How to Successfully Achieve Goals

Setting goals for yourself can be such a motivational experience. It can give you somewhat of a high, letting your mind take over what your reality could be! To attaining any goal it takes continuous planning and holding yourself accountable.

Goal setting is a powerful process. It takes continuous effort and focus for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision into reality. The process of setting goals helps you choose the path you need to take in order to achieve that goal. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You’ll also quickly spot the distractions that can, so easily, lead you astray.

Why Set Goals?

Top-level business-people, successful performers, and bloggers in various niches all set goals. Setting goals give you a long-term vision and short-term motivation. I compare it to climbing up a flight of stairs. I see where I need to be. That’s my vision and each step I need to take is the motivation to push myself closer to where I want to be. But you may ask how do I keep that motivation going? It can be frustrating at times feeling like you’re not making any or much progress. Just like if you were just staring at that flight of stairs. Your muscles do get tired, your sweeting, and want to throw in the towel. You’re fighting with yourself mentally if you can keep pushing or not. Sometimes it feels like you are only seeing all the same steps you need to climb compared to a variety of mini actions.

How to Keep the Motivation Going

By setting sharp, clearly defined actions, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals, and you’ll see forward progress. It can be fulfilling to see what you can achieve once you set out a plan. You will also raise your self-confidence, as you recognize your own ability and competence in achieving the goals that you’ve set. Periodically review the longer term plans, and modify them to reflect your changing priorities and experience. A good way of doing this is to schedule regular, repeating reviews using your computer and setting a weekly reminder. For example, instead of having “to have 1,000 followers” as a goal, it’s more powerful to state your goal as “To have 1,000 followers by December 31, 2017.” Obviously, this will only be attainable if a lot of preparation and steps has been completed beforehand!

Starting to Set Personal Goals

You set your goals on a number of levels. First you create your “big picture” of what you want to do in the next year, and identify the large-scale goals that you want to achieve. Then, you break these down into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit to reach your big picture goals. Finally, once you have your plan, you start working on it to achieve these goals. This is why we start the process of setting goals by looking at your lifetime or big picture goals. Then, we work down to the things that you can do in, let’s say, the next year, then next six months, next month, next week, and today, to start moving towards them.

Staying on Course

How many times do we look at our list and decide to knock off the little things because it will take less time? Reality of it is that knocking those small things off our list also makes us feel good. We see our list and say to ourselves wow look at all I got done. What we should be doing is not looking at our list to feel gratified and accomplished but review our list and rank them based on importance. After you rank your action items concentrate on your top 2 during the day. This is considered the 80/20 rule or Pareto principle. This is where 80% of your outcomes really come from 20% of your operational work load. When you need a 15 minute break from those 2 action items, then review your list to tackle one small item for no longer than 15 – 30 minutes! The key is not to get distracted. You are only making a pit stop not taking another route to your destination because you prefer another type of scenery.

Further Tips for Setting Your Goals

The following broad guidelines will help you to set effective, achievable goals:

• Create positive action items/statements
• Be detailed and as accurate as possible
• Review your goals/plans Daily and prioritize
• Visualize, draw, and write your goals down
• Keep operational goals small – Keep the low-level goals that you’re working towards small and achievable. If a goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it.
• Set performance goals, not outcome goals –If you base your goals on personal performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your goals, and draw satisfaction from them.
• Set realistic goals – It’s possible to set goals that are too difficult because you might not appreciate either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how much skill you need to develop to achieve a particular level of performance.

Achieving Goals

When you’ve achieved a goal, take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress that you’ve made towards other goals. If the goal was a significant one, reward yourself! All of this helps you build the self-confidence you deserve for all your hard work.

With the experience of having achieved your goal, ask yourself:

• Was the goal easily attained or took much effort?
• Is there a better process?
• Where there additional skills needed?
• What did I excel at?

Key Points

Goal setting is an important method of deciding what you want to achieve in your life. By setting goals it will help with separating what’s important from what’s a distraction. You will start to see a new you by building your self-confidence, based on successful achievement of goals. 

Set your big time goals first. Then, set a year plan of smaller goals that you need to complete if you are to reach your ultimate plan. Keep the process going by regularly reviewing and updating your goals. And remember to take time to enjoy the satisfaction of achieving your goals when you do so. If you don’t already set goals, do so, starting now. As you make this technique part of your life, you’ll find your life full of achievements, and you’ll wonder how you did without it!