Xpand Goals

The problem with most managers and coaches is when they hear someone’s goals, they go “great.” maybe write it down, and then that’s about the level of extent they really focus on it. It is mind boggling. Goals should be starring your client/employee right in the face all the time! 

In Xpand we have built a whole section to help you monitor goals and their progress. We have broken goals into 4 categories: 

1. Achievement 
2. Quantity 
3. Habit
4. Skill

Some goals are going to be micro goals that compound to make up a macro goal. Some goals are a one time thing, and other goals are constantly being updated. Not all goals are checked on as frequently. We have designed a perfect model for leaders to follow that helps you keep goals organized. 

Upon setting any of these goals it’s important that they are SMART goals. 

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Relevant

Time Based

You don’t want to lay out goals that are going to be really hard to know whether you are on track or off, or whether they have accomplished them or not. Most of those types of goals are emotional based, and it is easy to get lost on a roller coaster with a client because emotions are going to change every day. 

If you are in consulting, lots of these may be used as a business not necessarily an individual. They would look more like the business did XYZ by XYZ date. You may share the common goals across departments. You want to make sure that you do these discoveries for the business as a whole and for the business. 

You may not be a health coach, or family therapist. Despite your lack of knowledge, you shouldn’t only focus on goals in your specialty, I believe one should focus on seeing what goals your people have in all aspects of life. 

• Health
• Finance
• Work
• Family/Relationships
• Spiritual/Mental 

People seek leadership in life, and not just “sales performance” or “weight loss.” Find opportunities to learn what they are about in all elements of life. They may not be interested in you helping outside of your specialty, but it is worth exploring. 

Achievement Goals:

An achievement goal is simply a one time event or accomplishment. This would be like:

• Bought dream home by Dec 31 2025
• Ran a marathon by Jan 25th 2024 
• Went to Switzerland by Jun 5th 2023 
• Landed a new job by Sept 21st 2025 
• Got Yoga Certified by Oct 1st 2024
• Bought Wedding Ring by Jan 1st 2026 
• Read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by April 1st 2023

Notice how they all have dates and they all were written in past tense. I like this manifestation practice, and I have been utilizing that for over 10 years and watched many of my big accomplishments come true. Obviously you don’t have to do this, but just fun to play around with it on any of your goals. 

In the platform you will create a start and end date and map out the achievement you are looking to make happen. When creating the goal, it will ask you how often would you like to reflect? This is designed to bring this achievement journey to your attention, and to reflect on your progress towards that. Take the time every time it prompts you to journal down thoughts, hardships, wins, and actions that you may be pondering or dealing with so you have a log of what it took to achieve your goal. This will be fun to look back on and be able to help others achieve in the future. As you recognize patterns you start to find more intention behind your methods and accelerate the process of achievement. 

Example of this would be buying a home. You have the goal to buy a home in 12 months time, each month you would log about the process. 

Month 1: “I have now got qualified for up to $800,000, and know which bank I am using. I have about $10,000 in my account now ready for downpayment, and need another $70,000 to close. I think each month I can start putting away another 8-10k.” 

Month 2: “I wasn’t able to save as much this month as I wanted to because I had to fix my car….” 

Month 3: “I think I found the realtor I am going to use. My friend’s mom Sarah is super nice and seems to catch the vision of the style I want…” 

Another great use case is reading a book. You could reflect weekly on what you have learned that week from the book. You could reflect on the progress of training for the marathon and how you feel. 

Quantity Goals: 

Quantity goals are either dollar amount or numbers. For example: 

• Sell 100 Accounts by Dec 31st 
• Make $100,000 by Jun 1st 
• Make 1000 calls this month
• Lose 10lbs by Aug 31st 
• Raise $50,000 by Dec 31st 
• Bench 300lbs by Sept 1st 

These are used when tracking more KPI (key performance indicators) driven data sets. As a business consultant I would always say, “numbers don’t lie, people do.” If people didn’t have the answer or would say the data wasn’t accurate, I would simply have to reply “then get me accurate data sets.” Tracking numbers in life or business is the fastest way to find a source of truth. People too frequently live in states of self deception. The scale doesn’t lie. 

Commit your mentees to picking 1-4 key drivers that are going to show up consistently whether that is daily or weekly that they have to update. These drivers are what move the needle to the bigger goals that you may set out. But without the compounding efforts of daily activity, don’t expect big results. This consistent micro data points are going to give you insight on how committed, consistent, and diligent your people you lead are. 

Set your start and end dates, and how often you want to update these KPI’s. The app then will automatically remind the user each time they should be updating their goals. This will automate a lot of your check in process instead of banking on reaching out daily, or having them login to some google sheet to do so. 

If you don’t use the Xpand platform you can create google sheets, or use forms to have them update their data points. If possible get access to CRM’s, call logs, fitness apps, whatever you can where they may already have the data, and this could help streamline it for you. But the best solution is to API that data with the Xpand app to create some automation with updated numbers. Somethings aren’t realistic to automate, like paystubs, or calorie intake. The user has to manually input that. 

Habit Goals

“First we make a habit, then a habit makes us.” Charles C Noble 

Habit goals are all about consistency. Many say it takes 21 days in a row to make a habit, but i think it is more like 75+. Duo lingo, headspace and other apps that are trying to create consistent learning or new habits are great at gamifying your consistency streaks. As a leader your ability to inspire new habits is key to creating change. Whether that’s fitness, reading, meditation, prospecting numbers, eating, sleep, date night, stopping an addiction, kid time, etc.. The goal is to bring awareness to how often they are or are not doing the little things that create change. 

“In any discussion about success, the words “discipline” and “habit” ultimately intersect. Though seperate in meaning, they powerfully connect to form the foundation for achievement — regularly working at something until it regularly works for you. When you discipline yourself, you’re essentially training yourself to act in a specific way. Stay with this long enough and it becomes routine — in other words, a HABIT.”   Gary Keller 

Habits involve 3 steps:

Trigger – Something that sparks the thought or time frame to do the habit

Action – Doing the habit

Prize – the tangible or intangible reward that comes from doing the habit

Ed Mylett “Habits all have two things: intentional thought and repetition”

How as a manager or coach do you not be micro managing this, but at the same time you do? People don’t like someone babysitting them naturally. So first and foremost you must get permission to montor things like this from your mentee. It’s important to explain that you are there to hold a line, and take a stand to the committed greater version of them, and it is going to take true visibility into their habits. “Habits are safer than rules, you don’t have to watch them, or you don’t have to keep them either. They keep you!” 

If you are having to babysit it, it isn’t a habit yet for them. Explain this, so it must take some coaching to create the new relationship to the new task.

A few habit hacks that I have helped clients understand that have come from great authors on the topic like James Clear and Stephen Guise are: 

1. Mini Habits
2. Elastic Habits
3. Habit Aggregation
4. Habit Stacking 

What may come so easy to you, may not to your mentee, so you need to establish a baseline. Something that no matter what they can do, and if they fail to do it, then the habit was too big. This is a mini habit. Guise uses the example of 1 push up every day. Don’t tell me you can’t do that. 

Too often as leaders we push so much so fast on our mentees that they lose hope quickly because they can’t keep up with the program and start to slip. I would rather have 100% consistency over intensity. 

When your people can show they can be 100% consistent you can start to aggrate 1% more on their habits. Make it 5 push ups every day, push them to be 100% accurate with it. 

Another awesome technique is having a Mini, Plus, and Elite version of the habit. This comes from the book Elastic Habits. For example, not every morning goes perfect for me, I travel, I wake up late here and there, so I have built 3 different frameworks to have a habit of a great morning routine. 

Mini – 20 mins

Plus – 60 mins

Elite – 120 mins

I know that no matter what I can carve out and do my 20 min routine regardless of how hectic life is. But to assume that I am going to pack in 15 activities that come with my 2 hour morning ritual is ridiculous, but it would be ideal. My goal is to make sure 7 days a week I do one of the three. 

Lastly, help your people by explaining the process of creating a new habit. 1st rule is to make the habit so obvious when and how you are going to do it. An easy example would be if they want to get up before 6am, have them set a going to bed alarm, and 2 extra alarms in the morning 5:50 and 5:55am. This will help them and remind them to take that habit seriously. Another one is if they are trying to go to the gym every morning. Have them lay out their gym clothes and shoes next to the bed the night before so all they have to do is slip them on. 

2nd rule is to make it attractive. Make it exciting to them on why they will wanna do the habit. Create reward systems around it, give praise and recognition constantly to when they accomplish their habits. 

Habit stacking is to add a new habit to your routine by doing it right after a habit you already have. For example; if you brush your teeth before going to bed, and you are looking to add reading to your daily habit, read right after you brush your teeth. Keep the book right by your toothbrush so it is obvious too. You could even start reading while brushing your teeth. This will start to train yourself to add the new habit to your routine. 

Get with your mentee and see where there could be a possibility of stacking on the new habits to old habits that they already have. 

Getting rid of a habit is the same thing. It is common to find trends when people fall into their vices. For example people smoke right after they eat, so replace that habit with something else with them. In the app you are tracking how many days they go without falling into their vice. In addiction recovery lots of times they are celebrating milestones of sobriety. Use that same concept with your coaching. You are 6 months, 1 year, 2 years sober from the negative habit you together broke. 

In Xpand how we have it set up is it will have you choose how often you are looking to do your habit, weekdays, every day, once a week, once a month. Then it will prompt you at the time of your choice to “check in” meaning you did it. If you fail to do it it will then push your notification to later to remind you again. 

You will also set up how many total times you want to complete this habit by a certain date. You will have a goal for the longest streak you can hit. 

I promise when you have a consistent streak of 100 days, you don’t want to have to start back at 0, so when it is 11 oclock and the last thing you want to do is get your reading in, you will do it just to avoid having to start back at 0 and keep your streak alive. This is a major motivator for a lot of individuals. Talk about this with your clients and use it to create more “Free Energy” 

A few other ideas is creating a poster on the wall that you have stickers or markers. You can cross out days you complete the habit, and use different colors based on whether it was a mini, plus or elite. Then as a coach they can just take a picture of that weekly or something to show you their progress. I have seen other apps out there that track habits on more specific things like how often you go to the gym. Audible will track how often you listen to your books, etc… 

People when they pay someone to coach or consult them, they are asking for accountability. The investment they make into the program is permission for you to pay attention to these types of things. If you fail to do so, what ends up happening is it becomes an emotional relationship, not a results relationship. You can be their friend, but most importantly you must maintain a coach to client relationship with strong accountability. 

 Skills Goals: 

Skill goals are when you want to train on a new skill. Whether you source content from our Xpand library, or assign your mentee content you have made. By getting specific around the education around a specific topic, it will create focused learning and develop each individual on a more customized basis. You should cater the learning based on the skill goal and time lines each of your people have. 

For example: If I want to learn how to close more deals. I would look for different closing courses and add them to my skill goal. It would be a sum of 10 courses, and it would have me pick a timeline in which I wanted to finish that. Then it would track the progress of where I am at with finishing all those courses. 

One can self select a skill goal, or as a coach you can assign a skill goal to someone and monitor the progress of that. 

“Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field” Brian Tracy

As a leader you have to make continual education cultural. Talk about the things you are discovering in your person studies. Talk about the books and topics that you want your mentees learning and focusing on. Extract learning and shares from your people. The more they talk about it within your team or community the more it inspires growth and learning from within. 

Too often people saw high school and college as the final destination for learning. They didn’t realize that once they graduated was when the real learning began and they now have the freedom to pick and choose topics that they are interested in, or apply specifically to their field. The more you learn and master your craft the more value you can bring and the more money you can charge. 

My viewpoint on education is that there is a massive shift from formal education to specialty learning. Hence a big mission of my building the Xpand platform was to collect industry Xperts content and host it on one single platform as an open source marketplace to find topics and relevant categories that all humans should be interested in. Self selection of content creates buyin, and creates commitment to mastery because you are learning for you, not to appease someone else. 

As a mentor and coach inspire the importance of learning, and get curious with your people on what may interest them, or what topics would be relevant for them to learn that would help them achieve their bigger mission. Be an expert on books, podcasts, and courses that you could lead them towards, diagnosing their problems with specific content to solve it. You don’t have to be the one giving all the answers over the phone on your calls. Trust and empower them to watch more videos and learn on their own. It is a much more sustainable habit for them to understand and gain long term. 

This too can save you hours of time. If you can automate a lot of your content by putting it into text, or video format this will make a reference guide you can assign to your people and they can be learning with or without you on the phone at all times. This made my coaching program scalable and it to where I could start impacting thousands. 

In the next few chapters I am going to go much more in depth on how you can create duplicatable courses and programs for you team members or clients to follow that will free up your time, and give a much better experience for you people. My goal is to duplicate your success and Xpand the lives you lead and the next few steps are going to make a massive impact on that. 

Share Your Goals

It is always important for your own accountability to share your goals with people that are important to you. Naturally people want to cheer you on, and see you succeed. If you are hesitant to share your goal, you should question your real commitment to it. People don’t want to look bad in front of their peers and let them down. This is another “free energy” move. 

In the Xpand app you can share via messenger or link your goals so people that have the app can follow along. This is designed to create a social platform to track your peers goals, and have them see you win or fail. 

Ask the people you lead, who in their network would care about seeing them win? How can we get them involved in your transformation? Knowing that people are rooting for you, how can this also keep you excited for the change to come?