Renal Diet Headquarters Podcast 044 – SMART Goals and Willpower

Podcast #44 Released on January 7, 2015   Welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast with your host, Mathea Ford, CEO of Renal Diet Headquarters. This is our weekly talk about how you can succeed with a kidney diet. Brought to you by renaldiethq.com, a website whose mission is to be the most valued resource on kidney disease that people can use to improve their health. Hello, welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters. Podcast. This is Mathea Ford, and this week we're recording episode number 44 of the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast. You can find the links to this show at www.renaldiethq.com. Okay, this week we're going to talk about making goals and things that are smart and good goals for your resolutions for the new year and talking a little bit about willpower and how it works. So, I want to play a little clip for you from someone who's talking about setting smart goals and how they work and what you need to do to create smart goals. And then I'm going to talk about it. Smart goal setting for everyone. Setting goals is an important part of running a successful business today. Many businesses like to use the smart goal setting process. By using this process, it's possible to come up with an easy to execute plan. Smart stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. As you can see, this process can help you set realistic and attainable goals. Let's go through these processes in more detail. Specific goals are the best kind of goal to set and much better than just setting a very general goal. When you focus on just one specific goal, it helps everyone involved attain it. This is extremely important for employees. Giving them just one goal to reach at a time helps you to eliminate confusion and obstacles that would otherwise get in the way. Measurable means putting things in place that will help you measure the progress of the goal. This could be adding a completion date to the goal, or it could mean having everyone involved track their progress on a spreadsheet. Being measurable helps both employers and employees stay on track. Attainable means setting a goal which can be reached. While it's perfectly acceptable to set lofty or big goals, it doesn't help anyone if the goal is so big that it doesn't motivate the players. A business can lose time, money and resources by setting unreachable goals. Plus, it doesn't help with employee morale. Relevancy helps to keep everyone on track by giving them the same core values. When employees care about their place of employment, they're more motivated to help make things happen. One reason why it's important to ensure that your employees are happy. Timely goals keep everyone on track. This is where having a finish date for the goal is important. It's also part of human nature to want to know when this task will end. It makes it easier for someone to work overtime if they know it's only for a month. During the busy season, setting timely goals provides people with a sense of urgency and helps them keep things in perspective. The above steps are those that are put into place by using the Smart system. While many businesses swear by this system, some say that more is needed and that this process is actually missing a step. The missing step involves evaluating your goals at regular intervals. Evaluating is different to measuring your goals. When a goal is evaluated, it's looked at to see if the actions that are being taken are actually working or not. During the evaluation process, if things are found to not be working, then action steps can be put into place to change the direction of the goal. The evaluation step is not just a one time thing. Good business owners will realize that goals need to be continually evaluated until they've been accomplished. Business goals change for a variety of reasons, including due to the current economy and due to expansions in the business. There may be a huge change in management,