Your Goals Must Be Crystal Clear!

Your goals must be easy to perceive, understand, or interpret. Albert Einstein knew how to set and achieve goals and once said “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” These are wise words from a wise man, so it’s vital to pay heed of Albert’s wisdom. You must be clear about where you want to go and what you want to do. I have made a lot of mistakes in this area, especially in my sales career.

In life, failure is inevitable. Working in sales is a sure fire way to consistently learn from our failures. You have a product, your goal is to solve a customer’s need and the end result will either be a sale or no sale. It is either a success or a failure. That is not a bad thing though. Obviously all sales professionals want to achieve a sale but our biggest lessons come from our failures.
Every sales person has to make what’s known as “cold-calls”. This is a call to someone you don’t know. Your job is to have clarity in what it is that you want from that person. Lack of clarity kills conversations and also ends conversations. The listener on the other line can become frustrated. I have often called up a person from another company and mumbled my words because I wasn’t crystal clear about what I wanted to say in the first place. Literally I have mumbled my words. There is nothing more embarrassing and degrading then this. It can really affect your confidence.

Just like in sales, the person who has a clear vision with their own goals will achieve more goals than someone who lacks clarity. Less is more in the modern world. Take this approach in your emails, text messages and so forth. Messages must be easily understood so we don’t waste each other’s time.

Your goals must also be concise so that you can focus on your vision. They must be short and sweet. The definition of concise is “giving a lot of information clearly and in a few words; brief but comprehensive.” This is an art form for the gurus and they use what’s known as “laser focus” to develop a framework on how to set and achieve goals. It basically means that they pinpoint or sharply focus on their goals.

We live in a world where everything is happening so fast. Can you honestly go 5 minutes without checking your smart phone or checking Facebook? That is the world we live in today. We are “addicted’ to news and have the attention span of a goldfish.

Once again, I learned this harsh lesson in sales. I would go to meetings with clients and show them a presentation with lots of graphs and charts of about 20-30 slides. At the time, I presumed that this was all great. In reality, the clients were bored and I probably lost them at “here’s my amazing super long presentation”. 5 minutes or less is a great way to test how concise you actually are. I think it boils down to 5 slides or less! Then your audience gets your vision.

So what these lessons or mistakes have thought me, is that if your own goals are not clear and concise, then achieving them becomes extremely difficult! Learn how to set and achieve goals from failures. What failures have you made this week? And more importantly, what lessons have you learned from these? Please share below…