I recently read an article that Eric Standlee of InHouston wrote on July 18, 2010 entitled Fear of Large Amounts of Money and Goals. I wanted to follow up on the same point with an article about how to develop a process for formulating written goals that will help you implement what Standlee wrote and have clear, written goals with deadlines.

How to write an effective Game Plan

If you write a plan in the next hour, you will be ahead of most people walking the earth. Many of us have read that a very small percentage of the overall population has determined their goals and even less have written them down. If you ask how many people consistently follow a clearly defined goal-setting process, we’re talking about far fewer people. Maybe 1 out of 100 or less follow a system.

1. Do you have specific goals that you plan to achieve over the next 5-10 years?

2. Are these goals in writing?

3. Are your written goals clearly defined with the desired result and steps to reach the goal, along with a specific deadline for each goal?

Having the mindset to make the needed adjustments to your thinking and to refine your process for achieving your chief definite aim is a very important part of the equation, however writing your game plan also does several things for you:

1. Gives you a visual affirmation of your chief definite aim. Reading your plan out loud is a very beneficial exercise to focus your mind on the task at hand.

2. There’s a price to pay for any worthwhile goal to be reached. Going through the process of formulating and writing out your goals helps you to discern the effort, resources, time, etc. that will be needed to complete your mission.

Jesus said at Luke 14:28: “who of you that wants to build a tower does not first sit down and calculate the expense”?

3. Having an expiration or due date gives your mind the right perspective on the time remaining to attain your goal. This holds especially true when the goal(s) are less than one year away.

Bill Bartmann was a guest speaker at a Tom Hopkins boot camp I attended, and he made a point that had a tremendous impact on helping me attain my goals. He said to stop calling our most important objectives “goals” and call them “promises” instead. Why? Most people reach their goals about 70% of the time, while they keep their promises more than 90% of the time. In addition to calling them promises, he made sure to have an expiration date on each set of promises. If we just write down “in five years,” the five years becomes a perpetual date that just keeps getting pushed back another five years and becomes a goal that we never attain.

Using Bill’s philosophy, I wrote my most important “Promise Plan” items. I also attached an expiration date to every item on the list. This concept was a major contributing factor to my success as a salesperson, as well as a manager.

If you would like an exercise to help you formulate and write your goals, please visit my site to download this document, How to write an effective Game Plan. Let me know how it goes.