7 Wonderful Ways To Keep Your Goals In Mind

Discover 7 ways you can keep your goals in mind so that you have a much greater chance of achieving them.

Setting goals is easy.

It’s the achievement of them that’s the hard part. But it’s hard to achieve goals for many people because the goals they set with all good intentions, at some point fade into the background due to the busyness of life.

All of a sudden, you turn around and December 31st is staring you in the face and you think ‘What happened to the goals I set this year?’ or maybe even ‘What were the goals I set this year?’.

I don’t want that for you my friend.

I want you to be confident that you can achieve your goals because you’re clear about what your goals are and your ensuring that you’re focusing on them over the coming weeks and months.

How?

By keeping your goals front and centre. And in this post, I’ll be looking at seven ways you can keep your goals in mind as you go through your days and weeks.

But before we get into this post, I wanted to let you know that our stationery membership, Paper Me Pretty, includes a beautiful goal planner and more in fresh new designs each month. So you’ll want to check that out here:

7 ways to keep your goals in mind

1. Use a vision board

It’s pretty hard to ignore something that’s staring you in the face every day. That’s essentially what a vision board does. It stares you in the face and reminds you of what it is you said you wanted to achieve.

To make your vision board even more effective, I recommend putting it in plain view of wherever you sit down to work. It’s pure work motivation when you sit down at your computer and look up from your screen to see your vision board staring right back at’cha!

If you don’t use a computer often, then put your vision board somewhere you spend a lot of time. That way you’ll be frequently encouraged to keep your goals in mind.

To avoid your vision board blending into your wallpaper, I recommend updating it once a month with a new motivational quote or an image.

This frequent refreshing of your board has the double effect of getting you to review your goals and it helps your board to stand out again with a refreshed message.

Did you know that our new stationery subscription, Paper Me Pretty, includes a gorgeous motivational quote each month? AND we make it into an Art Print so that you can frame it, and a desktop and mobile wallpaper so that it can motivate you every time you open your device! It’ll save you a ton of time trawling through the internet looking for something inspirational. Find out more here:

2. Place them on surfaces you use daily

If you find yourself moving around your house a lot, why not write your goals down on bits of paper and stick them in precarious spots around your environment? Try the bathroom mirror, your computer screen, your mantlepiece mirror.

The idea here is to have notices spring up like pop-up windows on a browser. Just as you were minding your own business and completely forgetting about your goals – POP – out of no-where a note reminds you that you’re aiming for 20 sales this month or that you want to drop 5 lbs. And just like that, you put that snickers bar down and grab an apple. 😉

3. Review them weekly

Reviewing your goals regularly is key to achieving them. And it’s the main reason why so many people reach New Year’s Eve deflated about the goals they wanted to reach at the beginning of the year.

Review. Review. And Review.

Once a week, if you’re not doing this already, review your calendar for the week ahead, and then review your goals looking specifically for any actions you can take in the coming week to get you closer to your goals.

When you do this every week, you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish just by reviewing your goals and choosing to do at least one thing a week towards them!

Get a cute weekly planning page each month with Paper Me Pretty, our popular stationery subscription.

4. Adjust and align often (monthly, quarterly and annually)

Now I know it would be lovely if, when you set a goal of dropping 5 lbs in 5 weeks, you’d see yourself lose a pound a week.

Sounds great, right? But sometimes often, that’s not what happens in real life.

If one of your methods to drop a pound a week was to go jogging 3 days a week and you sprained your ankle on week two, that has an impact on your goal.

That’s why it’s just as important to adjust your goals as you progress your way toward them.

Adjusting your goal helps you to make allowances for the ‘life’ factor that has most perfectionists sobbing in the corner in full foetal position.

Life happens. Adjust.

It’s also import to align your goals too.

Alignment is where you look at your goal and you ask yourself, ‘Is this goal still relevant for me in this stage of my life?’ or ‘Does this goal still fit in with my values or my other aspirations or dreams?’.

Take the Covid-19 pandemic for example. I’m sure a lot of people had “Work out at the gym 3x/week” as one of their goals at the start of the year. When all the gyms shut down, suddenly you’re faced with a goal that doesn’t make sense given your locked-down-gymless situation. When something like this happens, you’ve got a few choices. You can;

• delete the goal altogether
• defer the goal to a later point in time or
• redesign the goal so that it aligns with where you are right now, and where you want to get to. In this case, it might be replacing the gym with the park and a pair of running shoes.

So, how often should you adjust or align your goals?

In addition to my weekly goal review, I also review my goals each month, quarter and year specifically to adjust or realign them.

A lot can happen in a month or a quarter (and definitely in a year) so it’s good to keep fine-tuning your goals as you go. No doubt, you’ll probably be learning a lot of things along the way! Use your learnings to help you fine-tune your weekly goal actions. This is pure gold!

5. Write them down regularly

One way to keep your goals in mind is to write them down regularly. There have been times when I’ve written down a specific goal every day for months to help me to focus on it. And it works.

The action of physically writing something down is very powerful. It causes our brains to connect with the words on a much deeper level than if we were typing them into a computer or tapping them onto our phones.

Our brains draw a stronger connection to the words we physically write and goes to work hard-wiring this onto our neural networks. It’s the reason why one study discovered that college students who wrote things down during lectures got better results than those who used a laptop.

If you’re having a hard time keeping a goal in mind, trying writing it out regularly.

6. Use a tracker

If you’ve heard me use the phrase ‘what get’s scheduled gets done’, you’ll hear me use this phrase too; ‘what gets tracked gets attention’.

Did you know that you’re more likely to lose 5 lbs in 5 weeks simply by tracking your weight every day? It’s true!

Research has shown that participants in a weight-loss study who were told to do an activity from a list and track their weight, lost the weight. Whereas others who only did the activity and didn’t track their weight weren’t nearly as successful.

Why does this work?

It’s because where attention goes, energy flows. By placing your attention on something by writing it down, you also put energy towards that thing. And you can keep your goals in mind by tracking them!

If you’d like to get pretty monthly trackers to track your goals, be sure to check out Paper Me Pretty, our new stationery subscription. We release a monthly bundle of stationery each month in beautiful new designs and our monthly bundles include a tracker for this exact purpose!

7. Set a reminder on your phone

One way to ensure you don’t avoid your goals is to set a reminder on your phone to go off every day.

Doing this causes you to make a decision. Are you going to take action on your goal today or not? If you really want to achieve your goal, you’ll probably be grateful for the reminder.

You can also set your phone to remind you to take a specific action towards your goal. In our lose 5 lbs example, you might set your phone to remind you to strap on your running shoes and go for a jog every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5:30pm.

Phone reminders. Annoyingly simple.

So there you have it! Seven wonderful ways to keep your goals in mind. Which one do you need to start today? Let me know in the comments. 🙂