We are almost into the 4th quarter of the year. By now you are well on your path to achieving the goals you set in January. Ideally, you would have checked in with your goals throughout the year, not only to refresh your memory of what they were but also to see how far you’ve come. You have a general idea of how close you are to achieving your goals. Some may be ahead of the game. Others may be right on track. And others may be behind. The good news is you still have time to catch up. With planning and a commitment to your habits, you can be sure to get closer to achieving your goal by the end of the year. Here’s how:

Assess your progress toward your goals

The first step is to assess your progress. This is where you see how close or how far away you are from achieving your goals. It is important to know this. After all, it’s difficult to know how far you need to go if you’re not sure where you are. Think of it as checking the temperature of your business.

How close are you to where you want to be? Are you nearly there, but perhaps some setbacks have caused you to lose momentum? Perhaps you’ve lost motivation and you need a quick boost. Or are you far away from your goal and are finding it hard to catch up to the target? In both of these situations, it is possible to get back on track, even if you are far behind. Although the farther behind you are the harder you’ll have to work to get on track, it’s not impossible. The key is to ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you close to achieving your goal? 
• How close do you want to be by the end of the year? 
• When did you start to fall off track? 
• Did you Miss short-term goals or milestones? 
• When were you supposed to have met your short-term goals and milestones? 
• Is your goal no longer feasible? 
• Do you have to reassess your goal in the year ahead?

These questions will not only help you see how far you’ve come but also figure out what you need to do to get back on track.

Analyze what went wrong

Now that you’ve assessed your progress, you can start thinking about the challenges or hurdles that you encountered throughout the year. Many network marketers have a lot of motivation and energy to succeed at the beginning of the year, but a few months in that motivation begins to wane and so does their commitment toward doing the activities that build their businesses. This is normal, it may happen to even the most successful people. However, successful people understand that they need to recharge their motivation and get back on track to succeed.

Another common setback is that you may not see the results of your efforts right away. It’s hard to stay motivated when it feels like you’re doing a lot of work but not seeing the fruit of your labor. People aren’t returning your calls or messages because they are busy, not because they don’t want to hear from you. However, it’s easy to begin to think that as you craft a narrative in your head that may be entirely false. Results take time. And building relationships takes time. You have to have the patience in order to enjoy the results.

Sometimes life happens and it can wreak havoc on your business. Maybe you or a loved one had a health challenge or other personal setback that prevented you from focusing on your business as you wanted to. If this happened, now is the time to get back on track. You can make up the activities that you may have missed at the time. By doing more activities now, you may be able to make up for the time lost.

Whatever the reason, it’s important to identify any setback or challenge you experienced so that you know how to deal with it in the future should you experience it again.

Think about how to move forward

Now that you know how close you are to achieving your goals and have identified what prevented you from reaching it along the timeline you had expected, now’s the time to think about moving forward. When we fall short of where we intended to be, it’s normal to want to wallow in this perceived failure instead of moving forward. While it’s important to identify what happened, it’s also important to create a plan to help you not only move forward but also avoid the issue in the future. Here are some ways to do so:

Increase your Power Hours

Doing more Power Hours is a simple way to get back on task when you fall short of your goals. By adding another Power Hour or two to your week, you can begin to make up for lost time.

Adjust your goal

Sometimes we get so caught up in setting goals that we become more ambitious than our skills and experience reflect. That isn’t to say that these goals are completely untenable. They may just not be within our reach right now. If you find yourself in this situation, take a step back to really think about your goal and what you want to accomplish. It may be that you set a goal that’s more of a 5-year goal then a goal you can accomplish this year. You have a couple of options. One, you could keep the goal as it is knowing that you will adjust it in January. Or two, you could adjust it now to be more in line with your progress as it is today. If you choose the second option, then increase it in January, keeping in mind that you need to make the goal more realistic.

Recommit to your business

Building a business takes commitment. You have to commit to your daily activities, commit to building relationships with your network, and commit to building your team. Although you may experience setbacks that cause your commitment to waiver, it’s essential to recommit to your business. You can do this at any time. One of the best ways to recommit to your business is to review your goals regularly so that they do not fall off your radar. Another way is to commit to doing Power Hours each day, or several times a week, in order to build relationships with people in your network. These are little things that help you build your business.

Note the lessons for next time

Whenever you experience a setback, just remember that there is always a lesson to learn to help you should you encounter it again. If falling behind in achieving your goals is the result of a setback that you encountered, take the time to find the lesson in it. That way you know how to handle the situation next time without falling behind in your business. This adds to your expertise and experience to not only prevent it from happening again in your business but also prevent it from happening in your team’s businesses. By sharing your experiences with your team they will be better prepared to handle the situation if they encounter in their own lives.

Teamzy can help you get and stay on track to achieve your goals

We created Teamzy to help network marketers build the foundation of a successful network marketing business. Part of this is setting and achieving goals. To achieve goals, it’s important to track your progress throughout the year. Teamzy makes it easy to track your progress so that with a click of a button, you always know where you stand. We love to see you succeed! Find out how we can help.