Hi everyone, how are you doing so far with organising your goals? In part three of our essential article workbook on the essential guide to goal setting, we are going to show you how to take your big dream and chunk it down into smaller ones.
Let’s do a quick recap. In part one of our essential guide to goal setting, we taught you how to create a balanced brain dump of all the goals and dreams you have for your life. The semantics of whether an item is a goal or dream is not relevant to this series of articles. Goals and dreams are just things you want in your life. Some goals, however, you will have to create in order to get to your long term goal.
In part two of our essential guide to goal setting, we showed you how to divide your goals in to long term goals and short term goals. We then took all your long term goals and took the top three goals that you would like to achieve. Finally, we whittled your top three goals to your number one goal/dream.
So lets get on now and show you how to chunk down your long term goal into smaller goals.
Chunk down to smaller goals
Smaller goals are essential to making your big dream come true. But what if you don’t know what these smaller components are?
To find out, you need to speak to people who have done this journey. For example, if you want to be in dance. Speak to people who have gone on and become a dancer before you. You can find out a lot by using the internet but you will have a more accurate guide by speaking with experienced people in your chosen area. If possible, try attending several industry networking events and exhibitions or a meet up. For example, if it is dance you are interested in – try some dance workshops.
The information you will need include:-
- Length of time it took a person to get to where you want to get to
- What the highs and lows of the journey was
- How they started
- What the milestones in their journey was
- What steps they needed to take to get to the next level
- What mistakes they made
- What information and/or who they needed to contact to improve their skillset
Don’t worry if you can’t get all the information. Just getting the research and speaking with people who are at different stages of your future journey will help to inspire and enable you. After speaking with your heroes, you may even make a decision not to proceed with this goal at this moment in your life.
Goal setting chunk down time
Now that you have a specific goal, you need to break this specific goal into the smaller components. Each of the smaller components will be treated as small specific goals
Let me give you some examples of dreams people have given me and how I have chunked them down to their smaller parts. Here is a non-complex seven step approach to chunk down a large dream or goal.
- Chunk your big dream down it down into several small projects
- Chunk those small projects into mini-projects
- Chunk those mini-projects into micro-projects
- Do all the easy micro-projects first
- If a micro-projects becomes too difficult move on to the next one
- Get help/an expert to help with all the other tasks
- Celebrate the milestones and the end of the journey
Let’s look at the chunk down method using an example of a house renovation examples.
Chunk down large house renovation example
Break the large property renovation into several smaller goals
Small project goal one – redesign
- Redesign entire house colours and furniture
Small project goal two – strip out
- Strip all wall paper
- Remove all old furniture
- Remove all old carpets
- Unscrew any shelves and stuff hanging on the wall
Small project goal three – strip out removal
- Arrange skip for strip out project
- Arrange transport for local dump
Small project goal four – plumbing
- Arrange for all plumbing on bathrooms, radiators and boilers
Small project goal five – electrical
- Arrange for complete re-wiring
Small project goal six – replaster
- Plaster and fill in holes in all walls
Small project goal seven – paint
- Paint entire house
Small project goal eight – flooring
- Put down flooring
Small project goal nine – furnishing
- Put all furniture and soft furnishings such as curtains in each room
Chunk down each small goal into smaller mini-goals
Do you see how we chunk down a large goal of renovating a house into smaller goals? We still to chunk those small goals further. Let’s use one of the small project goals instead of all of them. In this case, we’ll use as an example, small project two – strip out
Smaller mini goals for strip out
Mini goal one – Strip all wall paper
- Ensure all tools for wall paper stripping are available
- Schedule people for wall paper stripping
Mini goal two – Remove all old furniture
- Identify available people who can carry large furniture
- Ensure any special tools such as hex spanners are at the house
- Ensure skip or removal van is available when people are removing furniture
Mini goal three – Remove all old carpets
- Ensure appropriate gloves, dust masks available depending on carpet type.
- Ensure plan for carpet removal (skip, dump, re-use) is communicated to all involved.
Mini goal four – Unscrew any shelves and stuff hanging on the walls
Ensure any special screw-drivers and electrical screw drivers are available
Do you see how we chunk down a small goal into a mini-goal? Let’s use this procedure one more time and chunk one of the mini-goals into a micro goal.
Chunk mini-goals into micro-goals
In this example we will use one of the mini-goals above to strip all wall paper.
Mini-goal one – strip all wall paper.
Micro-goal one – Strip wall-paper in hallway
- Ensure tools and ladder are available
- Ensure water is available for wall-paper stripper unit
- Ensure you have two people for this job. One to strip the wall paper and one to secure the ladder and pass material to the person on the ladder
- Ensure one person is available to use water stripper unit
- Ensure one person is available to use stripping tool to mop up after water-stripper unit
- Ensure bags available to clean stripped paper off the ground
Micro-goal two – strip wall-paper in kitchen
As in micro-project one but also ensure all electric sockets are off in case water from the stripper gets in the sockets
Micro-goal three – strip wall-paper in front lounge
<complete components of project>
Micro-goal four – strip wall paper in bedroom one
<complete components of project>
Did you see what we’re doing here. We are taking a big goal or dream and looking at some of the smaller goals required to complete the big goal. We have used the chunk down method to several times to create more and more SPECIFIC and ATTAINABLE goals. We will come back to specific and attainable later on. I put those two words in capitals to emphasise them to you. words like specific and attainable should be a part of your thought process and communication.
Chunk down goals for becoming a famous singer
Before we end part three of the essential guide to coal setting, let’s look at one more example. In this example, I am only going to share an overview chunk down for becoming a famous singer.
Smaller goals to become a famous singer
- Learn to sing
- Get a singing coach
- Join singing groups such as choirs
- Apply to join bands
- Compose own songs
- Specialise
- Find out what type of people (your audience) like your music
- Work out how to make more music for your audience
- Practice voice exercises two hours a day
- Practice singing cover songs two hours a day
- Learn how to record yourself singing
- Create Youtube or other media channel
- Load at least one song a week into your media channel
- Learn how to socialise and make friends in social media
- Share your latest song on your Facebook or other social media channel
- Look for opportunities to sing in public and create your own gigs
- Learn how to look for further opportunities at gigs
- Set up a regular busking schedule
- Learn how to improve your voice through negative and positive comments
- Learn five methods that the music industry works to promote singers
- Engage in as many of those methods
- If you are on this journey add more here 🙂
The above list of mini-goals is not comprehensive. Neither will your list be. Over time as you embark on your journey, other things will come to light, setbacks will occur, friendly boosts will happen. Just write down as much as you can. Your goal list will evolve.
Break these smaller goals to become a famous singer into mini goals
Break these mini-goals to become a famous singer into micro goals
Celebrate that you took the time to create all these goals.
Action Points
Now it’s your turn
Take your big goal and chunk it down. You should have a minimum of fifty things that must happen to make your big goal come true. Remember to celebrate – we are helping you create part of your journey. You can re-use this process over and over for anything you ever want to achieve. Just remember one goal at a time
Before taking action here, please ensure you have read
- Essential guide to goal setting part one: Goal types and brain dump
- Essential guide to goal setting part two: Long term goals
In part four of the essential guide to goal setting, we share how you
- can analyse the likelihood of your dream becoming a reality
- how you take stock of your resources
- how you ensure you have the right mind-set for your journey
Until then live long and prosper, oh and don’t be lazy! Leave us a comment in the section below. We love to hear the tips and insights from our readers.
Join our growing financial freedom community to discuss these articles and other success techniques.
You may like to read the following articles other readers have found useful in helping them to achieve their goals:
- Five techniques to stay focussed
- How SMALL means big success
- Priming to achieve
- WTF should I do with my life?
