Attach Rewards to Your Goals And Achieve Higher Success

As the old saying goes, “physician heal thyself”. Business and life coaching isn't any different. It is funny that sometimes we forget to look in the mirror and judge ourselves. While talking with a client today I realized something I have been overlooking in my own life for some time now.

I had been confusing goals and rewards. Actually, I was skipping the goals and listing the rewards. Years ago when I first started creating goal sheets with my wife, the sheets listed real goals. Recently my wife and I had a discussion about our goals in the previous year and for the next year. She had accomplished significantly more of her goals than I had. I chalked my lack of accomplishment up to the fact that I was focused on a different area and obviously the goals were not as important as I had thought a year before when we created the goal sheets.


After talking with my client today I thought back over both of our goal sheets and realized the goals I had missed were really rewards. One of the things that I teach business owners is the importance of goal sheets. The most important part of a goal sheet is the reward, and even what happens after the reward.

Let's say that as a business owner you set a goal for your team of $100,000 per week in sales. In order to hit this target, there has to be a reward. Otherwise why would they do it. The reward doesn't have to be much, but it has to be something tangible. As Napoleon Bonaparte said “The day my life changed was the day I figured out a man would die for a blue ribbon.” Once they have received their reward, that is when the next step must be planned out. Are you going to expect them to reach $100,000 per week, every week after they've done it once? Are you going to expect them to go higher each week? In either case what is the next reward?

I have seen many businesses lose good people because of misguided incentives and reward programs. The owner will set a goal, and offer a reward. After somebody hit the goal and receives the reward, they are confused about why they are expected to continue the same level of performance with no further reward. The owner on the other hand is confused as to why a person could do so well and then no longer achieve the same targets. The problem is the owner doesn't take the goal down or doesn't set a new reward. The owners In the employees both become frustrated by the inconsistency of the goal reward program. Every new goal needs a new reward.

It takes a long time that consistently achieving goals and receiving rewards before the frequency of the rewards for the same goal can be reduced. For people, when the frequency of the rewards are reduced for achieving a particular goal, many times we find it better to set a new higher goal with a new larger reward, thereby eliminating the original reward.

As owners the same rules of incentives and rewards apply to you. When you set a goal for yourselves you too need a reward. Each time you obtain a goal you should receive a reward. This is the same positive reinforcement method that you should be using with your employees and your family. The reward is the reason for the work that achieves the goal. In your family lives, the knowledge of the reward may result in better support from your families as you try to reach your goals.

After a while, you can become so good at making your goals and earning the rewards that you start thinking about the rewards first. This is the mistake that I made. I became so good at the process that I started to confuse the goals in the rewards. Last year I had selected a goal of a Harley-Davidson Softail Custom. After a year I had still not achieved this goal. This is one of the goals of my wife pointed out when we had our annual goal setting day. As I said in the beginning I had missed several goals, which was something new for me.

Looking closely at the goal of a Harley-Davidson Softail Custom, I realized that this was a reward, not a goal. There wasn't any work defined in order to get to the Harley-Davidson Softail Custom. I had to do something in order to get there, and I had not defined what that “something” was. Even if that something was as simple as saving $3000 for a down payment, there had to be something that required work that resulted in my achieving of a goal. Only then could I purchase the Harley-Davidson Softail Custom as my reward.

You should have written down your goal sheets for the next year and started working backwards to today. By knowing where you want to go it is much easier to find the path that leads you there. Just remember that the rewards are not the target or the goal. You create your goal sheet, which is a set of goals that require tangible results from work to achieve. With each of these goals, define a reward.

The Harley-Davidson Softail Custom is now a reward attached to a goal for next year.