Tomorrow is the day we all share our goals for FinishYear! I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve got planned for 2012. As you work on your list of goals, I want to remind you of something. If your goals aren’t measurable or tangible, you won’t actually finish them. Every great book on goal setting will tell you that.

But how do you take a goal from fuzzy and undefined to crystal clear and actionable?

Here’s what I’m doing for one of my goals this year:

I want to have a grateful heart this year. I think being ungrateful and entitled would be an amazing way to wreck the fun opportunities I’m getting to do right now. I want to be focused and deliberate about having a grateful heart, but could a goal get fuzzier than that? Where do you even begin on that?

The first thing I did was ask myself, “What actions would a person with a grateful heart be known for?” Then I came up with a list:

1. They’d tell people thank you.

2. They’d send out handwritten thank you notes.

3. They’d slow down during the middle of a busy day to make sure they hadn’t taken anything for granted due to the push and pace of life.

Then I took that list and I applied the items to my own life. For instance, let’s look at number 3. I run around like crazy when I’m traveling to a speaking engagement. I’m nervous and excited and focused on delivering an amazing speech. It would be really easy for me to completely rush by the hard work that the staff at our company is doing to set up the conferences I get to speak at. How can I make sure I have a grateful heart in real-life situations like that?

Next, I took those real-life scenarios and turned them into actions. For instance, one of my goals this year is to empty my thank you note box. It’s got 100 cards in it. And, the best part is that I don’t have to write 100 fake cards just to meet my goal. In a year, I will run into way more than 100 people who I need to write a sincere, honest thank you card to.

Next December, instead of looking at my incredibly fuzzy goal of “having a grateful heart,” I can look at a hopefully empty box of thank you cards and know that I hit one of the metrics that mattered to me.

Is walking from fuzzy goal to real action easy to do? Not always, but I promise that the clearer your goals are, the more likely you’ll actually finish them.

Thanks for reading this post! There are over 100 million blogs and you read this one today. I really appreciate it. (See what I did right there? Boom!)

Question:
On a scale ranging from crystal clear to fuzzy like a teddy bear, where are your goals right now?