Career Success Through Goal Setting Fundamentals

How Do You Define Career Success?

Career success can be a fickle thing if you allow it to be. Especially if you haven’t taken the time clearly define what career success means to you personally.

Everyone is going to have their own definition, but without taking the time to articulate yours, how can you know what to aim for?

As Zig Ziglar was famous for saying, “If you aim at nothing you are sure to hit it every time.”

If you haven’t already, writing your own professional mission statement can help clarify you’re your own career fulfillment and success might look like.

> Define success for yourself using our Professional Mission Statement Worksheet <

In less broad terms, goal setting is a means by which you can measure incremental progress towards that greater idea of overall career success.

Goal Setting

Of course, ambiguity in goal setting only makes things harder. When it comes to setting goals it is important that each goal be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Goals set using these principles are often referred to as SMART Goals.

SMART Goals

Specific: In order to accurately reflect your standing in relation to how well you are fulfilling your career’s purpose, a goal should be articulated in a way that gives no room for mistaking whether you’ve succeed or failed in achieving it.

Measureable: Your success or failure in achieving goals serves as a way of measuring your progress. In order to measure progress, goals themselves must be measureable.

Attainable: A goal that cannot be achieved, simply cannot help us fulfill whatever purpose we’ve assigned to it. A goal that cannot be achieved is nothing more than a waste of time.

Relevant: If achieving a goal doesn’t move you closer to career fulfillment and actualizing your career’s mission statement, then it only serves as a distraction from the goals you should be trying to achieve.

Time-bound: This means having deadlines. Deadlines help to define success and failure. By giving specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant goals a time-frame in which they need to be achieved, the difference between success and failure becomes very black and white.

Tips for Achieving Goals

1. Commit your goals to writing
2. Narrow your focus
3. Decide on action steps toward achieving your goals
4. Implement a measure of accountability

Dr. Gail Matthews of Dominican University concluded in her study of individuals from the United States, Belgium, England, India, Australia, and Japan that having written goals and a written action plan, along with a measure of accountability, can increase goal achievement by an average of roughly 33% compared to simply thinking about what they wanted to achieve.

While having written goals and a written action plan for achieving them are pretty self explanatory, creating accountability doesn’t have to be any more complicated. Creating a measure of accountability can be a simple as sharing your goals and deadlines with a friend or colleague. Even more simply it can mean signing a written agreement with yourself that clearly states your goals and the output you’re committing to in order to achieve said goals.

FOCUS = Follow One Course Until Success – John Lee Dumas

John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire is a big proponent of having a narrow focus when it comes to achieving goals. Too often, professionals spread themselves too thin, chasing a number of unrelated accomplishment. In doing so, you’ll end up making little or no progress toward your goals because you haven’t given any one thing the focused attention and resources it requires.

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Establish SMART goals, focus & accountability with ease using our 

 > Goal Setting & Action Plan Worksheet <

Final Thought

By being intentional, deriving SMART Goals from your greater vision of career success, and eliminating distraction with John Lee Dumas’ FOCUS formula, professional development is inevitable. And on the other side of development is progress and then success.

Good Luck!