How To Set Goals You Will Achieve

We've all done it. We wake up one day, feeling on top of the world, and we write out the goals we'd like to accomplish for the day/week/month/year. However, many times, these lists, while well meaning, are overly ambitious and we never get the chance to cross anything off of them. Am I telling you to become a slacker and never set goals? Not at all! Although many people live by the "If you don't try you never fail" philosophy, that is not what I mean. I mean that in order to accomplish anything, you have to be able to imagine that you can do it.

It can be helpful to write down your overall goal and write down ways to accomplish that goal. For example, success can seem difficult to achieve, however, you don't have to become successful in one week. Think of ways you can be more successful. Maybe it's advertising your business more, working two extra hours a week or maybe it's time to stop procrastinating and finally become a personal business consultant.

The idea is to achieve your goals little by little. This can be easy to do this by writing your main goals at the top of a piece of paper. Underneath that, draw a ladder with 5 rungs, and on each rung, write 5 things you can do to accomplish the main goal. At the bottom of the ladder, you should have the thing that is easiest to accomplish, and you should work your way up to the thing that is most difficult. Under that ladder, draw another ladder with 5 steps that will help you accomplish the goal at the bottom of the previous ladder. Don't feel that your steps have to be complex. Maybe your ladder has steps like going to bed earlier, so you can wake up at 5 AM, so you can work out before work, so you can lose 30 pounds, so you can fit into that new outfit you bought, so you can reach your main goal of wowing everyone at your high school reunion.

You have to remember that if you don't have mini goals to propel you toward larger goals, you will feel like your goals are unreachable. Accomplishing mini goals can help you to easily imagine the larger goal. Have you every tried a crash diet? What happened? You probably crashed. This is because our human nature is to crave instant gratification in every area. However, when we are starving ourselves in an attempt to lose 15 pounds, we always seem to forget how long it took us to gain those 15 pounds. Chances are, we didn't gain the weight in just two weeks, so why try and lose them in only 14 days? This exact principle can help you to achieve your goals. Don't try and accomplish everything all at once. Sometimes, people use mini goals as an excuse to never accomplish anything. The key is to seriously pursue every goal as if it's your main "big" goal. The more aggressive you are, the more you can achieve.

With goals, it is crucial to reevaluate your progress every 2-3 months. If it feels you're swimming upstream towards your goals, then it is time to change your approach and find something that works for you.