From an early age, nearly all of us are told that one of the greatest tools to succeed in any form is setting goals. Unfortunately, what is often left out is the best way to set those goals to achieve success. Here are 5 tips that can help you learn how to not only set goals but crush them as well:
1) Write Your Goals Down
It’s all well and dandy to have some kind of daydream about the vague things we want out of life, but few things turn an idea into a concrete plan like putting it to paper (or LCD computer screen, as your preference dictates). Writing down your goals takes it from an abstract to something real; not just in your head, but in the physical world where you can see and feel it too. Writing things down can help you stay motivated, organized, and inspired to continue to pursue with relentless determination the things you want out of life.
You should also know that there are many ways to “write” down your goals, and it’s important to find out which works best for you. For some people, writing down what they want to accomplish in a journal or notebook is 
helpful; for others, they prefer some type of Excel spreadsheet; more visual learners might prefer a vision board, even. One of the more popular and wildly successful ways to get your thoughts down an organized is by using a S.M.A.R.T. goals worksheet which allows you to organize a goal you have into more manageable subsections to better achieve success. You can find our free to download S.M.A.R.T. goals worksheet here.
2) Make Your Goals Attainable
While it is always important to aim high, don’t set yourself up for failure either. For example, one common goal people have (particularly around the new year) is to lose weight. Now, if you jump right into it and try to make a goal to lose 100lbs in a month, it doesn’t matter how good your planning is or how hard you work, it just isn’t a realistically set goal. Unrealistic goals are nothing more than slightly more fleshed out fantasies and often lead to disappointment, discouragement, and, in extreme cases, unsafe practices.
The purpose here isn’t to simply wish for a better future, but to take tangible steps to create one. Setting your sights too high can actually have the opposite effect as intended. You don’t want to be constantly falling short of even your own expectations of yourself because the gradual wearing down that so often comes from successive failures can have stunting, halting, or even regressive effects on progress. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t dream big. In fact, you should strive to create…
3) Overarching Goals With Specific Milestones
Continuing with the previous example, a better way for the aforementioned individual to go about their weight loss goals might be to set a larger overarching goal (i.e. “I want to lose weight” or “I want to improve my health) and then smaller, milestone goals that will help them achieve their overarching vision (i.e. “I’m going to start tracking my nutrition” or “I’m going to go to the gym 3 days a week”). Keeping your overall goal vague with specific, smaller goals to get there will help you chart a path to general success in whatever you want to accomplish in life.
The reason for this is that it allows for two very important facets of goal-setting: 1) consistent progress and 2) flexibility. If your goal is to become a millionaire and at the end of the month you are in debt, that’s a failure. If your goal is to become financially independent and to get there you set off a goal to pay off your credit card debt this year and you paid more than the minimum payment this month, that’s progress. Having overarching goals with specific milestones flips the equation on its help so that your momentum is put towards moving forward rather than bracing yourself for when you fall short.
This method also allows a flexibility that hyper-specific goals do not. 6 months down the road, and well into your overall goal, you might have a slightly different vision for what you want then when you started… and that’s okay! As you progress you are going to learn, grow, and understand more about what you want in life and you want your goals to be able to grow with you. Being able to adjust the specific milestones in order to better concur with your ever-changing concept of your future, is a huge boon that should not be overlooked.
4) Record Progress
For me, has always been the most important part of achieving the goals that I’ve set. Just like writing goals down, recording progress can take a variety of different forms. You might take progress pictures of a home-improvement project or your weight-loss journey. You might jot down or even graph data points or financial statements. You might even simply do a little journaling so that you can look back at where you were and see how far you’ve come. This can be a vital tool for any time you feel particularly stuck or are dealing with an unusually difficult problem.
In these plateau moments, it can very easily feel as if we’ve been there forever and being able to look back and acknowledge what we’ve overcome can be powerful. It helps to remind you that you’ve not only made progress but you’ve done difficult things before and you can do it again. Sometimes that little extra motivation is all you need to get over whatever hurdle is in your path. Just remember that, whatever you end up doing, to try to make it a consistent habit and part of your routine so that way you have a more clear-cut picture of where you stand at any given moment.
5) Reward & Reflect
Just as important as all these previous steps, is what to do when you’ve finally hit a goal. It is vital to take a moment to yourself to process the journey you just completed as well as to look forward into the future. Make sure your rewards are appropriate in both their scope and their design (i.e. don’t go on a booze cruise as a reward if your goal was to quit drinking for a week). It’s also important that you don’t use this time to just fly off the handle and go wild but instead to earnestly congratulate yourself on hard work and enjoy the results of what you have accomplished. So have a cheat meal, take a vacation, buy yourself a nice watch because you’ve absolutely earned it; and as you enjoy whatever reward you’ve earned, think back on what you’ve done and learned, and think about how best to apply those lessons to the next goal you set out to crush!
Life takes on meaning when you become motivated, set goals and charge after them in an unstoppable manner. – Les Brown.
