You’ve done it! Months of blood, sweat, and tears — well, hopefully not actual blood — have paid off and you’ve reached the goal you set for yourself. Maybe you thought the goal might have been impossible when you originally set it, but here you are proving yourself wrong. It’s a great feeling. You feel a weight lifted off of your shoulders.
When you complete a goal, it’s no longer a goal but an achievement. Something to be proud of. Something to celebrate. Determined people are the ones that complete their goals though, and losing that sense of direction can be jarring. That goal has been burning a hole in your heart and mind for months. You’ve spent so much energy reaching this goal, that being left without it may leave you feeling empty.
So, what do you do now? Where do you start? You’ll need to find something to fill that void.
Don’t dive headfirst into your next set of goals until you’ve had a chance to appreciate the hard work you put into your previous goals. Whether you reached your goal early and are celebrating alone, or have reached the end of the goal period and are celebrating with the team, allow yourself some time to kick back and have fun.
Even the best work environments create a certain amount of stress. Setting goals that require a lot of hard work always come with some amount of stress. They’re designed that way. By setting your bar for success high, you’ve added onto the normal, but hopefully small, levels of stress that come with your current position.
So, take some time to enjoy having nothing on your plate. For the first time in a long time, you aren’t chasing a nearly impossible task. Hit happy hour after work. Hang out with your colleagues and discuss everything but work. Go home to your family and enjoy the weekend. Soon, you’ll have a new goal on your plate and the old feelings of stress and doubt will come flooding back. A new round of goal-chasing will start. There is no point in setting goals if you can’t enjoy your own success too.
If you finish your goals ahead of schedule, use the time to start brainstorming future goals and focusing on your optimizing your daily routine. With the extra time you would have spent pushing extra hard toward that goal, you can help others to achieve their own.
While it’s important to make sure you don’t do their work for them, there is nothing wrong with finding ways to help. Perhaps you can take over some of their busy-work to give them some extra time to focus on reaching their goal. You could help them brainstorm ways to improve their workflows and be more efficient. What’s most likely— you'll serve as their shoulder to cry on.
Find ways to become involved. Providing a little bit of encouragement can go a long ways toward helping your team. Be a positive influence and you’ll have more people to celebrate with!
Once you’ve got the celebrating out of your system and have had some time to refocus, prepare for the next round of goal-chasing. Even if you set your goals collaboratively as a group, start brainstorming new goals or ways to improve upon old goals for your next round.
Consider your previous goal. What about it worked? What could have been improved on? Consider these questions both for your goal setting process and the workflows you followed to complete the goal. Chances are that over time, you’ve improved the work processes you used to help you reach the goal. Will that affect how high you set the bar for the next goal?
Mindset plays a big role in your ability to complete your goals. If you're burned out, you’ll have a hard time getting back into the groove of chasing a new goal. Make sure you give yourself a break to tackle the next goal with the same vigor and motivation. Once you're settled, dive in.
After successfully completing a goal, there are a few strategies you can take when setting your next one. Like the first, you want to make sure you follow the SMART goal system to ensure what you’re working towards is worthwhile. The SMART goal system dictates that all goals be:
These should apply to organizational, team, and personal goals. With those principles in mind, there are a few strategies you can take for setting new goals.
There were good reasons behind the last set of goals you chose. In all likelihood, they deal with important aspects of your job. Since all goals should be tied to specific KPIs, there is a good chance future goals will use those same metrics. However, the fact you completed the last goal successfully means that you should set the bar a bit higher.
Consider moving the the goal post for success a bit and using your last goal as the foundation for a new one. If your goal had been to secure $10,000 in new monthly recurring revenue, try upping that number to $15,000. Consider how long it took you to complete, and with a better idea of how to achieve success, what you will be capable of this time around.
You can also use your previous goal as a foundation for a new goal while expanding its scope. For instance, if your previous goal was to secure $10,000 in new monthly recurring revenue, you could add new components to your goal to make it more challenging the second time around. For your new goal, you could choose to secure $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue while also securing $10,000 in one-time project-based sales.
Any additions you make to your goal should follow the SMART goal principles, and play a critical role in your job duties. Appending a new metric to your old goal adds a new dimension and makes it more challenging.
Just because you reach a goal doesn’t mean you need to completely move away from it in future goals. Build upon old goals by expanding their scope.
Sometimes in pursuit of your goal, you may realize you took the wrong approach. Maybe you should have set the bar lower to make it more achievable. Maybe you should have used a different metric that would have been a better measurement of success. Regardless of whether or not you achieve your original goal, sometimes it is best to start fresh, especially after having months to figure out ways to improve your goal-setting.
For instance, you may find that attaching a dollar value to a goal may make it so that aspects of achieving your goal are out of your control. Sometimes luck just isn’t on your side. In example, instead of setting a goal to secure $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue, instead you could decide to set a goal to secure one new sales call per day. Both metrics are ultimately building toward the same end goal — closing new deals — but one is completely in your own hands while the other relies on some outside influences.
If you find that a previous goal didn’t work for you, don’t be afraid to rip everything up and start from scratch. Ultimately, you should aim to set the best goals for yourself, based on your job duties.
Give yourself enough time to feel the weight of stress lift off of your shoulders, and refocus your attention. Then, you can begin looking forward toward what your next goals will be. Take what you have learned during the process of completing your original goal into account, and use it to inform future goals.
In our professional lives, we’ll never stop chasing goals. There will always be a new carrot at the end of the stick, helping to focus our actions. When you successfully complete a goal you’ve been chasing, take the time to first enjoy your success.