Setting and meeting Goals provides direction and joy. These simple steps will help you identify, define, and plan how your goals will be attained. For example, if you want to move up in your company, what's required? How much in personal sales? How many Consultants on your team?

Decide what you want and write it down - be precise!

· What changes do you want to make? · What income would you like? · What level of management do you want to reach and by when?

State what you are willing to give in return for your goal. Achieving your goal may require that you yield in other areas, make phone calls during a lunch hour, or miss a movie with friends in order to attend a meeting.

Why are your goals important?

List six reasons for accomplishing each goal, for example, “It will make me feel fantastic!” “I can buy that new furniture.” Or, “It will help toward my promotion by ...”

Focus on four goals at a time.

Start writing down all your desires - big and small - and don’t stop for one hour. Things you want to do, things you want to have, and person you want to be. Highlight your primary goal, and then select three others, which excite you and often support attainment of your primary goal.

Identify smaller steps that lead to each goal.

Mission-Critical Public Relations?

As a business, non-profit or association manager, any tool that helps you reach your department, division or subsidiary objective IS mission-critical.

And particularly so when that tool helps you persuade your most important external stakeholders to your way of thinking, and then moves them to take actions that lead to your success.

Here is such a mission-critical tool. One that lets you get serious about your public relations. It shifts emphasis away from communications tactics to a workable plan for reaching those outside groups of people with a large say about how successful you’re going to be – namely, your key external target audiences. The tool says, “People act on their own perception of facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done. When we create, change or reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action very people whose behaviors affect organization most, public relations mission is accomplished.”

Use this blueprint to create behaviors that lead to activities like more follow up purchases, higher contributions levels, increased qualified employment applications, new joint venture proposals or a big boost in capital contributions.

First, meet with public relations people assigned to your department, division or subsidiary and let them know you’re serious about finding out what your most important outside audiences actually think about your organization. The rationale being that target audience perceptions usually lead to behaviors that can help or hinder you in achieving your operating objectives.

Decide among you which audiences are really key to your success then build and prioritize your list of important outside groups of people whose actions most affect your unit. Now, let’s work on #1 on that list.

Your new mission-critical public relations effort will rest heavily on how efficient you are in rounding up perceptions of your key target audience.

You can put your public relations team to work interacting with members of that #1 outside audience. Or, if you can tap a good sized budget, you can ask a professional survey firm to do job for you. However, because your PR folks are already in perception and behavior business, my choice would be to use them for this assignment.