6 Crucial Tips for Reaching Your Goals
Photo Credit: Diriye Amey
We can have exciting goals written down on paper or in our heads, but either way we have to be careful of making the same mistakes repeatedly and never achieving anything. Here are six crucial tips for achieving your objectives.
1. Remember that persistence is crucial because many goals include a period of lag time.
Lag time is the time difference between when you set the goal and when you start seeing results. So, if you’re not seeing results yet, that’s because you’re in lag time. You need to keep going and updating your strategy as you go. If you find that you’re struggling for any reason, try looking to your support network for help or guidance.
2. Remember to put your goals somewhere within your focus so that you always remember your targets.
Photo Credit: Angie Torres
So many people don’t follow through with their fitness goals or their career goals simply because they forget about them on a daily basis. This means that we need to find a way to make sure that our targets are constantly within our focus - so stick reminders on your wall, your phone or your desk at work. Watch motivational videos, listen to inspirational speakers or put compelling images of your goal on your wall.
3. Remember that we need to measure where we are now so that we can track our improvement over time.
This is closely linked to the first two points because it’s going to help us with our focus and also with persistence - if we can see that we’re making progress. Measuring oneself in terms or personal or professional goals is something that many successful people talk about doing. The reason being that they want to know what’s working well, what’s not working and where they can improve. There’s no point guessing what’s going right and what’s going wrong, having good metrics will help you make better decisions based on the facts.
4. Remember that honesty is the only way we can make progress with our goals. If we’re not honest with ourselves, none of this will work.
Honesty in goal-setting is about looking at the facts and drawing conclusions from them. It’s not about being too easy on ourselves - but equally it’s not about being too hard on ourselves. It’s about being real. We’re not expecting for everything to go perfectly all the time or for us to be machines that don’t make mistakes or have bad days. It’s about setting standard of behaviour that we’re going to stick to.
5. Remember that baby steps are the key to progress. If any goal seems to big to achieve, break it down into smaller steps.
Photo Credit: Carol VanHook
Otherwise, it can lead to us feeling like we’re never going to be able to reach it because it’s too far in the distance. That’s why this step is crucial. Start with what you want to achieve and ask ‘what needs to happen for me to reach that point?’ Then work backwards from then until the present moment. Make sure that when you set a goal, that you can take the first baby step to achieving it right there and then.
6. Remember that with all of these goals, we constantly want to be asking ourselves, how can we make this as enjoyable as possible?
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Simply because when something is enjoyable, we want to keep doing it. Can you do it with more friends, family members or work colleagues? Can you add music or games? How do others make the activity as fun as possible? For example, if you’d like to get fit and you love dancing - the chances are that dance classes would be a much more enjoyable way of losing weight for you, than running on the treadmill (which seems to me like the least fun way of exercising!).
I hope you enjoyed these tips and they give you some inspiration today towards reaching your goals. Thanks for reading.
Ronan
