Far too many individuals fail to achieve their goals. Many who fail to achieve their goals simply give up on goal setting altogether out of  frustration or a loss of confidence in the goal-setting process. Why? Why do people fail to achieve their goals? The heart of the problem lies in the fact that many who set what they think are goals are not setting goals at all. They are, instead, making a wish. Wishes are not goals. What sets a wish and a goal apart is action. Wishes are wishes because there is no action-based plan underpinning the wish. Goals are goals only when action steps are required to achieve the goal. For example, a typical goal setter may establish a goal of making $100,000 in income for the year. They may even list this "goal" on a goal sheet that they review periodically. As the year moves along they soon begin to realize that they will not get close to making $100,000. This usually occurs mid-year. At that point they often stop reviewing their goals for the year in an effort to avoid reminding them of their failure in achieving the goal. Feelings of inadequacy, poor work ethic, lack of focus begin to filter into their minds as a result of missing the goal. That's too bad. It's too bad because the failure in achieving the "goal" has little to do with work ethic or focus or competence. Instead, it has everything to do with misinterpreting a wish for a goal.

So how do we turn our wish of making $100,000 in income for the year into a goal? The first thing we need to do is to create an action plan. An action plan represents the specific steps that are required in order to help you reach your $100,000 earnings target. Let's use the example of a life insurance agent who desires to make $100,000 in commissions for the year. What specific action steps are required in order for a life insurance agent to make $100,000 in commissions for the year? In order to answer that question we need to work backwards and define the steps necessary to reach this financial benchmark.

Step #1     How many average life policies need to be written for the year in order to spin off $100,000 in commissions?
If the average life insurance case generates $2,000 in commissions this means that you will need to close 50 cases for the year. Is this possible? If the answer is yes then you move on to Step # 2..

Step #2    How many individual meetings will you need to have in order to have a shot at closing 50 cases for the year?
If it takes 5 meetings to create 1 closed case then you will need to meet with 250 people during the year. Is this possible? If the answer is yes then you move on to Step #3.
                     
Step # 3    How many phone calls will it take to create 250 meetings for the year?
If it takes 10 phone calls just to get 1 meeting, then the answer is 2,500 phone calls for the year. Is this possible? If the answer is yes then you move on to Step #4.

Step #4    How many phone calls will you have to make every week in order to reach your goal of 2,500 phone calls for the year?
Assuming you take four weeks off for the year for various reasons (vacation, time off etc) then that leaves you with 48 weeks to work with. This will require you to make approximately 50 phone calls a week. Is this possible? If the answer is yes then you move on to Step #5.

Step 5    How many phone calls will it take each day to reach 50 calls per week?
Ok, that was an easy one. Ten per day. Is that possible? You bet it is. 10 phone calls per day. Now you have your goal, which is: 
Make 10 Prospecting Calls Each Day.

You may notice that each goal you set requires a step-by-step analysis in order to determine if the goal is possible to achieve. The real goal is not to make $100,000 per year, but, instead, to make 10 phone calls per day. That action step is your goal. The byproduct of achieving your goal is that you will make $100,000 for the year in commissions. See how goal setting works? What you have done is taken a "wish" of making $100,000 per year in commissions and broken it down into steps in order to determine what your Real Goal needs to be. By going through this exercise, what you are really doing is creating a business plan for each wish, which involves defining the variables for each particular goal. Variables such as the number of policies that need to be written, the number of meetings that need to take place, the number of prospecting phone calls that are needed to create a meeting. Then you break these variable assumptions down into the daily activities required.

In summary, a wish becomes a goal only when you define the action-based steps that must be accomplished in order for your wish to come true.