The fourth quarter of the year is when many begin business planning for the new year.
This is when I begin my business planning process for the following year. It’s a rather deep undertaking so I don’t take it lightly.
After all, creating a successful business is what helps me create a better life. Humans are all wired for improvement, achievement, and success. When you take the time to plan your days, weeks, and months you will achieve more.
To begin the planning process, I review the current year by looking at what worked and what didn’t, accomplishments, losses, and unfulfilled goals. I think completing and learning from the current year and the undertaken efforts are essential.
This is a vital step that is often overlooked. Without this reflection, I end up recreating the past or trying to fix what should have been discarded.
All missed targets, aka failures, have learnings. Learnings are the gold that can lead to better results or letting go.
Once the slate is clean, I find it easy to plan and dream. I envision what an ideal year would look like. This exercise allows me to gain the desire and commitment to set goals.
When I can see how I want to end the year, I can start to break down my quarterly, monthly, and then weekly goals. Breaking a yearly goal into quarterly goals helps to make a large goal more manageable.
Now I can create action plans for my goals. It is nearly impossible to reach your goal if you don’t have a plan or strategy to get there.
My one caveat is NOT to set goals too low. It is probably too safe if the goal doesn’t make me uneasy.
This year I set a hairy big goal. As of this blog, I did not achieve it AND there are many lessons I have learned about why I didn’t. It’s not a failure if I learn from it and grow.
Executing the action plan is an opportunity to form new habits. Behavior can become a habit that you do automatically to support the action plan. Think about exercising to improve your health. When you create an action plan to exercise 3 times per week and follow through with the plan, you are creating a good habit to meet your goal.
Discipline yourself to review and track your progress periodically. Evaluating your progress toward your goals helps you to stay on track and make adjustments along the way when needed.
We tend to forget to celebrate our progress. If you are taking action and moving closer to your goal, you are making progress. Don’t wait until the goal is finally accomplished to celebrate. As you begin to feel good about taking action, you train your brain to do more.
To achieve your goals, you must constantly improve and develop your skills. It is about growing and becoming better each day.
Planning your year is important to achieving goals. And as you plan consistently year after year, you become better at planning.
If your plans for the new year involve real estate, it would be my pleasure to help you. Contact me, Stephen Burchard, The Desert Bowtie Realtor, taking the (k)nots out of real estate.
