the1thing.com/66-day-challenge/66-day-challenge-complete