Steps for Creating Personal Goals That are Attainable
Start Dreaming In Order to Set Your Goals
It all starts with a Dream turned into a Plan. You want to see it, visualize it happening, or even just hope that you can reach those goals. The sooner you can be organized about setting the personal goals you want to achieve, the sooner you will start reaching them to improve your life.
Don’t be afraid to dream big about longterm goals that you want to meet in the future. That’s not to say that your goals shouldn’t be attainable.
In other words, something you know is possible to accomplish. I know you might dream of one day saving enough money to grab a seat on a SpaceX flight to Mars, but is that really attainable?
As long as your goal is something you can accomplish in your lifetime than It doesn’t matter what that is. It could be to buy a vacation home one day, to lose 40 pounds, or to stop smoking.
Maybe you want to eventually change careers to something that brings you joy. Or it could be that you want to be able to retire early so you can travel. It doesn’t matter what you want to change or where you want to go, you need a goal.
In order to set your personal goals, you want to start by thinking about what you want to change. At this stage, feel free to brainstorm. Come up with all sorts of fun dreams and goals.
They can be related like improving your health, losing weight, and getting back into shape for example, or they can be unrelated like quitting smoking and moving up the corporate ladder. Dream big and come up with some goals to get you started.
It doesn’t matter what goals you choose to start with. It could be the most important goal on your list or maybe the easiest to achieve in a short amount of time. Or if that sounds too daunting, pick the most fun one, or the one that will be easiest to reach.
Now write them down in a notebook or notate them on your phone! The best thing you can do to achieve your goals is to commit in writing to reaching them. Words have a lot of power, so use it!
Next, decide what you want to tackle first. It’s hard to keep up and stick to your goals when you’re trying to focus on too many different things at once. Instead, pick one short-term goal and one long-term goal to work on.
When you’ve reached that short-term goal or at the least are comfortable with where you’re at with your goals, you can go back to the list you dreamed up and pick another goal to start on.
Break Your Goals Into Smaller Steps
No matter how big or small your goal is, it will take several steps to reach it. Maybe it’s a small goal that only takes a handful of tasks to complete. Or maybe it’s a big goal that takes you in many different directions and has you juggling different parts all at once. No matter how big or small, all goals benefit from being broken down into individual steps or tasks.
Get out a piece of paper and start breaking it down using an outline format. You can break things down into smaller time chunks, or things you need to do.
Let’s look at a weight-loss for example. Let’s say you want to lose 35 pounds. You could break it down into smaller goals based on an amount time, such as losing one pound a week. Or you could break it down into daily tasks to complete like logging your food, getting your steps in, drinking 8 glasses of water, etc. You could also break it down into different strategies for finding 1 new new workout a week, eating more whole foods, going low carb, etc.
Try to come up with a step-by-step system or list of tasks that make sense to you, but also make it easy for you to make progress towards your goal. If you need to, you can break the goal up into bigger chunks and then work on each of those chunks and break them into manageable tasks.
For example, buying a house for the first time can seem like a pretty daunting goal. Break it up into choosing a realtor, securing a mortgage loan, and deciding what features you want in a house. By looking at each of those “sub-goals” separately it becomes easier to see the steps and tasks it will take to move in the right direction.
Speaking of moving in the right direction… sometimes our goals are so far away from our current reality that we don’t even know exactly what all our steps will be. That’s ok too. You know your end goal and you know where you’re at right now. You should also have an idea of what your first few steps or tasks should be. Start there and then keep adding more as you figure out what you need to do next.
“A Goal Is A Dream With A Deadline.”
Napoleon Hill
Set A Deadline For Each of Your Goals
Napoleon Hill knew what he was talking about. He spent years interviewing the most successful people of his time to find out just how important goal setting was for achievement. and one of the things he discovered was that these people set specific goals with deadlines. It’s those deadlines that make the difference and take you from doing ok, to becoming truly successful.
Without a deadline, you just putter away at your dreams. You may make a little progress here and there, but it’s never anything urgent. As soon as you put a deadline on it, you suddenly create that urgency that makes you jump into action. You have to do something now.
Start with your goal and set a deadline. If possible, be realistic, but choose something you have to work for. Going back to our example of losing 25 pounds, you wouldn’t want to make that deadline next week. You know you can’t lose the weight that quickly. You also don’t want to give yourself a year to do it. If you give yourself that long, you won’t try very hard. You give yourself permission to eat that candy bar or skip a workout and another one, and another one because there are 12 months left to make up for it. Instead, you may choose to give yourself four months to lose that weight. That’s very doable. If you’re feeling ambitious, cut it back to 2 months and see if you can pull it off.
Sometimes we don’t know how long it will take us to reach a goal. We don’t have all the information and when there are other players involved, it can be hard to figure it out. In that case, take your best guess and adjust the deadline as needed down the road.
Next, go back to your list of individual tasks and steps. Assign deadlines to the first few on the list. Push yourself to work fast and furious. Get it done and move on to the next batch, continuing to add deadlines and doing everything you can to meet them. You’ll be surprised how much you can accomplish when you have a tight deadline and you give it your all.
Have Someone Hold You Accountable to Your Goal
No matter how big or small your goal; there will be days when you’ll feel like throwing in the towel. You wonder why you set the goal in the first place. There will be roadblocks and unexpected delays. Life will get in the way of what you’re trying to accomplish. You get burnt out and it just plain gets hard. That’s when accountability will become your lifeline.
We all need a reminder once in a while of why we are doing what we’re doing. We all need a cheerleader every once in a while that gives us a pat on the back and tells us we’re doing great. We all need a team or a buddy once in a while to do it with us. And sometimes just knowing someone else is counting on us, or that they’ll be disappointed if we don’t’ reach our goals is enough to keep us chipping away at that list of tasks.
Find someone you can be accountable to. Share your goals and deadlines with them. Check in with them regularly. Who that accountability person is and how they will motivate you is up to you. Find someone that motivates you. Find someone that will help you reach your goals.
Maybe that someone is a person with the same or similar goals. Maybe it’s a whole group of them. You can work together to reach your goals and cheer each other on.
Maybe making a bet with someone that you can reach a certain goal by a certain time works for you. If so, make that bet and make sure both the reward when you win and the price you’ll have to pay if you lose motivates you.
Maybe you would benefit from the extra help and guidance of a coach. This can be particularly useful when you’re not quite sure how to reach your goal in the first place.
Accountability doesn’t have to be complicated. Make a commitment and share it publicly. Tell your friends or your mom that you’ve decided to quit smoking. Post it on Facebook. Sometimes knowing that you’ll have to fess up if you give up on your goal is enough to keep you going.
No matter what you decide to do, make sure you have some sort of accountability built in. You may not think you need it at the start, but it will come in handy down the road. And who knows… it may just be the one little thing that makes the difference between giving up and reaching your goal.
Make Sure to Celebrate Meeting Your Goal
Last but not least, don’t forget to celebrate. Change is often hard and as mentioned earlier there will be challenges on your road to success. It’s important to take the time to celebrate along the way and of course when you reach your final goal.
Set some mile markers along the way. For the 25lb weight loss example, you may choose to celebrate reaching that 10 pound mile marker and then every five pounds after that.
These celebrations don’t have to be big and you obviously don’t want to do anything that will sabotage your efforts. (No cake or pizza to celebrate the weight loss for example). You do however want to acknowledge the progress you’ve made. Taking the time to celebrate also gives you time to reflect and see how far you’ve come. It will give you a boost of self-confidence and the energy to make it to your next mile marker.
When you reach your final goal, it really is time to celebrate big. You’ve accomplished something amazing. You didn’t give up, no matter how hard things got, or how many times you thought about throwing in the towels. Instead, you set a goal and you worked hard until you reached it. That’s worth celebrating.
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