[Lesson 3] Develop your step-by-step + foolproof plan
This is the last step of creating goals that stick for your dream life and biz, and it’s super important because if you skip it, you’ll put off taking action for your goal every single day.
1 | List of all the steps you need to cover to accomplish your goal
Make a list of everything you need to achieve your goal.
Following the example of ‘I want to sell services as a fashion illustrator, and I want to take care of 3 projects per month, and earn $2,000 per month by the 10th of January 2017,’ let’s say the steps you need to cover are:
- Coming up with your unique value proposition
- Figuring out your secret sauce as a fashion creative
- Determining who’s your ideal client
- Developing services that your dream clients and you love
- Creating an authentic branding
- Building an optimized website
- Making an effective portfolio
- Creating a content and marketing strategy that attracts and lands clients
- Developing your sales and client process
- Publishing content and market yourself
- Actively following + interacting + engaging with prospective dream clients
2 | Take inventory
Now you have to take inventory of where you’re located; how far are you from your goal?
Maybe you need to start from scratch. Maybe you already have a website, and you only need to optimize it. Or maybe you still need to figure out your content and marketing strategies.
Determine exactly what steps you need to take, and evaluate if these steps could be considered as part of your current main goal or as separate main goals themselves.
Then, decide what steps you want to take first.
3 | Divide and make it happen
You can achieve any big dream and any big goal, not matter its size, and the best way to do it is by dividing the big goal into tiny + digestible chunks.
To do that, do the following:
- The first thing to do is determine how many months you have until your deadline. As I mentioned, I like to work in one main goal per quarter, but you can take the time that you want and need.
- Divide your main goal into smaller goals, one per month. These can be the steps you listed in point number one.
- Then divide each of these monthly goals into other four smaller goals, your weekly goals.
- And finally, break down each of the weekly goals, and determine the tiny tasks you got to do daily in order to accomplish them. This will be your daily tasks.
For example, let’s take create an authentic branding as one of your smaller goals (monthly goals). Then the weekly goals could be something like this:
- Discover what makes you unique
- Create your brand foundation coming from your origin story
- Translate your concept into visual elements
- Put it all together and create logo + graphics + photos + website elements
And then, the daily tasks for the first weekly goal (discover what makes you unique), would be:
- Reveal what’s your deepest why (1 day)
- Clarify the WHO + WHAT + HOW (2 days)
- Come up with a creative brief (3 days)
Pro-Tip: If your main goal is all about what we’ll cover during the course, then you don’t need to go too specific from now. You can wait until we reach those lessons and set your weekly goals and daily tasks until then (because that’s one of the purposes of this course, be a step-by-step guide for you 😉 ). On the other hand, if your goal is about something more personal like taking a long vacation or purchasing a new house, then go as specific as you can.
If there are more daily tasks, weekly or monthly goals that you have to complete to reach your goal, then you’d need to adjust your deadline and move it one month or two according to the time you have available to work on your goal + how big your goal is.
4 | Schedule it all
The next thing you must do is schedule each one of the daily tasks, and fill up your calendar with them. Remember to consider the time you have available to work on your goal per day, and your other projects and chores because you don’t want to pile up a bunch of daily tasks in an already busy day – you’ll end up overwhelmed and frustrated as hell 😛
