How to set and achieve your goals

We all have have our own goals in life. They simply drive us towards living each day for a bigger purpose. I bet majority of you don’t even realize that you achieve some of your goals daily. For example, you get out of bed every morning to go to work- that’s an achievement in itself.  Sometimes we fail to recognize this because some behaviors become automatic and we forget to place importance of them. So we can establish that achieving goals is possible. Lets take in consideration goals on a wider and more specific scale. How do you set them and most importantly how to accomplish them?
 
Have a clear vision of where it is you want to be
The most important part of goal setting is actually finding what it is that you really want. For this to work, you have to be very specific of what the goal actually is. It is not enough to say “I want to be healthy”. Firstly, to be healthy is a state and not an goal. Some people are healthy without even putting much effort towards it – it is a state, a feeling of being. So ask yourself, what specifically about being healthy do you want to be? Are you planning on running a marathon therefore requiring to work towards your fitness levels? Do you have a specific health problem you want to overcome? You need to give your unconscious mind a very clear idea of what it is that you want to achieve in order for it to work towards it.
 
Plan of action
Once you have established your goal, you need to set in motion a plan of action. How is it that you are going to accomplish this? What do you need to make this happen and what steps do you have to take? Do you have to sign up to a gym to begin working on your fitness to grow your fitness levels to run that marathon? If you want a specific career, would you need to take on a course to gain the skills needed? What are the skills you need to get to where you want to get? Identify all the steps that will bring you to the finish line. If you have no clue on what these are, find somebody who has already achieved it. This could be a person you may already know, or could be a celebrity or somebody you can research online. Learn about their journey and how they got there. When we feel uninspired, the easiest way to combat this is to look outside of our own box/mind and seek further motivation.

Give yourself a deadline
This may be hard at first, but if you have taken the above steps to learn more about your journey towards your success, then you should have an idea on timing. Set a deadline of when it is you want to obtain your goal. Taking the marathon example, that may be a little bit easier to figure out because you have a specific date of the event. But if your goal is to be in a specific career, or travel to a place, or complete a project, you need to make the work and set yourself a timeline. Looking at all the skills you will have to gain and the steps you need to take, calculate in your mind how long roughly will this take? How long do you want it to take you? When would you be able to finish all the above and are ready to achieve this? If you still get confused, using special calendar dates such as your birthday, Christmas, New Years, bank holiday weekends etc might motivate you further.
 
Be in control
The most important thing by far that I have learnt in achieving my goals is that I need to be in control of the outcome. There is absolutely no point setting a goal which requires an external input from somebody else. Why? Simply because you cannot control their decisions, time, thought process, etc. So, to achieve something, you must be in control of it 100%, at all times. That way, you are only depending on yourself to make things happen. You don’t have the time and right to involve somebody in your own desires. To get what you want, you have to be the only one who can make it happen. So, if you say “I want work for a specific company”, you have to ask yourself. Am I 100% responsible for making this happen or would I need to rely on another person’s decision towards it? What role do I want to have in this company and do I have the right qualifications for it? If there is somebody else involved in the outcome of your goal, change it so that it becomes in your domination. Only you can discipline yourself towards your desired outcome. Looking at the above goal, you will probably have to rely on somebody to hire you. Are you the right fit for the company? Do you have the necessary skills to work there? Are you in an environment which allows you to work for this company- or are they in a different city/country? Do they have a position available for the role you want? So instead, you could say “I want to gain the skills required to become a financial director (for example, here you would put the role you want). See how it changes? Now you are responsible and have a clear vision of what you need to get done for making it possible.
 
​Bring your goal to life
It is not enough to tell yourself what you want. As with everything else in life, practice makes perfect (well that’s the saying although perfection cannot be truly measured therefore it does not exist). Ask yourself what will you feel once you accomplish your goal? Where will you be? Who will you be with? How will this impact your life? Give yourself the fairness of actually living as if this has already happened so that you are aware of what it will be like when it does happen. Something that I find really helps is writing your goals down and every morning, when you wake up before you do anything else, take your list and read each goal out loud. Do this every morning until it is so fixed in your mind that you know 100% that you are going to get there by your deadine.

And remember, everything you want is within your reach. You just need a really good strategy behind it and make it happen.