Complete Your 3 Year Goals
Before you start your 3 year goals you need to make sure you have completed the exercise of setting your 10 years goals and 5 year goals from the previous weeks. If you haven’t go back and do that first, if you have completed them fantastic, let’s press on.
You should have your ‘Goal Setting Worksheet’ open and be using your 10 and 5 year goals as the outline to start breaking them down into smaller milestones for the medium term goals of 3 years.
The 5 step Goal Setting Process again is:
1 – Define What, Why and When
2 – Conformity
3 – Scope
4 – Develop a Blueprint
5 – Draw Up an Action Plan
Now we are moving into the 3 year goal setting, we consider this medium term goals so it’s time to use all 5 steps in the goal setting process. Add in step 5 of drawing up an action plan and when you go through the SMART section make sure your Time-Based includes the month within the year you aim to complete each of your goals.
You should also open up your Goal Setting WorkSheet and follow the instructions in the video to add in the two additional columns for the goal setting matrix.
First column is titled ‘Priority’ and in here you will determine if your goals are A (high), B (middle) or C (low).
Second column is titled ‘Difficulty and in here you will determine if your goals are 1 (hard), 2 (medium), 3 (easy).
*note: optional but you can also add in the data validation on each sheet so you have the drop down to select from, no essential but can be useful as your goal lists continue to grow.
Only you can determine how important and difficult you feel your goals are so there are no right or wrong answers. Just consider which goals are most important to you, or even if certain goals need to be completed first in order for other goals on your list to be started. This comes back to the inter-dependencies we talked about vs doing a set of goals side by side that are unrelated.
As for the difficulty again this is self rated, some things to consider might be what resources do you need to complete, who else do you need assistance from and are there many variables that could drastically change over the coming 3 years.
You then need to merge you priority and difficulty score so each of your goals has the goal matrix score, something like a A1, B3, C2 etc. This gives you a visual representation of where your goals should be started and have your time and energy put towards them.
You were also introduced to XMind, the free tool to build out mind maps. This gives you the chance to put your medium term 3 year goals in the centre and start to chunk them down further into smaller bite sized pieces that may well feed into your 2 and 1 year goals over the coming weeks.
If you are struggling with your 3 year goals then perhaps go back and use XMind with your 10 and 5 year goals and see if that helps you create the 3 year goals.
Lastly try to remember the 8 areas of life when setting your goals. It’s not essential but certainly desirable to have at least one goal in each of the 8 areas. The 8 areas again just as a reminder are:
1 – Health
2 – Personal Growth
3 – Business / Career
4 – Financial
5 – Contribution
6 – Free Time
7 – Relationships
8 – Spiritual
It’s really important to try and take a holistic approach to life and look to become a better person, see more success and achieve more in all 8 areas. Naturally you will have some areas that are more important to you now and they will have more goals in them however chances are as the years go on this will chop and change.
Just do your best to keep some balance in your life, we promise you that you’ll see greater health, wealth and happiness if you aim to achieve goals in all 8 areas!