… and Beyond
In our last article we discussed leading behaviors and the steps to achieving goals. This time, we’ll be hopping back into leading behaviors in a more practical way.
As a recap, leading behaviors are the steps that you can take today and every day that lead to your next goal. Unfortunately, we at Business Minded cannot tell you what those steps are for each of your goals. This is something you need to figure out based on your own individual goals.
And that’s where this article comes in.
Think about your current goal. Now start to think about the steps that it will take to reach that goal. We’ll throw a couple of examples your way to illustrate, but likely our examples are more simplified than your goals.
Let’s say you’re looking to save an extra hundred dollars per month, to put towards your passion project, your retirement, the uses are your goal. What do you need to do each day to reach that goal. That could be brewing your own coffee at home each morning (we hate that example, but in this case it could work). Or it could be making your own lunch every day. (This saves you money and helps you control your diet, a far better example than your morning cup of jo.) Making your lunch every day will save you probably $5 or more a day (if you live in a city). That’s an extra $25 a week to put towards your goal, or an extra $100 a month. Your goal achieved. But you don’t even need to worry about saving the extra $5 a day or the $100 a month. You just need to focus on making lunch for the day, each day. In that case, making lunch is the leading behavior.
To see this in action we should look at James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, and his research, on the paperclip strategy [https://jamesclear.com/paper-clips].
Reading the article, we can see that the leading behavior was simply making a call. While James jumps into the various psychological cues of the behavior, the actual behavior itself is what drives success. [You can check out JamesClear.com for some advanced habit forming practices and rituals.] The behavioral trigger led to some incredible results, incredible successes, incredible finish lines crossed.
The habit, the progressive chase after the daily behavior trigger leads to successful accomplishment of goals. These are the steps that lead across the finish line. That’s why we have our daily and weekly checklist. This helps us track our daily behaviors that eventually lead to success. With enough check-marks in effective behaviors, success is inevitable.
And so we leave on this; For each of your goals, for each of your pillars, what are the daily behaviors that you need to do that move the needle towards your next milestone? What can you do today to shape the future of tomorrow?