Top 6 Actions That Help You Achieve Your Goals

So, we are over halfway through the year and if you are like me, you had some lofty ideas about what you wanted to achieve this year and how you were going to go about it. And, you may have set some goals or New Year’s resolutions only to find that as the year progressed, little things cropped up and started to wear away at your mindset, diminishing the well-intentioned goals set months before. This is okay, life happens. If you are feeling like you are in a funk and if you’re tired of making resolutions and goals that you never accomplish, a new approach may help.  

Conventional mindset goals can fall apart for several reasons. You could be setting a process goal but treating it like a results goal, or vice versa. You may be setting a goal to please someone else or to show a third party that you can achieve X, Y or Z. These strategies rarely work as the ‘reason why’ is not centered around self.  Coaching can help you identify these goals and the underlying reasons to why you believe they should be achieved in the first place. However, once you’re aware of why this happens, you can prevent it or fix it so you can be on your way to achievement. 

Try these techniques to achieve your goals: 

1. Pick realistic goals. One of the most frequent issues is that you may pick goals that aren’t realistic. Perhaps you want to travel around the world, read hundreds of books, and lose an enormous amount of weight. However, many of these goals are simply not possible any time soon. You may not have the money for travel, you don’t have the time to read, and you can’t lose weight quickly. It’s important to make your goals tangible. For example, instead of trying to lose 20 kilos, focus on losing five kilos at a time. 

2. Break goals into a journey. It’s easy to set a goal, miss it, and get upset. Instead of doing this to yourself with each resolution, try a different way. View your goal as a long-term journey, where each leg of the journey leads up to where you’ll finally arrive. Create a plan that will get you to that goal. Set milestones and rewards along the way. Make sure the rewards are not in conflict with the original goal. An example is rewarding yourself with food for losing weight. It becomes counterproductive and hinders your progress. 

3. Measure your progress. In some cases, you may be close to achieving your goal, but you give up too soon. By measuring your progress, you’ll be able to see what you’re doing more clearly. You’ll be more motivated to stay on the journey and keep pushing toward your resolution. Set up a system to track your progress. Try different tools, such as calendars, journals, or logs to keep track of your goals and see which system works best for you. Why not invest in an accountability buddy like a coach or mentor that will keep you honest about your progress and helps you by motivating you along the way when things get difficult. 

4. Ask for help. Sometimes you might fail simply because you don’t ask for help and try to do everything by yourself. Perhaps a little help will bring you success! It’s normal to need help along your journey. You may need an entire support network behind you to achieve your goal. Turn to friends, family, coworkers, and others for support. Asking for help can help you achieve your goals faster and make the entire process easier as you work toward your target. 

5. Feel free to adjust goals. You don’t have to stick with an old goal. Sometimes goals need to be changed and modified. You may evolve as a person and realize that your earlier ambitions are no longer relevant. This is also a good time to reflect on why you wanted the goal so badly in the first place. As you evolve, your thought process moves with you. Embrace the new learnings. Your present is constantly affecting your mindset and the way you perceive things. You accumulate knowledge, wisdom, and experience over time that affects your goals. 

6. Stay aware of growth. You will continue to grow even if you don’t reach your goals. In some cases, failure may be a blessing because it teaches you valuable life lessons you wouldn’t have realized before. Without failure, you may not change enough to grow.  Failure isn’t the end, and you can always set new goals. Remember FAIL stands for First Attempt In Learning. So you can never really fail at anything – unless you give up without even trying. 

 
These steps may sound simple enough, but sometimes we get so hung up on what we haven’t achieved that we forget to stop and take stock of what we have achieved, and why we set the goals in the first place. It’s more important to grow and become stronger than to reach every goal on your list. Remember, your list will also change, so it won’t look the same as when you started. Be proactive about your goals! Take effective actions that support you and your goals, and you’ll find that achievement comes much easier.