Every year around the first of December, I start jotting down any goals or accomplishments – anything I’d like to achieve or do – in the following year. This tends to be random and informal, except for writing them down. I don’t really brainstorm this until later in the month when I really sit down to plan the year.
This is kind of my Phase One: just capture and collect things that I’d like to achieve or do. They are, of course, professional things, but also personal things. Some examples include:
- Explore a particular voice-over genre in more depth
- Identify a new coach I’d like to work with or area of training I’d like to improve
- Set my income goal for the year
- Improve my relationships with family, friends, clients, and other voice actors and creatives
Phase Two is taking all that data collection and boiling it down to 2-3 clear major goals, and 2-3 clear minor goals. Any more than that and focus gets too diluted to have any effectiveness.
Goals should also have a clear due date. For example:
- I will have a new professional demo produced in Genre X by December 1.
Setting goals is nice. The problem is, that’s where most people stop. Goal setting is merely a starting point.
Goals are nothing but directional headers. Every team, even the worst team in the league, wants to win the Championship. It’s not the goal that separates the winners from the losers. This notion that better goals produce better outcomes is hogwash.
It’s not the goal of a better year that gets you there, but the actions you take, the behaviors: the cumulative effect of the daily, consistent habits you develop and execute over time are what lead to significant accomplishment.
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits and a leading authority on habits, said, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
Like in any journey, starting with a goal gives you direction. It’s the preparation, planning, fuel, and consistent motion toward the goal that determine how far and how fast you’ll go.
So, in Phase Three, those goals need to be broken down into action items, behaviors, and habits that provide the fuel to reach the goals.
Let’s say your goal is to add 50 new clients this coming year. That’s an average of one new client per week, allowing for two weeks of vacation. One new client a week is a sub-goal. The question now is, “What actions do I have to take to add one new client per week.”
If you track your habits and behaviors, you’ll understand exactly how many new prospects you’ll have to reach out to each week, and therefore each day in order to gain one new client a week over the course of the year.
If you haven’t been tracking your habits and behaviors, in this case, how many times in a day or week you’re reaching out to a new prospect, then implement a system to start tracking this metric. Many CRMs (Customer Relationship Management software such as Hubspot, Voiceoverview, Keap, Monday, etc.) can track this for you.
If, for example, on average you reach out to 100 new prospects, 40 open the email, 10 reply, and you sign one new client, then you know you have to reach out to at least 100 new prospects per week to sign one new client each week so that at the end of the year you’ll have reached your goal of 50 new clients.
The magic doesn’t happen in setting goals. It doesn’t even happen by understanding your numbers and behaviors that will get you there.
The magic is in the consistent performing of positive behaviors that advance your goals. As Clear also says, you have to get comfortable with the boredom of repeating the same actions every day, whether you “feel like it” or not. That’s what pros do. Designing systems that support, facilitate your positive habits is also key.
Habits eat motivation for lunch. Motivation fades every time. Consistent, positive habits lead to life-changing results.
I wish you a safe, happy, wildly prosperous, and positive habit-forming new year.
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