112. Progress Goals vs Outcome Goals: Staying Motivated and on Track with Your Goals
Do you ever feel like your big, shiny goals lose their luster once the initial excitement wears off? How often do you get caught up in the day-to-day grind and lose sight of the progress you're making towards your ultimate vision?
This week, I share a powerful strategy that will help you stay motivated, accountable, and on track throughout the entire journey: leveraging both progress goals and outcome goals in your interior design business. Utilizing both of these approaches gives you clarity, direction, and ways to evaluate your path forward, all of which are going to increase your likelihood of succeeding.
Join me this week to learn what progress goals and outcome goals are, how they differ, and why you need both to not only make consistent progress toward your desired results, but to make the journey there so much more enjoyable. I show you how setting clear and measurable milestones helps you stay focused on what matters most, and why these approaches will help you take your goal-setting to the next level.
My annual goal-setting workshop, Create Your 2025 Roadmap, is coming to you soon! Mark your calendars for January 9th and 16th 2025, and click here to register.
If you're interested in working together one-on-one in the fall or winter, now is the time to put your name on the waitlist for private coaching. Click here to secure your spot!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
The key differences between progress goals and outcome goals and why you need both to succeed.
How to set clear, measurable progress goals that will keep you motivated and on track.
The importance of developing self-accountability as a business owner.
How measuring process goals helps you adjust course when you aren’t seeing your desired outcomes.
Why focusing on progress goals can help you enjoy the journey and not just the destination.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 112. In this week’s episode I’m going to share two different approaches I want you to consider when you plan for and pursue your goals in your interior design business. I’ll be sharing the difference between progress goals versus outcome goals, and how leveraging both types of planning will really help you stay on track, be accountable to yourself, and enjoy the journey to goal achievement so much more.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I am sitting here on an incredibly rainy day and wishing I had a spot of sunshine coming through my window. I’m also back from the Eras tour with my daughter, which I can say was a total success, and glad to be here with you, as always.
Today we’re going to continue the theme of goal setting and goal achievement with a really practical and tangible shift you can adopt when you set your goals that are going to make it easier to plan those needle-moving tasks into your weeks and know how you're making consistent progress, or possibly notice that you're not making progress so you can course correct.
And then also make the process of working towards your goals so much more enjoyable because we all know there’s kind of that glittery, shiny part, that initial sparkle of goal setting that happens when we dream up that big vision, we set that goal. And then that starts to fade rather quickly and it’s time to get down to business but we’ve lost that spark around the goal. And so this is going to be one of those ways that you can keep the motivation going throughout the year.
The concept I want to present today is progress oriented versus outcome oriented goals. And I really believe that leveraging both of these types of goals is essential to your success next year. What I’m sharing today really pairs well with the recent episodes I’ve done on defining enough and the five key things you need to help hit your goals next year. Those episodes are episode 110 and episode 111. So be sure to listen to those when you’re done with this one.
As we talk about how you can leverage the progress goal and the outcome goal in your business, I want to of course start by talking about what are these and why I think they’re so important to you as an interior designer who wants to achieve their next-level vision.
If you listened to the last episode, you know that I typically will suggest setting a singular financial goal for the year and then use that to inform what you work on in a quarterly or 90 day planning cycle. This gives you a lot of focus and clarity on where you put your time, energy, and resources.
I love a 90 day time frame because it’s long enough to give you time to implement, even when life happens, because inevitably it will. That 90 days, it’s a long enough stretch where it can absorb some of those things happening, but also short enough that it’s focused and efficient. I’m not remembering the episode number off the top of my head, but I do know that I have an episode dedicated to why I encourage you to set those 90 day cycles. If you just scroll back in the podcast feed wherever you listen you’ll be able to find that one.
Setting that singular financial goal and then deciding what projects you’ll implement in those 90 day time periods are very much an outcome-based goal. There’s a very clear result that you're working towards. This could be money made, clients signed, systems in place, employees hired, there’s a very clear definition of what done or achieved is with these outcome-based goals. There’s one thing, you're pointing at it as the destination.
And as you might see with the examples I gave, a lot can lead up to you achieving that very specific outcome. An outcome-based goal is focused on results. And I think when you're focused on the results, that’s very important. I want you to see that these two things that I’m presenting today really work in tandem.
When you have a clear outcome or a clear result, you essentially create this North Star or guidepost, whatever you want to call it, that you're working towards. And clarity will always help get you moving and make decisions that align with that overall outcome you want to create.
This is incredibly helpful when we’re swimming in a sea of possibilities, of things we could do, how we could do them, how much we could do, the direction we could go. We want to know where, for our business specifically, we are going.
Where I do see some clients get stuck with outcome-based goals is that it can feel big and the timeline to success is rather long. It can be an entire year, sometimes when we’re talking about this we’re talking about a three-year vision, and it can be harder to wrap your head around what will help you gain traction with your daily actions, your behaviors, and habits you engage with that will ultimately support you in achieving that goal. And that is where a progress goal becomes so helpful.
Progress goals are the measurable steps, the actions, the behaviors, the habits that could lead to that eventual outcome goal. They are intentional. They are strategic actions you choose on purpose to move you closer to the results you ultimately want to create over time. You still need that outcome goal, but then you support and plan for your eventual success with your progress goals.
I want to give you some examples of what a progress goal could look like or sound like for you. This could be regular financial check-ins or checking other metrics that would indicate success or movement towards your outcome goal so that you know that you're on track.
It could be deciding the number of times you want to engage in a particular marketing activity. Maybe a specific number of posts on Instagram per week, or maybe a certain number of industry events where you're going to go to those per month where you're going to nurture relationships with project partners.
Maybe even your progress goal is around supporting you as the business owner so that you're calmer and more focused in your days. So the progress goal becomes a certain number of workouts you have per week because that really helps fuel your energy and calm your mind.
There’s lots of ways that you can play with progress goals, the thing that I want you to remember is that they are clearly defined and measurable. Outcome goals, of course, are defined and measurable as well, but the progress goals are the bits and pieces that are going to essentially be those boxes you check along the way.
You could even have a tracking spreadsheet for this. You could give yourself a big check mark at the end of the day or the end of the week when you’ve completed the tasks, or even some gold stars. I know all of us over achievers love a good gold star. Who doesn’t like being told good job? And let me remind you, as the designer CEO you can be the one to tell yourself good job any time you want.
Now, I want to talk about why these progress goals are so, so helpful and how they help you achieve your outcome goals. The first reason is because it really gives you intention and focus in your work days. You know what you're supposed to do. Like I said before, clarity always supports forward momentum.
It also helps with planning. If you know the specific things that you need to get done, it’s much easier to plan for them versus if you don’t know, how are you possibly supposed to craft a plan that’s going to make sure they’re done? It’s so much harder.
The other reason why a progress goal is so helpful is because it’s a clear definition of enough. That goes back to my recent episode of defining enough. If you don’t define what you're doing, how much you're doing, and what progress looks like, your brain is likely going to tell you it’s not enough. And not enough is a crummy place to be and kind of like this dead weight you're dragging around trying to get to your goal. So you could drop that weight and define enough.
I also love focusing on this progress piece because it allows you to see and celebrate your movement. This is so motivating. It becomes a positive feedback loop, you see yourself be successful and you start to identify as someone who follows through and makes progress towards their goals, further reinforcing that identity and the behaviors you want to continue.
Here’s another big one, you're going to enjoy the process of reaching your goals so much more. If you think about setting a yearly goal, there is very little time being in the actual achievement of the goal. The majority of our time that we spend in our businesses is in the act of goal creation, moving towards that final achievement.
With the motivation that you can help create for yourself from tracking your progress goals and the feelings of pride and accomplishment you can get to experience the positive emotions along the way, not just when you “arrive.”
Another big one here is that you are building habits and a process around successful action taking. This is going to help you build confidence and also build the skill of self-accountability. As you practice following through and holding yourself accountable to yourself, and to your goals, and to the vision for the business, that becomes a transferable skill set. So the next goal you set, you're going to be able to take the skill set of honoring your word to yourself and apply it to the next big goal.
A couple more here. Can you tell I think this is a good idea? All right, the other reason I want you to consider this progress goal is it reinforces the concept of compounding results and it’s going to off-set any kind of black and white thinking that might be coming up for you.
Tracking your progress gives you evidence of how a lot can be accomplished over time when our natural tendency is to believe that you have to do it all or it’s not worth doing. Or that if we don’t do it all right now, it’s never going to happen. So we can see that a little bit at a time adds up.
And of course, as you’re looking at your progress, you're going to have an opportunity to check in with yourself and assess what’s working and what’s not working so that you can adjust course. If you're consistently taking these actions and not making progress, this is really good to know. We want to know that sooner rather than later.
And then once you realize, oh, this is not leading me where I thought it would, you have a data set to reference. You know what you’ve tried, so now you know that didn’t work and you can make a new hypothesis and move forward.
The last reason I think this idea of progress goals can be really helpful is that it gives you a sense of control. No goal is totally in your control. Clients or other building professionals who possibly refer work to you or the marketing that you put out that needs to be put in front of the right people, there’s lots of ways in which we have to let go once we do our part because accomplishing our goals requires other people to say yes to us. And if you have forgotten, we can not control other people, so that means we can’t control our goal.
However, we can look to create opportunities for ourselves where we’re in control of the actions we take and how we show up. And that is really empowering when you're going after a big goal.
All of this talk about both the outcome goal and the progress goals is of course designed to help you create that next-level vision you have for yourself and your business in the coming year. And these two approaches give you clarity, direction, and ways to measure and evaluate your path forward, all of which are going to increase the likelihood of succeeding.
As you consider your 2025 goals, I want you to first set that outcome goal, the result you want to create, and then identify a few progress goals you can commit to. Let’s clarify, it’s a few progress goals. I don’t want you to try and track 10 different behaviors at once, this will get very overwhelming and you’ll probably say, forget that, soon after you get started.
And as a reminder, we can do this together in my upcoming goal setting workshop. Create Your 2025 Roadmap is an interactive two-part coaching experience I’m hosting and I’m going to be able to help guide you to set that outcome goal, identify the key projects you're going to be working on in those 90-day cycles throughout the year, and can also help you identify which progress goals make sense for you.
We’re meeting live on January 9th and 16th. The first call is going to be a guided planning session, and then one week later we’ll have a group coaching call where you can get additional support, get your questions answered, and get personalized feedback from me on your plan. And if you can’t make both calls, no worries, there will be a replay.
And I also want you to know that if you're someone who kind of likes to hang back in group situations, I will be there to support you as well, both from you gaining so much from listening to your peers and you’ll also have the opportunity to send in your questions ahead of time and I can speak to those on the call where you can listen and don’t necessarily have to be one of the people that raise their hands.
All right, that’s what I’ve got for you today. I want you to consider those outcome goals and progress goals, maybe even reflect back on this past year and your goal that you had set, how maybe you unintentionally had some progress goals that were helpful or how you could have used that to support you, just to get your brain thinking about some more ideas and how you might use this in the coming year.
Oh, and before I wrap up, I need to tell you where to sign up for Create Your 2025 Roadmap. I almost forgot. So if you go to desicreswell.com/resources I’ll have that linked on that page where you can click the little bar that has the name of the event and sign up right there, it’s only $87. So I do hope you join me and I get the opportunity to work with you and support you in that way.
I’ll be back next week with a brand new episode, and until then I am wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I am sitting here on an incredibly rainy day and wishing I had a spot of sunshine coming through my window. I’m also back from the Eras tour with my daughter, which I can say was a total success, and glad to be here with you, as always.
Today we’re going to continue the theme of goal setting and goal achievement with a really practical and tangible shift you can adopt when you set your goals that are going to make it easier to plan those needle-moving tasks into your weeks and know how you're making consistent progress, or possibly notice that you're not making progress so you can course correct.
And then also make the process of working towards your goals so much more enjoyable because we all know there’s kind of that glittery, shiny part, that initial sparkle of goal setting that happens when we dream up that big vision, we set that goal. And then that starts to fade rather quickly and it’s time to get down to business but we’ve lost that spark around the goal. And so this is going to be one of those ways that you can keep the motivation going throughout the year.
The concept I want to present today is progress oriented versus outcome oriented goals. And I really believe that leveraging both of these types of goals is essential to your success next year. What I’m sharing today really pairs well with the recent episodes I’ve done on defining enough and the five key things you need to help hit your goals next year. Those episodes are episode 110 and episode 111. So be sure to listen to those when you’re done with this one.
As we talk about how you can leverage the progress goal and the outcome goal in your business, I want to of course start by talking about what are these and why I think they’re so important to you as an interior designer who wants to achieve their next-level vision.
If you listened to the last episode, you know that I typically will suggest setting a singular financial goal for the year and then use that to inform what you work on in a quarterly or 90 day planning cycle. This gives you a lot of focus and clarity on where you put your time, energy, and resources.
I love a 90 day time frame because it’s long enough to give you time to implement, even when life happens, because inevitably it will. That 90 days, it’s a long enough stretch where it can absorb some of those things happening, but also short enough that it’s focused and efficient. I’m not remembering the episode number off the top of my head, but I do know that I have an episode dedicated to why I encourage you to set those 90 day cycles. If you just scroll back in the podcast feed wherever you listen you’ll be able to find that one.
Setting that singular financial goal and then deciding what projects you’ll implement in those 90 day time periods are very much an outcome-based goal. There’s a very clear result that you're working towards. This could be money made, clients signed, systems in place, employees hired, there’s a very clear definition of what done or achieved is with these outcome-based goals. There’s one thing, you're pointing at it as the destination.
And as you might see with the examples I gave, a lot can lead up to you achieving that very specific outcome. An outcome-based goal is focused on results. And I think when you're focused on the results, that’s very important. I want you to see that these two things that I’m presenting today really work in tandem.
When you have a clear outcome or a clear result, you essentially create this North Star or guidepost, whatever you want to call it, that you're working towards. And clarity will always help get you moving and make decisions that align with that overall outcome you want to create.
This is incredibly helpful when we’re swimming in a sea of possibilities, of things we could do, how we could do them, how much we could do, the direction we could go. We want to know where, for our business specifically, we are going.
Where I do see some clients get stuck with outcome-based goals is that it can feel big and the timeline to success is rather long. It can be an entire year, sometimes when we’re talking about this we’re talking about a three-year vision, and it can be harder to wrap your head around what will help you gain traction with your daily actions, your behaviors, and habits you engage with that will ultimately support you in achieving that goal. And that is where a progress goal becomes so helpful.
Progress goals are the measurable steps, the actions, the behaviors, the habits that could lead to that eventual outcome goal. They are intentional. They are strategic actions you choose on purpose to move you closer to the results you ultimately want to create over time. You still need that outcome goal, but then you support and plan for your eventual success with your progress goals.
I want to give you some examples of what a progress goal could look like or sound like for you. This could be regular financial check-ins or checking other metrics that would indicate success or movement towards your outcome goal so that you know that you're on track.
It could be deciding the number of times you want to engage in a particular marketing activity. Maybe a specific number of posts on Instagram per week, or maybe a certain number of industry events where you're going to go to those per month where you're going to nurture relationships with project partners.
Maybe even your progress goal is around supporting you as the business owner so that you're calmer and more focused in your days. So the progress goal becomes a certain number of workouts you have per week because that really helps fuel your energy and calm your mind.
There’s lots of ways that you can play with progress goals, the thing that I want you to remember is that they are clearly defined and measurable. Outcome goals, of course, are defined and measurable as well, but the progress goals are the bits and pieces that are going to essentially be those boxes you check along the way.
You could even have a tracking spreadsheet for this. You could give yourself a big check mark at the end of the day or the end of the week when you’ve completed the tasks, or even some gold stars. I know all of us over achievers love a good gold star. Who doesn’t like being told good job? And let me remind you, as the designer CEO you can be the one to tell yourself good job any time you want.
Now, I want to talk about why these progress goals are so, so helpful and how they help you achieve your outcome goals. The first reason is because it really gives you intention and focus in your work days. You know what you're supposed to do. Like I said before, clarity always supports forward momentum.
It also helps with planning. If you know the specific things that you need to get done, it’s much easier to plan for them versus if you don’t know, how are you possibly supposed to craft a plan that’s going to make sure they’re done? It’s so much harder.
The other reason why a progress goal is so helpful is because it’s a clear definition of enough. That goes back to my recent episode of defining enough. If you don’t define what you're doing, how much you're doing, and what progress looks like, your brain is likely going to tell you it’s not enough. And not enough is a crummy place to be and kind of like this dead weight you're dragging around trying to get to your goal. So you could drop that weight and define enough.
I also love focusing on this progress piece because it allows you to see and celebrate your movement. This is so motivating. It becomes a positive feedback loop, you see yourself be successful and you start to identify as someone who follows through and makes progress towards their goals, further reinforcing that identity and the behaviors you want to continue.
Here’s another big one, you're going to enjoy the process of reaching your goals so much more. If you think about setting a yearly goal, there is very little time being in the actual achievement of the goal. The majority of our time that we spend in our businesses is in the act of goal creation, moving towards that final achievement.
With the motivation that you can help create for yourself from tracking your progress goals and the feelings of pride and accomplishment you can get to experience the positive emotions along the way, not just when you “arrive.”
Another big one here is that you are building habits and a process around successful action taking. This is going to help you build confidence and also build the skill of self-accountability. As you practice following through and holding yourself accountable to yourself, and to your goals, and to the vision for the business, that becomes a transferable skill set. So the next goal you set, you're going to be able to take the skill set of honoring your word to yourself and apply it to the next big goal.
A couple more here. Can you tell I think this is a good idea? All right, the other reason I want you to consider this progress goal is it reinforces the concept of compounding results and it’s going to off-set any kind of black and white thinking that might be coming up for you.
Tracking your progress gives you evidence of how a lot can be accomplished over time when our natural tendency is to believe that you have to do it all or it’s not worth doing. Or that if we don’t do it all right now, it’s never going to happen. So we can see that a little bit at a time adds up.
And of course, as you’re looking at your progress, you're going to have an opportunity to check in with yourself and assess what’s working and what’s not working so that you can adjust course. If you're consistently taking these actions and not making progress, this is really good to know. We want to know that sooner rather than later.
And then once you realize, oh, this is not leading me where I thought it would, you have a data set to reference. You know what you’ve tried, so now you know that didn’t work and you can make a new hypothesis and move forward.
The last reason I think this idea of progress goals can be really helpful is that it gives you a sense of control. No goal is totally in your control. Clients or other building professionals who possibly refer work to you or the marketing that you put out that needs to be put in front of the right people, there’s lots of ways in which we have to let go once we do our part because accomplishing our goals requires other people to say yes to us. And if you have forgotten, we can not control other people, so that means we can’t control our goal.
However, we can look to create opportunities for ourselves where we’re in control of the actions we take and how we show up. And that is really empowering when you're going after a big goal.
All of this talk about both the outcome goal and the progress goals is of course designed to help you create that next-level vision you have for yourself and your business in the coming year. And these two approaches give you clarity, direction, and ways to measure and evaluate your path forward, all of which are going to increase the likelihood of succeeding.
As you consider your 2025 goals, I want you to first set that outcome goal, the result you want to create, and then identify a few progress goals you can commit to. Let’s clarify, it’s a few progress goals. I don’t want you to try and track 10 different behaviors at once, this will get very overwhelming and you’ll probably say, forget that, soon after you get started.
And as a reminder, we can do this together in my upcoming goal setting workshop. Create Your 2025 Roadmap is an interactive two-part coaching experience I’m hosting and I’m going to be able to help guide you to set that outcome goal, identify the key projects you're going to be working on in those 90-day cycles throughout the year, and can also help you identify which progress goals make sense for you.
We’re meeting live on January 9th and 16th. The first call is going to be a guided planning session, and then one week later we’ll have a group coaching call where you can get additional support, get your questions answered, and get personalized feedback from me on your plan. And if you can’t make both calls, no worries, there will be a replay.
And I also want you to know that if you're someone who kind of likes to hang back in group situations, I will be there to support you as well, both from you gaining so much from listening to your peers and you’ll also have the opportunity to send in your questions ahead of time and I can speak to those on the call where you can listen and don’t necessarily have to be one of the people that raise their hands.
All right, that’s what I’ve got for you today. I want you to consider those outcome goals and progress goals, maybe even reflect back on this past year and your goal that you had set, how maybe you unintentionally had some progress goals that were helpful or how you could have used that to support you, just to get your brain thinking about some more ideas and how you might use this in the coming year.
Oh, and before I wrap up, I need to tell you where to sign up for Create Your 2025 Roadmap. I almost forgot. So if you go to desicreswell.com/resources I’ll have that linked on that page where you can click the little bar that has the name of the event and sign up right there, it’s only $87. So I do hope you join me and I get the opportunity to work with you and support you in that way.
I’ll be back next week with a brand new episode, and until then I am wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
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