Be your best self.

How To Plan A 3 Month Goal Sprint

How To Plan A 3 Month Goal Sprint
Carly Jacobs
I

’m not the biggest fan of New Year’s resolutions. I think they put too much pressure on people. ‘I’m not going to drink alcohol for the WHOLE YEAR!’ or ‘I’m going to make a MILLION DOLLARS by December!’

Those goals are great but they’re kind of hard to achieve if you don’t break them down in to smaller chunks.

goal

My goal big goals this year are to lose some kgs that crept on over the last few years and to increase my Crochet Coach customers base (I swear I will get this world COVERED in crochet if it’s the last thing I do).

Both of these goals are pretty big and neither of those things can wait until September when I decide I give a shit about it. So I need to break it up into little bite sized portions.

I started my first sprint of the year on January 1st and it went up until 31st March. I’m just about to start my next one and I think you should join me.

goal

My goals for the Jan to March three month sprint were these…

– Lose 8kg

– Get to 250 Crochet Coach members

I actually didn’t achieve either of these goals despite concentrating fully on both of these things.

I only lost 5kg but I lost 11cms off my waist (and lots of cms every where else).

I got a quite a few new Crochet Coach customers (about 170) but not as many as I would have liked and I definitely didn’t reach my goal. I was focussing on business development, current customers (always important) and social growth. My next sprint will be focussing on customer acquisition.

goal

What I learnt

– Sometimes you need to change your markers for success. With my weight loss I didn’t reach the target but I smashed the target with centimetres lost. Sometimes success looks a bit different than you thought it would and that’s okay.

– Sometimes you need to readjust your focus. The definition of insanity is repeating the same behaviour but expecting different results. I had an amazing three months with Crochet Coach but I wasn’t focussing on the right stuff. I’ll be re-adjusting my strategy for this goal in my next three month sprint.

goal

My goals for May, June and July

Lose another 5 kgs (or whatever centimetres this presents itself as) – that seems to be what my body can manage in a three month period.

Get to 300 Crochet Coach Customers – Although I didn’t get as many new customers in my last sprint as I hoped for, I got enough to bump my goal up to the next level for my next sprint.

The next sprint starts on May 1st

I was going to start my next sprint straight away but you know what? Sprints are tiring. I really needed a month off. I’m certainly not stopping working on my goals but I’m giving myself some time to move slowly for a month to re-group.

How To Stick To Your Goals

1. Write down your truth every day

Every day on my sprint I wrote the same statement.

I weigh (insert weight) and I have 200 Crochet Coach customers. It wasn’t a wish or dream, I was making it my reality. I’m going to continue to use these positive truths to get to my goal. I like how it frames the goal as a non-negotiable reality.

2. Focus on only those two things

And say no to everything else. I got offered a great freelance job during this sprint and I turned it down because it didn’t align with my two goals. There was no benefit to taking the job except that it would take time away from the things I really wanted to achieve.

3. Be kind to yourself

3 months is a long time. It’s okay to have a slack few days – don’t beat yourself up about it!

A word on weight

I’ve had a few people get a bit shirty with me for using weight as a measurement of weightloss because there’s a trend at the moment of people not using actual kilogram weight as a measurement for weightloss. I totally get that – obviously because I’m one of those people who loses centimetres well before kilos but I train hard at the gym several times a week and extra weight is a burden to my training. It doesn’t matter how small my waist gets, if I’m carrying an extra 5 kgs (or 10kgs!), it makes my training harder. I honestly don’t care what I weigh for any other reason but I’d love for push ups and chin ups to be easier or even achievable – hence the focus on losing kgs. I also get comments from people saying that I’m healthy and I shouldn’t be so obsessed with losing weight. Yes, I am healthy but I only have to have a few extra glasses of wine a week for a few months before I gain weight and become unhealthy. I gain weight VERY easily, more easily than most people so I need to stay on top if it constantly. For some reason having weightloss goals is demonised these days but I can’t do much about that. It’s a battle I’ve been fighting my whole life and the ‘just eat the damn cake’ or ‘life is too short to not eat chocolate’ kind of lifestyle mantras don’t work for me and they never have. Just wanted to clear those few things up.

Also today is podcast day! Here’s today’s episode. We’re talking about decision fatigue. Like when you spend all day making important decisions and then when you have to order dinner, you feel crying. Is that you? Here are our thoughts on decision making.

If you’re keen to join the 3 month sprint just join the The Smaggle Crew group on Facebook. I’ll be doing some challenges and prompts and things in there for the next three months to keep people on track.

[divider type=”standard” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]

What do you want to do on your 3 month sprint? What areas need focus in your life?

 

[divider type=”standard” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]

P.S Also you should totally sign up for my newsletter. It’s full of cool stuff.
P.P.S Don’t forget Crochet Coach has a free trial offer period at the moment so float on over and join my crochet mail list.

3 Comments

  1. Dawn 7 years ago

    I’ve been working on losing weight since the end of last year, 1st10lbs down and people keep telling me i don’t need to lose any more. I’m still 2st away from the top end of a healthy weight range for me and i know what works for me since this is not time on the weight lose seesaw. It’s always nice to get a compliment but a lot of times people do need to learn to stop at the compliment and let everyone do what works for them.

    • Author
      Carly Jacobs 7 years ago

      Oh that’s great progress! I’m the same, people always tell me I don’t need to lose weight but they’re not the ones trying to pull up my body of my bricks at the gym! 🙂

Pingbacks

  1. […] am IN LOVE with this idea of planning 3 month goal ‘sprints’ instead of charging head first into a huge […]

Leave a Reply