Everyone has hopes and dreams, when people set goals that excite and motivate them, they do whatever is necessary to turn their vision of the future, into reality.

Setting clearly defined goals is a powerful way to determine your ideal future and give you direction. Ask yourself:

• What is important to achieve in your life?
• Where do you want to go in life and business?
• What might lure you from your course? What is important, irrelevant or a distraction? 
• Where can you concentrate your efforts?

• Determine your focus areas

  Focus areas are key life areas we wish to focus on to achieve our vision. Determining key focus areas will help you fulfill your vision and create structure around how to achieve your farm business goals.

  Focus areas are often called “areas of life” or “big rocks”. Goals and actions are developed for each focus area.

  Focus areas

  There are no rules around which focus areas you should choose. To help you create balance in your life, it is useful to consider selecting a balanced range of areas including:

  • Personal - health and fitness
  • Farm business performance - stockmanship, pasture management, financial performance
  • Professional development - such as training and industry awareness.

  Download a list of possible focus areas and determine yours.

  Personal and business focus areas could include:

  Health and fitness	Networking and reputation building	Industry awareness and understanding
  Friends and social life	Leisure and fun	Building a herd or buying stock
  Farm systems skills or experience	Personal development	Staff management
  Spiritual	Saving money	Industry contribution
  Wealth creation or investments	Learning or building skills	Caring for the environment
  Community contribution and helping others	Partner	Holidays and travel
  Family	Leadership	Industry awareness and understanding

• Set SMART goals

  Dreams will stay dreams if you don't identify and achieve specific goals and actions. Writing down and putting intentional focus on achieving goals sets you up for success. 

  Develop SMART goals for each of your key focus areas. 

  Think about what is needed to get you from your current position, to your desired position. What does success look like?

  To be effective and powerful, goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time bound, for example, instead of having "To own a farm" as a goal, it's more powerful to say "To own a farm by 31 December, 2025".

  For each goal, think about what help or new information you may need. Ask yourself, will I need:

  1. Leadership support: someone to help me with direction, strategy
  2. Mentoring: someone that has ‘been there done that’ and had experience in where I want to head
  3. Coaching: someone to keep me on track, someone who questions and gets me to justify things to myself, hold myself to account for getting things done – may not necessarily have had previous experience
  4. New information: courses, reading, farm facts, technical specialists e.g. consultant, accountant etc.

  Use the SMART process to test the goals you write and to keep yourself accountable, if you don’t think your goal is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic or it doesn’t have a time frame keep refining it.

  Breaking down your goals into bite sized chunks and prioritising and sequencing the actions you need to take will help you to make sure you are working on the right things, measure your progress and feel a sense of control and achievement as you do it. 

• Develop your action plan

  Your action plan should detail the steps and activities required to achieve each goal. Meaningful action plans keep you motivated and on track by breaking goals into bite-sized, manageable activities against which you can measure your progress.

  Download and complete our action planner to prioritise actions, assign responsibility, allocate time frames, and assess your progress.

  There are no rules about what you should or shouldn't include as actions in your action plan. Some people list each mini step, while others outline the key major steps.

  • Organise actions into a priority order
  • Try listing each action in mini steps or outline the key major actions
  • Put a time frame on each action step if possible, to help keep focus and give a measure to assess your goal progress.
  • Make your action steps be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound).

  When action planning

  • Identify what you would need to do to be fully satisfied for each key focus area
  • Assess what actions required to get from your current to desired position
  • Gather necessary resources and undertake learning
  • Surround yourself with helpful people
  • Break steps into bite-sized chunks
  • Prioritise and sequence actions
  • Make your actions SMART

  Decision making matrix

  As you develop your action plans, at times you will need to choose between different options or approaches. Use our decision making matrix to decide which option will help you achieve your goals and best fit your vision and values.

• Bring it all together on a planning wheel

  Your planning wheel provides a visual representation of your vision, focus areas, and the goals and actions you need to achieve that vision. Use the planning wheel to measure and monitor your progress.

  A planning wheel is central to your business plan, it helps you make decisions by considering whether different options align with, or work against, your goals.

  Create your planning wheel

  Transferring your vision, focus areas and goals and action plans is as simple as completing the planning wheel.

  Make your planning wheel something that really motivates and inspires you every day and pin it somewhere you will see it; revisit it often to check you’re on track. Don’t be afraid to get creative with pictures and colour. 

• Celebrate your successes and refresh your goals

  Unlike your vision, goals can change frequently. It’s important to monitor your progress and take pride in achieving your goals.

  At least twice a year revisit your plan and your goals. Tick off goals you have achieved, and review and refresh any that might need to change and set yourself some new ones.

• 

  Video: Goal setting - Greg and Rachel Roadley

  "We regularly review our goals... medium and long term. One of the principle reasons we farm is to have the ability to generate time for ourselves to invest in whatever we want, be that community projects, family, or sports."

• 

  What do you want to achieve this season?

  28 April 2017

  DairyNZ has a new online tool to help you work out what you want – whether it’s to build equity or spend more time in the boat – and form a plan to get there.

• 

  QuickPlan - DairyNZ's interactive tool

  Personalise and create your own vision statements and goals and actions or select from examples gathered from years of interactions with farmers just like you.