Goal Setting
Reaching Your Goals: A 6 Step Program
By Sharon Teitelbaum
Mar 27, 2008

For many people, it's easy to feel discouraged by a perceived lack of progress toward reaching their goals.

If you find yourself feeling this way, take heart. In my ten-plus years as a coach, I have learned some critical factors that can make the difference between meeting and not meeting goals. In this article I'll share with you something I call the "B-SASSY" system - an approach for helping people be successful in reaching their goals.

The B-SASSY system contains 6 steps, one for each letter. If you can get better at even one of these steps, you'll get more traction and your effort will take you farther. These steps are:

B: Be accountable
S: Start
A: Ask for help
S: Stay on course
S: Stay with it
Y: Say YES


B: Be Accountable

If you're serious about what you want to accomplish, you've already established clear, explicit goals for yourself. From there, the most important thing you can do with your plan is to break it down into actionable chunks and schedule those chunks into your calendar.

Your action items, just like your bigger goals, need to be measurable and specific, and have a time frame associated with them. So, for example, "Spend more time with my family" isn't very specific, but "Be home for dinner with the kids 4 nights a week" is.

Next, find someone to hold you accountable: a colleague, a coach, or a friend, and probably not your spouse. You want this to be someone who won't let you off the hook (as we tend to do for ourselves), and who will hold your feet to the fire when you need it. Arrange to check in with this person once a week; reviewing the past week's progress, stating your goals for the upcoming week and agreeing on what you'll have done by when.


S: Start

Do you know what I see a lot of? When the task at hand is out of the comfort zone - out of the arena in which the person feels mastery - there is enormous hesitation, procrastination, and time wasting.

There is enormous power in just plain getting started. If you find yourself circling around the outside of a project, not starting and not starting and not starting, pull yourself off the hamster wheel. Ask yourself if there is ONE small step into this project that you can take right now? Identify something you can do and get going. That's often all you'll need to break through your barrier, step over that starting line, and finally be in motion.

There's a quote attributed to Goethe that applies here: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."


A: Ask for Help

Many people fail to create what they want for themselves because they think they have to know how to do it all by themselves. In practice however, and in order to keep growing professionally and personally, you will continuously need different kinds of help.

This may mean delegating some of the "lower level" tasks that you are capable of doing but do not find challenging. On the home front these may include routine maintenance chores, repairs, research for new purchases, and other tasks. At work this could mean clerical, administrative, or other work that you no longer find challenging and that truly doesn't have to be done by YOU, it just has to get done. Often the work that you delegate to junior staff is a development opportunity for them.

And sometimes the kind of help you need is from someone more skilled and experienced than you are. I can't tell you how many people I have worked with over the years who unnecessarily held themselves back because they expected themselves to know how to do everything, and when they didn't, they stayed stuck instead of finding someone who would (and could) help them. When you need technical assistance, do yourself a favor, and admit it and go get it! If you don't get what you need from the first person you ask, go ask a second person. Do not let yourself be stopped by "I have no idea how to do this."


S: Stay on Course

I've heard that commercial airplanes are off-course 95% of the time. They arrive on time at the correct destination however, because their navigation technology frequently and consistently checks their actual position against the plotted course, and makes course corrections as needed.

With your personal and professional goals, you also need course-correction technology. If your goals are specific, measurable, and have a time frame associated with them, you can check yourself at regular intervals (e.g. once a month). If you're no longer on course, make the necessary correction.

Just as you don't want your plane to Seattle ending up in L.A., you need to make sure that you stay pointed towards your stated goals as the year progresses.


S: Stay With It

Many people are easily distracted. Their lives are complex, their work is demanding, they are flooded with information, they have heavy-duty responsibilities, they are constantly multi-tasking. It's easy to lose sight of goals that are actually near and dear to your heart.

If you have this quality, you know that in many ways, it's an advantage. You are likely to notice trends, opportunities and correlations sooner than the average person. But it can also be a liability. When you lose your focus, you don't take the consistent actions you need to take reach your desired outcomes.

Regular monitoring of yourself is the key. When you find yourself distracted, just bring yourself back to focus on what you want to be focusing on. There is no need for drama or self-criticism -- that's just further distraction. Just pull yourself back on track and get focused again.


Y: Say "Yes"

As you move through the hard work of creating what you want for yourself, you will inevitably encounter many challenges, such as a steep learning curve, a need to master a wide variety of skills, financial risk, an adjustment to new working conditions, relationship challenges, competing demands, to name a few.

In order to keep yourself afloat in the face of all these challenges (whether you feel them on a daily basis or not), it is important to acknowledge your successes, even if they're small and even if you feel like Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live ("I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me"). When you accomplish an important task, when you learn a new skill, when you manage your time productively - all of these successes should be "owned" and acknowledged by you.

Say YES to celebrating the good days and staying focused through the challenging ones.

So check it out. Notice where you are and are not implementing the six steps outlined here. You may be doing all of them, but only sporadically. You may be doing some regularly and other not at all. When you are doing all of them consistently and strongly, you will notice an acceleration in your progress.

Copyright 2006 Sharon Teitelbaum. All rights reserved.