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Vision Becomes a Reality with Strategic Goal setting
Are you motivated to develop yourself and prepare your business to flourish in 2025? Then you must know that growth is not automatic! Growth must be intentional. It’s in that purposeful approach where the value of strategic goal setting reveals itself and vision becomes a reality.
A Structured Path Forward
Whether leaders or specialists, we have an innate drive to evolve and achieve greatness. The challenge is that we can’t always see a clear development path, which often holds us back.
So how do we turn our passion for growth and development into an actionable strategy and success?
Through goal setting!
Goal setting is defined as an articulation of objectives you set to achieve. It’s a process that provides a clear roadmap to help your vision become a reality.
Last year PwC released their study on goal setting. It revealed that employees who engaged in goal-setting practices were 34% more likely to meet longer-term business objectives, enjoyed better morale and had a greater impact on organisational success.
This tells us that there is a science to goal setting, and we can draw from it to enhance our personal and professional growth.
As a start, it means you must make significant changes in how you do things daily. As John Maxwell says: “You’ll never change your life until you change something you do every day”.
The Building Blocks of Goal Setting
According to goal setting theory (Locke and Latham, 1990), there are 7 building blocks of effective goal setting:
- Self-efficacy – Confidence to believe you can do it.
- Belief – “The Why” refers to how much the goal matters.
- Commitment – Your commitment must match the difficulty. You may require resources, self-discipline, habits for success, elimination of distractions and perhaps a support structure.
- Specificity – The goal must be specific and clear.
- Attainable – You must be stretched, fully engaged, excited, and compelled to move forward.
- Skills and experience – There may be learning gaps that must be closed.
- Feedback – You’ll need the perspective of others.
Self-efficacy Fuels Growth
As a mentor and Enterprise Development Coach, I believe we must go beyond frameworks and cultivate a purpose-driven mindset rich in self-efficacy, conviction, and commitment.
I recently coached a group of small enterprise owners and asked what their personal and business vision would be if they knew they couldn’t fail.
They expressed a desire to grow their business from survival mode into a thriving success story. I then asked how they felt about their visions, and of course, they felt inspired and excited about life.
But for a moment, their inspiration dimmed, and they were quickly grabbed by one or more mistaken beliefs on growth.
Some felt high-level success was only for a select few and out of their reach. Others thought they didn’t know enough to grow. Sadly, it made them want to scale down their goals.
Believe in Yourself
The truth is that growth is for everyone who pursues it with the correct mindset and an effective goal-setting strategy.
Carol Dweck tells us that there are significant links between a growth mindset and the ability to achieve our goals.
People with a growth mindset are persistent, embrace challenges, see effort as a path to mastery, and learn from feedback. These essential attributes can help us execute our goal-setting strategies.
Coaching Brings It All Together
Coaching is a powerful support tool for effective goal setting. At Change Partners, we provide executive coaching and leadership development initiatives to help you develop an effective strategy and the mindset tools to follow through.
We’ve introduced a critical step to SMART goals called growth goals to encourage positive thinking, self-discipline, and resilience.
Let 2025 be the year where your inspiring growth and development goals become a reality. We’ll walk that journey with you and celebrate your wins.
With a diverse team of professionals experienced in unlocking leadership excellence, and tuned to the future of leadership development, Change Partners is perfectly positioned to help you advance.
Tebalo Tomane is an International Executive Coach at Change Partners with a wealth of experience in business. She’s passionate about empowering leaders to step up to become the best versions of themselves.
Contact her at tebalotomane@change.co.za or on 083 636 3120, and make your leadership journey a rewarding one.
