Strategies for Achieving Your Goals
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A fulfilling life is guided by meaningful, impactful goals, and steered by how we choose to work towards them. But when it comes to strategies to achieve goals, what is best? How can you ensure your success? And why do goals matter, anyway? Walk with us through a tutorial of how to achieve your goals, and why they’re important in the first place.
Benefits of Establishing Goals
Similar to solidifying and living out your core values, identifying and working towards your goals can have an incredibly positive impact on your life. Having something to work towards gives life meaning, importance, and direction. Goals keep you focused, on the right track, and constantly striving to improve yourself and your current circumstances.
On the contrary, a life completely devoid of goals can trigger anxiety, depression, and even an existential crisis surrounding who you are and what is important to you. The simple act of identifying and creating a plan to achieve even one goal can pull you out of a rut and set you back on the path to success.
Strategies to Achieve Your Goals
Having a goal is one thing, but knowing how to accomplish it is another entirely. And what good is a goal if you never take action to reach it? With careful planning and a commitment to taking the appropriate steps, achieving your goals can improve your life immeasurably.
Here are some helpful strategies that Jonette Dyer uses with her clients to help them achieve goals of all shapes and sizes.
Use a Goal Setting System
While your goal may be unique to you, your desire to set and achieve goals is not. Every ambitious person throughout history has set and worked towards specific goals. Because of this, there are lots of tried-and-true goal-setting systems that can set you on the path to personal achievement. These goal-setting systems are identified with easy to remember acronyms, so you always know what’s required to set and achieve even your most ambitious goals.
SMART Goals
SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. This ensures that you know exactly what your goal is, why it’s important, and that it’s realistically attainable. It also guarantees that you stick to a deadline and regularly check in by measuring easily quantifiable progress.
HARD Goals
A HARD goal is heartfelt, or adds meaning and value to an important aspect of your life. It’s animated, which means you vividly picture in your mind what it will be like to accomplish what you’ve set out to do. It feels required, as if you must do this thing in order to keep your life moving forward. Finally, a HARD goal is difficult. This is not the same as impossible. A realistic goal should push you to work hard and do better, but shouldn’t be so unattainable that you lose motivation and give up.
WOOP Goals
You can also think of your goal in terms of the WOOP method. This quantifies a goal as a type of wish; something that really matters to you, and you feel would change your life for the better. WOOP encourages you to focus on the outcome, allowing the end result to motivate you as you work towards it. To do this, you must eliminate any obstacles, especially those that are internal, that may get in your way. The WOOP method also requires you to have a backup plan you can default to if things don’t go exactly as expected.
OKR Goals
Finally, the OKR method of setting goals encourages you to set a clear and meaningful objective, and continually monitor your progress through measurable key results.
Track Your Progress
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to succeed if you don’t know where you are on your journey. For this reason, it’s very important to find a way to track your progress. This can be done through noting observable, measurable standards to be met along your journey, or from creating a long-term plan and checking off smaller goals one at a time until you reach your ultimate goal.
Whatever system you use, be sure to stick to it and hold yourself accountable to the progress goals you’ve set.
Instill Self-Discipline
In order to commit to tracking your progress, you have to have the self-discipline to stay focused. You may be the best goal-planner on the planet, but if you don’t have the discipline to follow through, it doesn’t matter.
If you, like so many of us, are someone who knows you have trouble staying disciplined and motivated, ask for help. Reach out to a friend, family member, or life coach and request that they help keep you accountable. This can be as formal or as casual as you need it to be. Some may need a scheduled daily, weekly, or monthly check-in with someone else to stay on track, while for others, just telling someone about your goals can be the only accountability needed to keep focused.
Don’t be afraid to set up a system that works best for you, and over time, you may find yourself no longer needing outside discipline.
Eliminate Bad Habits
Bad habits can derail even the best of intentions. If you know there is something you habitually do that will negatively impact your ability to accomplish your goal, it’s essential to do everything you possibly can to break the habit.
Once again, you don’t have to do this alone. If your habit is too ingrained for you to break away from on your own, look for outside help. Depending on the nature of your bad habits, you may find support through dedicated support groups, talking to a life coach or therapist, or connecting with friends and family who may be trying to break the same habit.
Understand Time Management
We’ll be blunt. Procrastination can be a powerful goal-killer. Mismanaging your time can make it unnecessarily difficult to stay on track and continue working toward your goal. Plus, poor time management tends to have a snowball effect. First, you find yourself missing one time-sensitive goal, and before you know it, you may be several goals behind, and ready to give up.
For short term productivity, consider resources and tools such as a Pomodoro timer, a to-do list, or an itemized daily schedule. For longer-term time management, remain committed to tracking your progress and hitting any and all deadlines you set for yourself. And if you miss one? Be kind to yourself. Nobody’s perfect, and you’re more than capable of getting back on track.
Welcome Failure
Did we mention that no one’s perfect? This means that at some point, we all fail. As the saying goes, “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.” Or, in more colloquial terms, “You’ve gotta risk it to get the biscuit.”
What we’re getting at here is that you don’t need to be afraid of failure. Instead, you should welcome it as a valuable learning experience. When you fail, you learn what doesn’t work, and can alter your path so that it doesn’t happen again.
Seek Out Inspiration
One of the most powerful strategies for achieving your goals is to find people who have accomplished what you’re striving to accomplish. Who has walked this path before you? Seek these people out and learn everything you can about how they got to where they are.
Inspiration can come from many places – celebrities, friends, coworkers, family members, and more. Leverage the success and wisdom of these people to create success on your own journey.
Turn Goals into Habits
Remember when we mentioned that bad habits can derail even the best plan? Well, good habits are equally as powerful. Over time, if you stay focused and driven, your goals can become habits. Soon, you won’t have to think about what you should be doing to inch closer to your objectives. Instead, knowing just what to do to keep moving forward will become second nature.
Find a Mentor or Coach
All of these strategies are proven to effect positive change, but trying to implement them all on your own can be overwhelming. This is one of the many reasons people choose to hire a life coach.
Choosing the right life coach is not a light decision. Just as your goals are unique and personal to you, your working relationship with your life coach should also be an individually tailored experience. When embarking on your search, seek out coaches like Jonette Dyer who have proven experience, have worked with people trying to achieve goals similar to yours, and can provide testimonials from satisfied clients.
Through her personal coaching services, Jonette Dyer has helped countless people achieve their goals. To get started on your journey, please reach out to her today.
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