How To Achieve Your Goals
No one sets goals in the beginning of the year only to see them go unfulfilled after a few weeks of trials. Everyone wants to achieve their goals. The question is how?
A rookie mistake people make when they set their goals is that they make too many goals or too high goals. When people make too many goals, they can’t keep up with all of them. When they make their goals too lofty, they get tired and burn out in the process.
How to achieve your goals
1. Revisit your goals.
This is probably one of the most obvious solutions many people miss. After people come up with what goals they want to achieve, and perhaps with a plan to get there, they simply forget to go back to it!
Just revisit your goals and plans on a weekly or monthly basis. Whatever your goal is, come back to it again and again and see how much progress you’ve made. See if you need to tweak any detail of your plan for the goal. Remember why you wanted to achieve that goal when you first had it. Remind yourself of what is at stake if you don’t achieve your goals.
2. Align your goals with your identity.
Examine your goal and see if it aligns with who you are. It doesn’t matter how noble and ambitious your goal is if it doesn’t resonate with who you are.
Take a close look at your goals. What outcome will you get after accomplishing them? Is that what you really want for your life? If not, you need to consider making changes to your goals.
3. Keep track of your progress.
Another step that people miss often is keeping track of their progress toward the goal. It sounds intuitive that you’d check your progress toward your goal consistently. But many people don’t do this!
Make sure you keep a habit tracker to mark off your progression.
4. Chunk it.
Remember what I said about setting goals that are too high? Chunking can be a solution to that problem. Divide your goals in steps and accomplish them in sequence.
For example, if your goal this year is to read 100 books, divide your goals into 10 stages where each stage contains reading 10 books. Your ultimate goal is to read 100 books at the end of the year. But, your initial goal is to read 10 books at the end of each month. (Reading 10 books a month still sounds quite daunting!) Divide and conquer.
5. Celebrate milestones.
This goes with #4. After accomplishing each stage, celebrate the goal achieved. You can reward yourself with incentives of your preference. Each celebration will give you motivation and encouragement to move forward.
6. Get a support team.
As iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens another. -Proverbs 27:17. Achieving your goal is not an easy task. But it might be doable when you have an accountability partner who can give you support when you need it to finish the race. Consider having one or two friends who will give you unconditional support no matter what. Also, get one or two friends who will give you the cold hard truth as is when you slack off. Or, better yet, get a coach who can encourage you and spur you on. You need both kinds of help to achieve your most audacious goals.
Achieving goals is not an easy task, especially when your goals are worth achieving. Work at it. Have fun with the process. Don’t ever give up. Regardless of achieving the goals or not, you will have grown and matured already as a result of working towards the goals. Goals are not your purpose. It’s living out who you are.
