E785 | My Number One Hack To Achieve Your Goals

How to Set and Stick to Your Goals: A Practical Guide

Goal-setting is a powerful tool for achieving success in every area of your life, from business and health to personal relationships. But setting a goal isn’t enough—what really matters is how you track, review, and adjust those goals throughout the year. In this blog, we’ll explore actionable strategies to help you set meaningful goals, stay intentional, and turn your plans into accomplishments.

Why Most People Fail at Goals

At a recent family gathering, my wife asked her aunt and uncle about their New Year’s resolutions. Their response? They didn’t bother making any because they never stick to them. This is a common mindset, and it highlights a major problem: most people set goals but fail to follow through because they don’t have a system for tracking progress.

Goals are meaningless if you don’t check in on them. It’s not enough to set a goal at the start of the year and hope for the best—you need to be intentional and revisit your goals regularly.

The Key to Achieving Your Goals

The most important thing you can do to achieve your goals is to review and track them consistently. This process keeps you accountable and helps you stay motivated, even when life gets busy.

Here’s how to make it work:

1. Set Clear and Specific Goals
   Break your goals into specific categories, such as:

   • Personal Goals: Health, family, relationships
   • Business Goals: Revenue, team growth, key performance indicators
   • Intellectual Goals: Education, skill development, personal growth
     Start small if needed. For example, instead of saying, “I want to lose weight,” set a goal to lose five pounds per quarter by tracking workouts, nutrition, and sleep.

2. Check In Regularly
   Review your progress monthly or quarterly. This allows you to:

   • Evaluate whether you’re on track.
   • Adjust goals if priorities shift.
   • Celebrate small wins along the way.

3. Be Flexible
   Life happens, and it’s okay to course-correct. If a goal feels too ambitious or less relevant, adjust it to reflect your current priorities.

4. Track Progress Like You Track Business Metrics
   Think about how you approach your business. Most of us regularly review financials, KPIs, and quarterly goals. Apply the same level of attention to your personal goals.

Examples of Goal-Setting in Action

In our family, even our kids set goals. My daughter’s personal goals include growing her cookie club at school from 5 to 10 members and swimming twice a week. These simple, measurable goals teach the value of intentionality from an early age.

As adults, our goals can be more complex, but the process is the same:

• Define what you want to achieve.
• Identify the specific actions needed to reach those goals.
• Review progress and adjust as necessary.

Why Tracking Matters

Reviewing your goals regularly helps you:

• Stay motivated by seeing progress.
• Recognize when adjustments are needed.
• Avoid the “end-of-year surprise” of realizing you didn’t accomplish anything.

Tracking also gives you clarity. If you want to go camping with your kids once per quarter, you’ll know exactly what needs to happen if you miss a quarter—schedule two trips the next quarter to catch up.

Tips for Success

1. Limit Your Focus
   Start with 3–4 meaningful goals across different areas of life. This keeps things manageable and prevents overwhelm.

2. Schedule Your Check-Ins
   Add monthly or quarterly goal reviews to your calendar to ensure you stay on track.

3. Set Goals That Matter
   Goals don’t always have to be about achievement. They can be about experiences, like spending more time with family or trying something new.

4. Celebrate Progress
   Recognize and reward yourself for small wins. Progress builds momentum.

The Long-Term Impact of Goal-Setting

Goal-setting isn’t just about what you accomplish this year—it’s about the compounding effect of consistent effort over decades. When you look back at a lifetime of intentional goal-setting, the progress can be astounding.

Whether you’re growing your business, improving your health, or strengthening relationships, being intentional about your goals will create a life you’re proud of.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Q1. Got it. Q2. Didn't do it. Q3. Got to make up for that. And I got to go twice. Q4. We're going, here, set the dates for these things, right? So it's about. Being proactive with what you're trying to do. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skillset in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family?

If so, you're in the right spot. My name's Danny Matta, and over the last 15 years I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession. I've been a staffee, I've been an active duty military officer. Physical, the. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices.

So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, cause I'm here to help you. What's going on? Dr. Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast. And today we're talking about your goals. Most of you. Probably set some sort of goal for this year, you know, whether it's your business or it's your health or I don't know something that's important to you, whatever it is you probably have something that you want to change or something that you want to improve or something you're hoping to see be different.

And I want to bring this up because you know, as I'm recording this, this is, this is actually early January and I was just recently at a family new year's day, like lunch. Right. And I overheard my my wife having a conversation with her uncle about goal setting. She basically was just like, you know, asking her aunt and uncle about any sort of new year's resolution that they had, like anything that they, you know, were trying to accomplish or change or something like that.

In in 2025 and they said, no, not really. No, there's nothing that we really. That we really decided that we want to do as a New Year's resolution. And they said, well, we really never actually like stick to anything that we do anyway. So not really a point in doing it. And what my wife said was interesting was she basically said, yeah, you know, one of the things that that we'll do is we'll sit down and we'll just look at like.

Family goal, personal goal health goal, you know, business, so these different buckets and they were just kind of blown away the fact that like we were as intentional as we are with setting, setting goals, even with our kids and not, and not, and we're not sitting down for a four hour goal. You know, setting session with my children, but but they set goals and like, you know, I'll give you, I'll give you an example.

My daughter my daughter's is, is right here. Like one of them is she wants to increase the size of her cookie club at school. She started a cookie baking club at her school. And I think there's like five or six kids in it and she wants to you know, get that up to 10 or 12 kids. Right. So. Or her health goal is to swim at this, she's in a, in a little club swimming team two days a week and then she wants to you know, exercise two days a week, right?

So these are, these are her. That's her health goal. Right? And you know, whatever it's, she's not, she's not old. She's, you know, whatever she's young and, but even still she at least said something and that's her goal. But here's the, here's the key is, is a lot of people set goals. And I'm telling you, this is the, this is the absolute most important thing that I've learned about goals.

Goals are meaningless if you do not check in on those goals. And when, when my wife was talking to her aunt and uncle one of the things that she said was that one of the things we'll do is we'll actually like look at and review the goals that we set where are we at in our progress? And this is something for me I don't do as much as as I used to I used to look at these like every week and every At least every every month sometimes, you know, two to three times a month but the, the, the challenge for most people is even if they set goals, they never, they don't check in on them until the end of the year.

And they're like, Oh shit, did that actually happen or did it not? And they're like surprised of whether it did or it did not versus are you reviewing and tracking what you're trying to do, reviewing and tracking what you're trying to accomplish. That is way more important, like far, far more important than even like setting the goal, like.

Yeah, obviously you need to do that to check in on it, but, but in order to, for you to accomplish something, you have to review where you're at. What's your progress at? Because some of these are challenging, right? Are we sticking to these? Are we making these changes that we say that we want to make? Because it's a long time.

You have a whole year, right? And motivation is going to drop off for everybody. That's just the way it works. But it is quite motivating when you look at your goals that you've set and you check back in and you say, where am I at on that? Is that, and sometimes it's, it's reevaluating it. Is that really important to me right now?

Has it, has anything changed? You know, can I deviate this a little bit? Maybe it's a slight change. So what you might want to be doing or accomplish, or maybe it's farm. You said this really like lofty goal is just like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this this year. I had these other things that have popped up.

Okay. Let's let's course correct that. And there's nothing wrong with this, right? Like it's, it's totally fine for you to just say, all right, well now I have a better idea of like really what I'm trying to do, or maybe that goal isn't all that important to me. And in a rush, I was kind of thinking of something that is a really, really important exercise to go back through and check in on this.

And the funny thing is like. If you're going to do any sort of goal setting in your business, you got to do the same thing. And most of us are actually pretty decent at reviewing our businesses, you know, whether it's annually, quarterly, monthly, most of you probably are at least looking at your, your key performance indicators on a monthly basis, right?

And if you have an annual or quarterly goal, you're reviewing those pretty regularly. And the likelihood that you're going to hit business goals. Is actually like really pretty high if you're keeping track of these things and you're, you know, you're working towards whatever, whatever work you establish as this is necessary to help me get to this goal.

And you're doing that work. The likelihood of you accomplishing it is pretty damn high on the personal side. And this is where we can learn from business and vice versa is. If you can do this in your business, why can't you do it in your personal life? You know if your goal is that you want to drop 20 pounds And that means that you know, you need to drop five pounds a quarter Okay.

So what work do I need to do in order to do that? Well, all right I need to make sure that you know, i'm Limiting sugar intake i'm getting x number of training sessions in you know per week I'm getting You know x number hours of sleep i'm drinking this much water like there's there's things that you can do that are objective They lead to the outcome that you want and then you can check in on those on a you know quarterly basis And really start to work towards whatever that that goal is if you have this, you know Goal is going to take you all year so you can do the same things.

It's no different than business It's a skill that you can acquire in business and you can apply to all these other areas of your life and even for me like I I kind of dialed this back, but I I used to set goals in Like eight to 10 different areas you know, so it might be health and nutrition contribution.

So, you know, goal for, for charitable giving intellectual growth adventure and lifestyle, like things I want to do that are challenges or things that are outside my comfort zone, family, relationships business, you know, all these, all these things, I should set like multiple goals within all these categories.

That gets a bit tough to manage. I really do think that if you have, you know, if you have a personal health goal, some sort of intellectual goal and some sort of business goal, right? If you, if you can, if you can get three to maybe four different areas that you want to try to improve and you can just pick one thing in each of those and that's really meaningful to you.

And some of it's just like thinking about what you're wanting to accomplish. That actually makes a massive difference because it's, it's all about being intentional about what you're trying to change or what you're trying to do. Because sometimes it may not even be a change, but it literally might be you want to go camp with your kid more, but you get busy and before you know it, the year's over and you haven't gone one time.

And yet, you know, when you go, it's like, man, it's such an enjoyable thing for you to do with your with your with your kids, but you didn't make time for it because you got busy. That's what happens to everybody. But being intentional about these things. Now, all of a sudden you look at it and you're like, okay, cool.

I want to go camping, you know once a quarter. Q1. Got it. Q2, didn't do it. Q3, gotta make up for that. And I gotta go twice. Q4, we're going here, set the dates for these things, right? So it's about being proactive with what you're trying to do and actually scheduling those things out intentionally, especially in the beginning of the year, even better.

And then keeping track of those. That's the key. And the number one thing I see people, they drop off with, is they don't actually check back in with their goals. This is something that I just kind of take for granted now. But after listening to this conversation my wife had with, with her aunt and uncle, I was like, oh shit, this is odd.

Maybe not a lot of people do this. You know, maybe this isn't a bit extreme, but it works, it works really well if you want to be intentional about the life that you're trying to create for yourself, right? I mean, that's, that's it, right? Don't just wander through the year and hope that you end up in the right spot.

That's not a plan. It's just you're just hoping something's gonna happen and maybe it does maybe it doesn't but it's not very likely If you don't have you know an actual structure around what you're trying to do So my advice to you is if you set some goals check in on look at it every single month At a minimum look at it every quarter and if you if you're Not actually like achieving what you're trying to do each quarter then, you know, make it intentional to where you're looking at it more often than that.

And you're scheduling the things out that you really, really want to make sure that you have accomplished. And that's, that's probably the best way to achieve whatever it is you're trying to achieve this year. I hope you have a great year. I hope that you take it you know, very seriously that you're, you're trying to make progress in whatever area you're trying to improve.

And it's the compounding improvements over decades are insane. Like this is something that I look back at sometimes, you know, and and i'm like damn when I was, you know 22 years old I knew that I wanted to go to physical therapy school So what things do you have to do? you know If you go to pt school, you want to do these things then you want to become a good clinician then you want to you know, whatever for me open a clinic and and And to look back at a couple decades of goal setting and things that you're working towards It's pretty impressive to see what you can actually accomplish versus You know, if you hadn't done anything, if you just kind of floated through life, hoping that something awesome would happen in your life, like that's just, that's probably not going to be the case.

I mean, it might be, but it's probably far less likely than if you're actually very, very intentional about what you're doing. And it kind of depends what you want to do. I mean, maybe, you know, you just want to chill. You're here to just chill. I have a friend and, and she says, some people are here to work and some people are here on vacation.

Just like the way in which they live their life. And sometimes I get jealous of people that can be here on vacation and they can just, they can just chill and they're totally content. You know, they just, that's, that's just the way they're wired. That's not me. And I know that, right. So in order for me to be happy, I have to achieve things.

I have to work towards things. I get a lot of satisfaction out of. Progress in whatever area that I'm trying to improve. I like to see that, right? That's, that's actually something that I get a lot of enjoyment out of. And if you're like that, then this just be something that's right up your alley.

So don't forget, check in on your goals. It's the best way to accomplish them.

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