How to Change Course

“Be stubborn about your goals and flexible about your methods.” Unknown

It’s so important to create goals. But sometimes, we may have to change course along the way for a variety of reasons. Let’s look at some ways we can assess our goals while we work on them.

Evaluating progress as you go:

Hopefully you’ve been specific about your goals and then broken them down into small steps. When we can work on each of the small steps, it allows us time to evaluate how our progress is going before we get in too deep. There’s still time to change course!

  • Questions you can ask yourself:
  1. Is this step helping me reach my end goal?
  2. Do I need help with this step?
  3. Is this step going to take me longer than I estimated?
  4. Do I need to break this step down into smaller pieces?

Let’s say your end goal is to create a presentation about using social media in business.

Your first step is to do research on the topic and you gave yourself one hour to complete the research. Go back to the questions you can ask yourself:

  1. Is this step helping me reach my end goal: Yes
  2. Do I need help with this step: No
  3. Is this step going to take me longer than I anticipated (1 hour): Yes, 4 hours
  4. Do I need to break this step down into smaller pieces: Yes, break the talk down into 4 segments and do separate research for each segment. Each segment may be: Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and LinkedIn

Creating a new version of the goal

As you progress toward reaching your goals, you may find you need to make changes or adjustments. You may find that your original goal isn’t actually quite what you want. It’s okay to make adjustments! Don’t keep slogging along because you feel obligated to that goal. If you need to adjust it, adjust it.

Back to the goal of creating a presentation about using social media in business. You found so much content about social media platforms that it was better to zero in on just one platform instead of a presentation on the broad topic of social media. Your adjustment or new goal is now to create a presentation on using Instagram in business.

Uncheck the box (drop the goal)

When we create a goal, we have the positive outcomes of reaching the goal in mind. We’ve visualized an outcome or more than one outcome that is worth striving for. There are three points in time where we may actually decide to drop the goal:

  1. Before starting to work on the goal. You’ve reflected on the goal and decided that you’re not interested in it or now isn’t the right time.
  2. While working on the goal. You’ve reflected on the goal and and decided that you’re not interested in it or now isn’t the right time.
  3. After you reached the goal. You’ve reached your goal but it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. I’ve tried things in business that I thought were a good idea only to find out later it wasn’t the great idea I thought it was. And that’s okay, we learn from everything we do.

Positive qualities of a business owner

As business owners, there are a lot of challenges on our journey. Some of the qualities that will help you rise to the challenges:

  • Be willing to try new things and new ideas, new products, new content, new partnerships, etc.
  • Be willing to evaluate goals to make changes or cut something loose.
  • Don’t be too proud to say something didn’t work out.
  • Be resilient. Know that you gave something a try, it didn’t work out and you moved on to try something else.

Points to remember

  • Evaluate your goals as you work toward them
  • Be open to changing course
  • Be open to letting things go and trying something else (after you give it a fair shake)

“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” Jimmy Dean

Monika Kristofferson is a professional organizer and productivity consultant with Efficient Organization in the Seattle area.

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