What is your BHAG, your Big Hairy Audacious Goal? In the book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, BHAGs are defined as compelling, long-term goals you’re pumped to achieve. Often these are goals that most people think you’re crazy to aspire to, but you want to achieve anyway. Your BHAG gives you something to focus on and aspire to, even when you’re not feeling motivated to do much. 

What’s your BHAG?

If you already know your BHAG, skip ahead to see how to get closer to achieving it this year.

If you’re not sure what your BHAG is, now is the time to find it. First, pinpoint what your ultimate goal is. Do you want to be the number one salesperson in your industry? Or, perhaps you want to lead a business that is so successful that you can quit your day job or that would allow your spouse to quit their day job. Both of these goals may seem impossible, especially if you’re just starting out in your network marketing business. However, they’re not totally out of reach. While they may encourage you to stretch beyond what you thought possible, they can be achievable in time. And that’s the key. You shouldn’t be able to reach your BHAG within the next year, especially if you just set it. Think long term, as in the next decade. What do you want to achieve in your business in the next 10 years?

How to get closer to achieving your BHAG

Although you may not achieve your BHAG this year, you can get closer to doing so. Here’s how.

Set tangible goals

This is important. While your BHAG may be out of reach, the goals you develop to help you get there should be tangible and realistic for your skills and situation right now. That’s not to say they won’t be ambitious; however, there’s a difference between being out of your comfort zone and totally out of reach. 

What can you achieve this year? Look at your progress and results over the past year or so to see what is achievable for you at this point. Were you able to achieve your goals relatively easily last year? This year, set goals that are a bit more challenging. If you had trouble meeting your goals last year, try adjusting them so that you can be sure you’ll achieve them this year. 

When you’re creating goals, whether it’s a short-term goal you’ll achieve over the next few weeks or a longer-term goal you’ll reach over the next year, always keep your BHAG in mind. Each goal you create and achieve will get you that much closer to your ultimate goal.

Prioritize your business to harness your focus

Many network marketers miss achieving their goals or fall off track by mid-year. Why? They don’t make their businesses a priority. As a result, they aren’t able to apply their focus to building their businesses and achieving their goals. If you want to thrive in network marketing, you have to make your business a priority.

For many, this is easier said than done. We all have the best of intentions, but it’s the follow-through that gets us hung up every time. That’s why we have to make it easier to remember to prioritize our businesses, at least until it becomes a habit we can’t shake.

Write it down. If you make a daily to-do list, be sure to add your business to it, that is, your Power Hour. A Power Hour is a block of time in which you commit to focusing on building your business. You’ll connect with your network, do general business housekeeping, and maybe even work on personal development so that you’re able to provide the best version of you to your network. 

Pinpoint your top 2 priorities. Once you’re written your to-do list, circle or highlight your top two priorities for the day. Your business should be one of them. These are the two tasks that you’ll complete, no matter what. This will help you fight distractions and stay on track to focus on your priorities and achieve your goals. 

Ignore distractions. This is the hardest part. There are always things that try to veer us off course and distract us from our goals. You’ve got to ignore them, at least for the time being until you can complete your top 2 priorities of the day. Try to find a quiet place to work to work on your business, or identify a time of day when distractions are less likely to take over your day.

Get accountable

Accountability is a trick to help you stay on track. We’re more likely to do what we say we will when we’ve told someone about it. Not only that, if we can bring them along for the ride and encourage them to keep us honest to our goals, they’ll help ensure we do it. 

For many network marketers, there’s someone on the team who can help them stay accountable and serve as an accountability buddy. Let’s say you have a goal to double your sales in the next quarter. Your accountability buddy will check in with you to make sure you reached out to your network that day. Not only that, you may provide that same level of accountability to them. This makes you more likely to reach out to your network and reach your daily goals. After all, you’re not only letting yourself down if you don’t do it; you’re also letting your accountability partner down as well.

Get a coach

A coach is an accountability partner on steroids. They not only provide accountability when you need it most, but they can also offer input and advice to help you in your business as well. If you’re having trouble staying on track or feel your motivation waning, a coach can help you refocus your energy on your business and your goals. And, they can help you create goals that not only will help you succeed this year but will also get you closer to your BHAG as well. 

What’s more, is they provide unbiased input about your business. Whereas a spouse or team member may have a vested interest in your success, your coach doesn’t have that level of interest. Whether you succeed or not doesn’t directly impact them so they can give you the straight truth without sugar-coating it. If you’re not focusing on doing a regular Power Hour, they’ll delve into why that is. Perhaps you’ve lost motivation or you just feeling lazy. A coach will give you strategies to move past this roadblock and get you back on track. 

Check-in with your goals regularly

Regularly is the keyword. For some network marketers, “regularly” means twice a year. For others, it’s once a quarter or even once a month. Whatever you decided it means is up to you. The point is to revisit your goals multiple times during the year. There are many benefits to this:

1. To remember the goals you’ve set. Your goals aren’t “set it and forget it” even though most people treat them that way. Most people who set goals do so at the beginning of the year and never think about them again until they attempt to set goals for the following year. If you want to achieve your goals, you have to check in with them from time to time. 
2. To keep them top of mind. Reviewing your goals will help them stay top of mind. That way you always know what you’re setting out to achieve. On days when you’re not feeling very motivated, you can remember what you’re working so hard for.
3. So you can correct your course. Doing a goal check-in will allow you to see how close you are to reaching your goals and alert you if it looks like you’re falling behind or off-track. This way, you can take steps to correct your progress, whether it’s adding another Power Hour to your week or tweaking your short-term goals to add more people to your network.
4. To stay motivated. Want a quick surge of motivation? Review your goals! Reading over your goals will help you remember why you’re working hard and remind you of your BHAG.

If you do all of these things, you can be sure you’ll be on track to achieving your BHAG. Remember, the more milestones you reach, the more likely you are to achieve the main goal, regardless of how impossible it seems right now. 

Teamzy can help you reach your BHAG 

Teamzy makes it easy and fun to not only set goals but to reach them as well. Whether you want to achieve your BHAG or the short-term goals you’ve set along the way, Teamzy offers the tools you need to succeed. Set goals, track your progress, and have all the tools you need to stay top of mind of everyone in your network. We also offer short training videos to help you focus on building a lasting network marketing business. If you’re not using Teamzy yet, what are you waiting for? Click here to learn more.