Discover the five things you’ll need that will help you to achieve your goals.
Have you ever struggled to achieve a goal? If you have, it may be that one of these 5 ingredients were missing. These are 5 things that will help you to achieve your goals – no matter how difficult they may seem.
This blog is all about helping you to focus on what matters. So it’s no surprise that this article is about goals.
When you have something that matters to you, whether you realise it or not, you create an aspiration or a visualisation of an improved future vision surrounding that thing. These are just fancy words for dreams.
But these dreams remain just that – dreams. Until, of course, you add a deadline.
Then it becomes a goal.
But adding a deadline to a dream doesn’t automatically make it achievable. And if you’ve been alive for a dozen years or more, you’ll know that achieving a goal isn’t as easy as it sounds. The five things I’m discussing in this article, however, make it a lot easier to achieve your goals.
5 things you’ll need to achieve your goals
1. Ensure it’s necessary
Now you may be saying ‘Of course it’s necessary! I set a deadline and everything!’. But that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Here, I’m talking about the need to achieve it. This means, do you feel that you absolutely must get this thing done – by hook or by crook? Or would it just be nice to have?
There’s a big difference.
I need to put food on the table for my kids. And because I see this as a need, it causes me to get up and get to work on my goals. It’s not a burden or a pressure force. It’s a driving force. A motivating force.
Or how about this. I need to paint. I’m a painter. It makes me feel alive and when I don’t paint I’m miserable. So I’m going to ensure I have some time to paint.
These are just a couple of examples of necessity working to help make a goal possible. There are different kinds of necessity that can motivate you to take action on your goals. You just need to connect with yours.
So ask yourself the following questions;
- Why do I want to achieve this goal?
- What will happen if I don’t achieve this goal?
- How will I feel if I don’t achieve this goal?
- How will I feel when I do achieve this goal?
- Who’s relying on me to achieve it?
- How does this goal fit in with the identity I have for myself?
- Does this goal help me to live a congruent life? That is, does it align with the kind of person I want to be?
- What am I willing to sacrifice to achieve this goal?
2. Write it down
The act of writing down your goal on physical paper improves your ability to achieve your goal by 42%!
If you’ve been the kind of person that previously kept a mental note of your goal, you should be thinking about changing that – stat!
A study done by Dr Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University, found that participants who wrote their goals down greatly improved their chances of achieving them.
And writing things down on paper has a completely different effect than typing them into our smartphones or computers. The physical act of writing on paper causes our brains to interact differently with what we’re writing and to, in essence, hardwire it more into our brains. This is crucial stuff for goals!
And this is one of the main reasons I love paper! And why I’m super excited about the new project I’m launching soon, called Paper Me Pretty, that will be providing beautiful paper stationery each month only to subscribers. If you’d like to get on the waiting list to hear more about it, you can do that here:
3. Keep it visible
In order to achieve your goals, you need to be looking at them regularly. Ideally, every day. Yes. Every. Single. Day.
The main reason why so many New Year’s resolutions fail is because people make them and then forget about them after a few days or a month.
But with goals, you shouldn’t “set it and forget it”. Doing that just causes your goal to fizzle out.
That’s not what I want for you. I want you to be able to achieve the things that really matter to you. And that means keeping them front and centre.
Put them on a vision board, post them on your computer, bathroom mirror, fridge door – anywhere and everywhere you place your eyes often.
I keep mine in my planner and vision board and see them constantly. And every time I think about the upcoming week, I look at my goals and ask what I can do in the coming week that will get me closer to that goal?
Which brings me on to the next point…
4. Schedule time to act
What gets scheduled, gets done. It’s a fact.
You’re life may already be crammed full of appointments, tasks and just the whirlwind of daily life. Which is why, if you don’t carve out time – literally remove things from your calendar – to work towards your goal, it won’t be achieved.
Take a good hard look at your week. Where can you spend an hour or two to work towards your goal this week?
Don’t have an hour? What are you going to remove so that you DO have an hour?
If your goal really matters to you. If it needs to be achieved (point #1), you’ll make time for it. Even if that means removing that hour of watching TV. Or doing your grocery shop online instead of in person. Or getting up that extra bit earlier in the morning so that you can take action undisturbed by other family members.
And if you’d like to plan your week out on weekly planners that are beautifully designed and different each month, then you’ll definitely want to get on the waiting list for Paper Me Pretty as it will include a gorgeous weekly plan, monthly calendar and so much more – every month for subscribers only.
5. Get accountability
This is one of the secret sauces of goal achievement. And it’s a big separating factor of those who achieve and those who don’t.
If you’ve heard of the company Weight Watchers, you’ll know that a huge part of their success is their weekly accountability. It’s baked into the Weight Watchers system.
Because it works.
If you’re serious about making your goal a reality, you’re going to need one or more people with whom you can connect with on a regular basis who will help to keep you accountable to doing what you said you were going to do.
Not many people get accountability for their goals and that’s a shame. Perhaps, even in your own mind, the thought of being accountable to someone makes you think of being dragged into the Principle’s office at school. Or being called by your parent when you were a kid in that tone of voice that meant you were in trouble. You know the tone I mean? It’s the “Jimmy! Come here. What did you dooooo???” tone.
And it kinda feels like told-you-so’s, frowns and tut-tutting will be heading your way at the first sign of failure.
But that’s not what goal accountability is like at all.
When someone is helping to hold you accountable to your goal, they’re just there for you to let them know if you did what you said you were going to do.
You set the target for yourself and for your own goal. They’re not there to make a judgement or put you on the naughty step.
This is another topic all by itself as there’s so much I could say about this one point. But just to say that having someone to keep you accountable to your goal is a vital element to helping you actually achieve them.
So there you have it! 5 things that will help you achieve your goals. Are any of these vital ingredients missing from your goal achievement process? If so, what are you going to do today to add it? Yes, act today my friend!
Taking one tiny action each day toward your goal will help you make your goal a reality faster than you thought possible. You can do it!
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