This week, we’re talking about goal setting and how the traditional means of setting goals may not be serving you, and what you can do instead.

Let’s discuss a new way to look at and set goals that will actually help us not only create goals but work on achieving them in a timely manner and help us to build our businesses. I’m going to reference and summarize what Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes about this type of goal at Ness Labs. Reference linked in the show notes.

These goals are called PACT goals. P-A-C-T.

PACT goals are:

P:  Purposeful: Every goal we set needs to be meaningful to us and our long-term purpose in life and business, not just relevant to us right now in one moment. We need to care about the goals we set. I.e. I can set a goal of reaching out to 10 new people via DM on Instagram to ask them to subscribe to my newsletter, which would be a good resource for that person but what does that do for my business or life? Not much. Spending time working in and on my business, i.e. auditioning is well worth it and more meaningful to me because I know for a fact this is how I get work.

A: Actionable: A good goal is based on outputs we can control. If you haven’t yet, go listen to episode #31, where I talk about demystifying your daily workflow with a simple system. We talk about output goals and that’s what we’re talking about here as well. Actionable and controllable goals – for example, I know auditioning keeps my pipeline full so I need to do it every day. I will set a goal of 15 auditions per day. Not only is this reasonable but I can achieve this goal 100% of the time if my workday is normal. I’ll take it!

C: Continuous: Goals that are meaningful and actionable need to be simple and able to be repeated easily. For instance, in episode #31 when we talk about categorizing goals, we talk about doing the things in our business that actually get us closer to our definition of success, more financial freedom, more time away from work stuff, whatever that looks like for you. And the only way to achieve these goals is to be sure they are bite-sized and something we can do over and over again so we can see if something is working or not and to remain consistent in accomplishing what we want. 

And T: Trackable: NOT measurable. Statistics in our businesses can be for vanity metrics alone and that’s not useful to us in our day-to-day. Trackable goal setting can be as simple as asking yourself “did you audition for 15 jobs today?” if the answer is yes, MOVE ON. If the answer is no, do the thing or not. Either way, tracking your goals doesn’t have to be complicated and, frankly, it shouldn’t be. Getting into the details of audition listens, shortlisted auditions, emails in your inbox, etc. makes you distracted and gets you off track and you’ll lose out on time you could have otherwise used to do the work you need to do on a given day – talking from experience here. Can you tell?

All we’re doing here with PACT goals are shifting our mindset on how we think about goals. The key takeaway goes back to setting up a simple system for your business – and most of the work comes at the beginning when you’re building your business and working to set up a client base, make time to audition, and send out marketing emails if you’re at that step yet. When we look at our businesses, it’s important to create the most viable version of our business, one that has a simple system in place and goals that are purposeful, actionable, continuous, and trackable to keep us organized and motivated. I’m telling you, if you take the time, sit with yourself and untangle what you need to do each day and take out all the busy work, figure out what makes you money and keeps your pipeline full, gets you more time with your family and your hobbies instead of working – you’ll be ahead of so many other freelancers out there. And I’m telling you from experience, of doing exactly what I’ve talked about in my podcast, that you can make this happen. But that’s just it – you have to make it happen. So, yea, all of this sounds simple enough, but while you are your greatest business asset you can also be the biggest crutch or reason why you’re not progressing. So take some time with yourself to really understand what we’ve discussed in this episode and episode 31.