Episode 99: A Blueprint On Personal & Professional Goal Setting For 2022

Before we get started, we want to wish you all a very happy holidays on behalf of our entire To The Point team. We’re incredibly grateful to our listeners, and thankful for the opportunity to have a positive impact on the hundreds of thousands of people who downloaded our episodes this year.

Chris Yano, host of To The Point and CEO of RYNO Strategic Solutions has been setting goals his entire life and accomplishing them, and wants to share what he has learned in his 42 years on this earth with you. Chris wants to get you set up for 2022 with goals, guardrails, and actionable advice to make sure you crush next year both personally and professionally.

Goal setting is critical because it creates focus and gives you direction. When you accomplish your goals, you grow from it! It also causes you to take action, Simply put, when you put a goal in place, it gives you something to work towards. It also gives you inspiration. After all, nothing feels quite as good as checking off that box after you’ve met your goals in your professional and personal life. Lastly, it’s just plain good for the soul.

Common Pitfalls When Setting Goals

Setting a goal is a pretty simple thing, right? It is, but that doesn’t explain why so many people struggle time after time achieving their goals. If it was that easy, you wouldn’t see the same people posting their “I’m going to lose weight” resolutions year after year. Knowing the pitfalls of goal setting is imperative so that you can prevent yourself from being another casualty of wishful thinking and inaction.

First, you need to have a why. Your why needs to be a compelling argument as to why this goal is so important to you. Second, make sure you aren’t setting too many goals. Focus on getting your list down to something attainable. What are the most important goals to you? Third, work backwards. Imagine your goals as already being done.

Once you’ve set your goals, work backwards to plan on how to achieve them. If you think about goals in the future tense instead of the past tense (imagining having already completed them), you’re looking at how far you need to go. You can’t psych yourself out. Focus on thinking powerfully for positive results. It’s about looking at the end result that you WILL achieve, and creating steps backwards to where you’re at today. This will give you a roadmap of steps you’ll need to take to get to where you want to grow.

Finally, write your goals down. This might seem trivial, but it’s integral to have visual cues for your goals. Also, be intentional about how you write your goals. Approach how you write down your goals from a place of knowing you will get them done.

If You Fail To Plan, You’re Planning to Fail

It might seem cliche, but you’ll hear Chris saying it time and time again because it’s absolutely true: “if you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail”. You have to put something in place and create steps towards accomplishing your goals, and then have someone hold you accountable for it. Otherwise, you’ll never get where you’re trying to go.

Reflect

Before you move forward, stop for a second. Reflect on the goals you accomplished in 2021. Are you happy with what you achieved? Are you mad you missed some goals? No matter how you did, pat yourself on the back. This was a tough year, and you need to give yourself some credit. You made progress somewhere, so reflect on that and cherish that. Harness that good feeling you get from achieving your goals!

Create Habits

Achieving your goals isn’t as simple as writing them down and thinking about them, of course. You have to put in the work! That’s where creating habits comes into play. Habits get your brain working on autopilot towards your goals.

The 4 Stages to Creating a Habit

You’ve probably heard it takes 21 days to create a habit. That’s true, but there is more you need to know. There are four stages to creating a habit. These are cues, cravings, response, and reward.

A cue is a prompt that gets you started. Using food as an example, it’s seeing the cookies on the counter. That’s a cue, or what starts the process of a habit.

A craving is a prediction your brain makes about what the cue means. Seeing that cookie, your brain says “hey, that’s going to taste good”.

Response is the action taken. In our example, it’s eating that cookie.

The reward is the positive, feel good outcome. You’ve looked at the cookie, your brain decided it would taste good, you ate it, and dammit, it tasted good! This is important, because if a behavior isn’t rewarding, it won’t feel good and train your brain to continue the behavior long enough to create a habit.

The cycle is simple, and once you understand it, you can utilize this to create habits that will help you achieve the goals you have set for yourself. Just remember: the cue triggers a craving which motivates a response, which provides the reward, which satisfies the craving and ultimately becomes associated with the cue.

Create Categories

This step may not work for everybody, but it’s certainly worked for Chris. Separating your goals into categories can help you be strategic about achieving them. Chris always starts with his personal goals first because they are the most important. Remember, you work to live, you don’t live to work! Maybe this is a vacation you want to take, working on your marriage, or anything else in your personal life.

Next, set your professional goals. Do you want to make more money or advance your career path? Perhaps you just want to learn a new skill that will make you more valuable, or start planning for a major change in your career.

Another category you can set up is health. From rest to losing weight to general self care, achieving your goals won’t mean much if you aren’t healthy enough to enjoy it all. You have to take care of yourself and your health first. Some other categories you could create might fall into the spiritual/religious arena. Perhaps it’s meditating or praying every day, or journaling, or something else that feeds your soul.

Once you’ve created your list of goals, highlight the ones that are non-negotiable. What goals are you dead set on achieving this year? It can be helpful to have one for each of your categories that you are 100% certain about; the ones that have the strongest “why” behind them. If your list is short enough, this might be all of them.

Find an Accountability Partner

Now you have your list of goals, and you know what you need to do to achieve them. The only thing left is to make sure you have an accountability partner. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can do everything on your own. Find someone who knows you and that you trust to check in with you and hold you accountable for your goals. This is an incredibly powerful tool, and you’ll find that the most successful people both have mentors and are mentors to create circles of accountability.

CRUSH YOUR GOALS

Chris started this podcast to positively impact lives. Our whole To The Point works hard to bring you the best guests and give you wisdom and knowledge that will not just improve your professional life, but your personal life as well. We want you to succeed!

Identify your goals and work backwards. If you happen to miss a step or fall short for a bit, don’t beat yourself up. Let it motivate you to crush the next day, week, month, and year. Chris loves to say “No Zero Days”, and it’s a powerful phrase you can use as a mantra. It doesn’t mean that every single day you’re making leaps and bounds both personally and professionally, it’s just that you’re making some type of step in the right direction. It can be as simple as not hitting the snooze button in the morning or making your bed. As long as it’s not zero!

We’re excited about 2022, and have lots of great guests and episodes planned just for you. From Chris and the rest of us at To The Point, we wish you a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season!