You have big goals to accomplish, but they are so big that they always seem so far out of reach.
You want to “someday” complete your goal because it will help you with your business, your finances, your fitness, your life.
The problem is that when you go to make a plan to reach your big life goals, you don’t even know where to begin.
The road between where you are now and where you want to be seems so disconnected that it’s impossible to draw a straight line between these two points.
Want to know the piece you’ve been missing?
The piece that will break any goal down into actionable steps that you can start taking today?
The answer is to reverse-engineer goals, and it all starts with detailed definition of what your goal actually is.
Defining Your Big Goal
You may know what your big life goal is, but odds are that you don’t have a crystal clear picture of what it is that you actually want.
If you want 6-pack abs, what does that look like for you? What is the goal weight? When do you want it by? Is this something you have time to dedicate to make happen?
If you want a million dollars in your bank account, how is that going to happen? When do you want a million dollars by? What income source is going to fund this dream?
If you want to be the number 1 supplier of tennis balls on the east coast, who do you have to beat? What quantity of tennis balls would that take? What is the cost of supplying that many retailers? What retailers do you need to target?
As you can see from these 3 examples, we need to have SMART goals in order to figure out how to attain them.
What are smart goals?
SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.
Let’s discuss each of these a little more in depth to see how they relate to our overall big life goal and reverse-engineering.

Specific –
When a goal is specific, there are no unanswered questions about what that goal actually entails.
You see in the examples I provided above, I expanded the goal with a lot of questions about what that goal actually looks like.
It’s not just make a million dollars. It’s what activity will drive your income higher so you will reach that million dollar goal.
Really dig in and round out your goal to paint a full picture of the driving forces behind it.
Measurable –
Your big goal has to have some sort of way to tell when it has been accomplished.
In our tennis ball example, the initial goal was pretty vague. We need numbers behind what it actually means to be the number one supplier, and details on who we need to beat.
You need to be able to reach milestones along the way towards your goal, and you can’t do that if the goal isn’t measurable to begin with.
Achievable –
You will find that most things are achievable if you reverse-engineer your big goal.
While you can break most things down into actionable steps, you still have to make sure your goal is something achievable.
If you go through the process in my goal wizard (linked below) and you don’t come up with actionable steps that you can start on right now, your goal may not be achievable.
Realistic –
Is your goal something that can be accomplished within your set time frame?
You want to make sure to set expectations for your goal that can be met.
If you say you want to make $1 million by next Tuesday by inventing an invisibility cloak, and you’ve got 12 cents and no prototype, that’s not a realistic goal.
Setting realistic expectations for a goal takes some practice, and you likely won’t have a 100% realistic goal from the beginning as you are likely setting out on a new adventure.
Just set your goal and your timeline, and adjust accordingly as you learn more and realize more realistic expectations of the process.
Timely –
Speaking of timelines, your goal has to have one.
You have to set deadlines on your goals, or you won’t get them done.
Make sure your time frame fits within the realm of the other 4 stipulations of SMART goals, and then try your best to reach your goal by the deadline.
How do you reverse-engineer your goals?
Now that we know how to define our goals so that they are crystal clear, we need to know how to get there.
Logic tells us to plan from where we are at now, and list steps out to get to where we want to be.
The truth is, that its much more easy and practical to start with your big goal and work backwards.
There are some set milestones you need to define along the way.
Your Big Goal
We’ve already discussed your big life goal a lot, and if you are playing along as you are reading, you have likely written out your SMART goal and have a clear vision of where you want to be.
For our example here we will use this big, specific goal: Start and Grow a Sales Funnel Agency to $100,000 profit in year one.
This is the first thing you will enter and define into the Goal Wizard.
Measurable Actions
Now that you have your big goal defined, you will need to list out 2 main, measurable actions that help define your larger goal.
A measurable action for starting our funnel agency may be mastering software and education necessary to offer funnels as a service to your clients by researching software and finding a course on how to implement it in your business.
A second measurable action may be to build your own sales funnel that will draw 8 new clients to your business on autopilot so you don’t need to worry about getting fresh leads.
These are larger goals that are made up of smaller pieces that you will again break down and define in greater detail.
Supporting Goals
Now that we have the 2 main building blocks, we need to break them down further.
List out 3 supporting goals that will help you complete your measurable actions. Again, you can enter these into the Goal Wizard.
For our funnel agency, one supporting goal may be researching the top 5 funnel software companies and identifying what courses are available to teach you to implement the software in your business.
A second supporting goal may be mapping and planning your lead sales funnel, and identifying what content you will need to assemble to build it out.
Lastly, you may have a supporting goal to find and research a target market so you stay focused and know what your market is looking for. You are better off to pick a niche and stick with it. You can’t market to everyone.
Tactics and Tasks
Now we have broken our measurable actions into supporting goals, its time for tactics and tasks, or essentially the to-do list of the process.
I usually break these down into 4 main tactics and list out the tasks underneath each, giving me four main areas to focus on, and my list of to-dos for each.
For one tactic in our funnel agency startup, we may want to dedicate a portion of our effort to software research.
Tasks within this category may include:
- Find main review article on funnel software comparisons
- Find top 5 with the best reviews
- Research and list out pricing on each software
- List out functionality of software to see if each can do what I need it to
- List out educational resources surrounding software that will show me how to operate a business after purchase
- Allocate business funds towards price of software
- Create business packages that incorporate software cost into pricing
You get the idea.
Other tactics may be Market Research, Funnel Planning, and Building Funnel resources.
I don’t want to go over each of the tasks for these tactics in this article, because I don’t want to waste your time reading this, and you get the idea from the first example.
The main point is that we have taken our big goal, and now have a to-do list we can start on today.
If this all seems like it will be confusing to plan out, I have a special, free Goal Wizard tool for you below to help reverse-engineer your goals.
Using the Goal Wizard
I built this reverse-engineer goal wizard based on a goal pyramid I had found in previous readings (this is based on the goal pyramid from Matthew Michaelwicz; but I’ve adapted it to an easy-to-use form for myself and my followers).
Essentially it is designed to take your answers from above and put them into a format that is easy to read and reference over a long period of time as you work to complete your goal.
Using the Goal Wizard, our big goal breakdown for our funnel agency may look like this:
As you can see, this is a lot cleaner way to organize the reverse-engineered goal process described above.
We can see we now have SMART goals that are easily defined, and above all actionable.
The Goal Wizard helps you accomplish this.
I normally charge $27 to access the wizard, but I have a special offer for you to get free lifetime access.
Accessing the Wizard for Free
I normally charge $27 to access the Goal Wizard, but I want you to have it for free.
I appreciate you visiting my blog and your interest in this free tool, so you deserve free access to help you reverse-engineer your goals.
To get access, head on over to The Goal Wizard Access Page on our Master Sales Funnels University page.
Use coupon code Goalz247 to drop the price to $0 and claim your FREE ACCESS!