by Laura Martinez, League Member
Our role as moms is one of the most important roles we will ever have; it encompasses so much - it can be energizing, unpredictable, overwhelming, terrifying, and rewarding - sometimes all within a single hour.
No matter how you got to this moment in your life, it is essential for continued success to ensure you have a clear path - that you can live with INTENTION.
But how exactly do you do that? Good question. I don’t have all the answers, but I can offer some insight into how I help Fortune 500 companies figure out their clear path to continued success. Those strategies can totally be applied to any goal or problem to determine the path to success and, sometimes even more important, to know when you need to PIVOT.
Let’s get started!
Step One: You Need a Vision
A vision is defined as the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom.
I think this definition is helpful because, very often, you need to establish some wisdom to empower yourself to imagine. How do you see yourself now? What is important to you? What should stay the same? What needs to change?
Take some steps to brainstorm. You can get some magazines and clip out things that visualize what you want to achieve (our upcoming Vision Board event on January 20th would be perfect for this!), you can get some post-it notes and write down one idea per post-it or journal. Look through what you create and pare it down to what describes you and where you ultimately want to go. Then create a vision statement.
An example of a vision:
I am a mom, wife, and philanthropist who wants to give back to my community, learn by doing and be smart about planning my financial future while also making time for self-care and fun.
Step Two: Establish Principles
Now that you have a vision, it’s a good idea to have some guardrails to keep you from going off course. Think of principles as those guardrails. What are the things that need to be true to keep you on the right path? Are there paths you do not want to go down to achieve your goals?
Draft some ideas and then work to pare them down to 3-5 principles that are the most important to you or will most enable your vision based on your current state.
An example of principles:
Take care of myself to ensure that I can be the best I can be and take care of others.
Take steps to create an environment that promotes learning and growth.
Surround myself with people who embody what I want to become
Step Three: Create Goals and Metrics for Success
Goals can be tricky. I don’t know about you, but if I set a goal for myself and don’t achieve it, it can feel like I failed, and that can make me go off course or give up completely. Life is busy, and it’s easy to get distracted and move on.
This is why I have found it very important to be grounded in the WHY - it’s not just about what you want to achieve but why you want to achieve it. This allows you to try some things that you think will get you there, but if they don’t, you can try different ways to get there.
As you think about setting your goals - I would encourage you to have the goal be the WHY and to create metrics for success that are the WHAT - the things you can try that you think will get you there. This will also ensure that the goals you are setting are actually important to you and can grow with you as you continue on your journey.
Example:
My Goal: I want to feel good and have more energy
Metrics for success:
Lose 10 lbs
Work out three times a week
Meal plan to ensure I eat healthy
In this example, let’s say you start strong with meal planning, but it eventually tapers off or isn’t sustainable. You could either decide that is important and reinvest, or decide to pivot and either adjust that metric or create a new one that would enable your goal in a different way.
Getting stuck? Try this…
Pro Tactic - The Press Release: If you are running into trouble when it comes to defining your vision, principles, and goals, try out this methodology made famous by the team at Amazon. Write a “press release” - aka a story that the news would run describing what you have achieved once you have reached your goals. This should be concise and highlight the most important information. This will not only help you articulate your vision and goals but also can help you determine what is actually most important to YOU. It can also help give people within your support system the context they need to be able to help or support you.
Step Four: Create Your Plan with a Roadmap
To reach big, substantial goals, you want to be sure that you are giving yourself deadlines while also allowing yourself some flexibility to have the space to learn and time to reflect as you grow through the process. A roadmap can help enable this.
Steps for creating a roadmap:
Take the goals and metrics you established in Step 3 and decide what you think is achievable within the next year.
Break those tasks up by quarter - the next quarter should have a really clear plan. Q4 may look a little fuzzier, and that’s okay! (click HERE if you don't know what a Q4 is!)
As you make progress, it’s okay if you have a goal in Q1 that needs to move to Q2 or even decide something isn’t important and take it off entirely. More on this in Step five!
Step Five: Keep Yourself Accountable
This is honestly the most important step. You need to have a plan to check in with yourself often and to ensure you have the visibility and support you need to make your dreams a reality.
Accountability Plan:
Check in on your progress every six weeks. Set a reminder, set a recurring calendar hold, tell Siri or your husband to remind you - whatever way will make it consistently happen - just make it happen. You can even make it a date night over drinks and dinner. Like a Shia LeBeouf meme - Just do it!
Acknowledge and celebrate your progress. Every small step counts. If you don’t celebrate the journey, you aren’t enabling yourself to be able to one day celebrate the destination.
Keep it real with yourself when you are missing the mark. If you are consistently missing the mark and know why, be honest about whether it’s actually important or if the goal needs to change. If you aren’t sure why you are missing the mark, try conducting a retrospective. Make notes on what went well and what didn’t, and create action items to address issues or remove blockers. Add those action items to this quarter or the next.
Let people know about your goals, and don’t be afraid to ask for help and support. If you keep all your goals to yourself, statistically, they are significantly less likely to happen. You’d be surprised what you invite into your life when you are open and vulnerable about your aspirations or being clear about how people can help you.
In closing - just remember - when you believe in yourself and have a plan, you can do anything. Be clear about who you are, what you want (your vision), how you want to get there (your principles), your why and the what (goals and metrics for success), then put a plan in place (roadmap) and keep yourself accountable.
~Laura Martinez
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