Why Setting Big Goals Is Important?

I always like to set big bold goals, and the reason for this is because it makes you think about things differently.

If you just look to increase or improve your performance by 5 or 10% you can often just continue doing, just what you’re doing and just making small improvements.

But if you want to increase performance by 100%, 200% or 500% then making small improvements just isn’t going to cut it.

You have to do something different!  You have to change your thinking, often throwing away your current approach and going right back to the drawing board.

Now whilst this is scary, it is the only way to make those huge gain, the big improvements which really allow us to take things to the next level.

I have ben coaching a with a client who has been running events, and her big event has attracted 200 people for the last couple of years, which is  a great result and allows her to successfully run her business.

But during one of our coaching sessions she told me that ideally she wanted to take her business global, take it to the next level.

So using the FAST Approach I asked her what would success look like.  I wanted her to have an image of that so we could then start to Focus on how we would achieve it.

She told me, I’d like 1000 people to attend my event in 2015.

The speed of her answer surprised me, clearly she had given this quite a bit of thought. I was impressed too because this was a big, bold goal, looking to increase her attendance by 500%.

This is the type of challenge I love to be involved in, and it is always exhilarating when its achieved.

Now that we had a clear Focus, 1000 attendees, it was important for us to share this with her event team, so that they knew what the goal is.

We have to share our goals with our teams, it helps them understand why we are doing the things we are doing and also what their role in this will be, which helps foster Accountability.

It also allows our teams to take some ownership too, because with such a bold goal, we definitely need to change our approach and often our teams can help come up with some ideas and suggestions, and when you’re looking to increase things by 500% you need all the help you can get.

Setting such a bold goal can be scary, and in several later discussions, attempts were made to down play the goal, but we shouldn’t allow that, because we need to challenge our thinking, change our ways of doing things.

Maybe we will only come up with a solution that will achieve 500 guests, but that’s still a significant improvement.

If we go back to our original approach, which only yielded 200 attendees we will never get close to 500, because we will be back to focusing on improving the old approach.

We have to change our thinking, we need to explore new approaches, find new potential customers.

Fortunately my client, is a branding and marketing guru, so after some serious brainstorming sessions, she finally came up with an idea that will allow her to extend her tribe significantly which will give her the potential to achieve her goal of 1000 attendees.

She has come up with a simple approach, she has started her own TV channel which is steamed live on the internet.  This allows her to increase her reach  and consequently her tribe. This is something she had wanted to do previously, but with the need to get in front of more potential clients, now was the ideal time to launch it.

So now she has the right Focus with a clear picture of what success looks like, she has shared this with the team and let them know what their roles and responsibilities are which increases Accountability, and she has come up with the Simple plan to reach new customers to build her marketing list.

The last part of FAST is Transparency, and with just 4 months to go to her event, she knows that she has to sign up 250 people per month, so now she can monitor progress and make an necessary tweaks to the plan, or reward her team as they meet each monthly milestone.

This all started with a big, bold goal and now she is well on her way to achieving it.

If you need help with seeing your big bold goals, or want to know more about how FAST can help you achieve them, then email me at Gordon@leadership-principles.com.