One of my first days in college, my health professor asked us to write down all our lofty goals, and just save them somewhere. He said that if we had written them down we might direct forces within our beings to achieving those goals whether directly or indirectly.
I tried that, and as far as I can tell, I am a long ways from getting a cherry red jeep, or taking a hot air balloon ride across the Serengeti.
So I switched the idea of writing all my lofty goals, and narrowed them to just 3 simple goals that I hope I can achieve within the next 5 years. I can’t tell much else beyond that, and 5 years is long enough to make me feel like I have time, but short enough that I can break down into chunks of what I want to accomplish this year, and the next.
What does this have to do with personal brand statements?
Well if you really think about it, personal brand statement is a vision of how people should see you. So using it as part of your goal setting will help you refine what professional goals you should set yourself in the interim to make that personal brand statement happen.
So how do we use personal brand statements to create SMART goals?
SMART goals by the way are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time specific. So let’s start with a personal brand statement I recently wrote on creating your personal brand statement, and work off that to create a SMART goal.
“I want to help people find and leverage their uniqueness to achieve success in their career or business.”
Make the personal statement goal Specific
So breaking this down, how do I want to help people? Off the bat we can start with tools that I can use to achieve this vision: Blogging, creating and maintaining an e-mail list, joining LinkedIn groups that talk about personal branding, guest posting on related blogs. All these activities are centered on setting myself up as a resource for people to learn about personal branding.
Make the personal statement goal Measurable
How will I measure and track my progress towards achieving this goal? Tracking your progress can be inspirational and help you stay motivated and on-track. Just the other day I had a sign-up to my mailing list; this is how I am choosing to measure my success because I can get actual numbers on how I am doing.
Make the personal statement goal Attainable
It would be fun to say I want to be featured on talk shows, write a book and become famous for personal branding, but that is too lofty for me to achieve within the time I am setting for myself. So instead, I am focusing on making the goal attainable by looking at factors and activities I can control. I can start by promoting the blog, and writing darn good posts. I can research and read all that is out there to become an authority on the subject matter, I can seek out people in my profession to build connections with, these are all within my sphere of control, and fame is not.
Make the personal statement goal Realistic
I’m a big dreamer and optimist. I really think there’s nothing you can’t achieve with focus, time and passion. So for me making it realistic understands the constraints I am working under, namely I do not have a lot of money and time to throw into it, so focusing on what I can do is more of a priority. To that end, I can probably set apart an hour every other day to work on writing blog posts or promoting them before or after I get work done.
Make the personal statement goal Timely
At this point, you can take all the ideas you have and break them into chunks. Overall, say you want to achieve your vision in 5 years’ time, what can you overarching goal can you make each year that will help you get and stay on track?
Break down each of the ideas into phases, and then further down into quarters of the year. I did this by creating Evernote notebooks around each phase so that if I get ideas or see things I would like to carry out at a later stage I can put them into the respective notebook, and come back to them when I get to that phase. In case you were wondering, I’m at Phase 1.
That’s it; you’ve turned your personal brand statement into SMART goals. High-five me in the comments if you’re on board with this plan!
Daisy Quaker is a freelance internet marketing consultant, specializing in social media strategy, content marketing, e-mail marketing and internet marketing strategy. In her spare time she writes a personal style blog. Find her on <Twitter and Google+ and tell her what strategies work for your business.
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