How to Set Your Goals and Stick to Them

Your Goals and Your Purpose

Have you ever created a meaningful life goal, only to feel unmotivated by it after only a few weeks of effort?

Have you felt the need to push and drag yourself along until something is somewhat finished, but you feel emotionally and mentally depleted by at the goal’s finish line.

Your goals may not be aligned with your life’s purpose. It happens all the time. We set goals for our lives that we think we’re supposed to want.

As we get older, or life goals—unintentional as it may be—often shift to some strange amalgamation of every goal that’s been ingrained in our minds as the single version of success.

Success is often narrowly defined, and if we don’t met those life expectations at certain stages in our life, we feel we’ve failed in some way.

Give yourself the time to ponder on what would make you truly happy. What could bring your body, mind, and soul ultimate gratification?

What are your hopes, dreams, and passions? Align your goals with your purpose.

Write It Down & Break It Down

Do you have it in your mind? Your dreams, passions, and hopes? Good. Now, write them down. They can be as vague as they can be specific.

There are no rules or boundaries at this stage. Just take your unabashed thoughts and put them to paper.

Once you’ve accomplished that, try to break these ideas down into elements. When looking at your hopes for life, dreams for the future, or passions to be pursued—try to create a list of what that looks like and steps to achieve them.

With that, you already have a messy list of goals. They likely require a bit of cleaning up, perhaps a bit of defining.

How you decide to define and list out these goals are up to the individual. Not every method of accomplishing goals will look the same from person to person.

A Healthy Relationship With Your Goals

Now it’s time to start a healthy relationship with your goals. Your goals are your friends, your companions. They’re not meant to be your enemy. They’re not there to put you down, or to make you feel less than.

You will grow tired of them at times, aggravated by their presence. You may even want to end your time with them altogether.

Like any relationship, your time with your goals can sour. All the time and effort can prove to be too much to handle.

You know yourself best. If your goals are still not aligned with your purpose, it may be time to make peace with them and let them go.

Be careful to recognize when those feelings are just fear, anger, impatience, or a lack of discipline. Achieving a goal, no matter how small,  is tasking work.

Sometimes it’s not enough to just stay motivated. There are few greater feelings than that of achieving a goal, but getting there is never as simple as we want to believe.

If you’ve determined the worth is still there, be patient on the journey of progress.

Set…

Don’t Feel Pressured to Talk About It.

Don’t feel obligated to announce your goals to the world. A lot of people find that telling others their goals has the strange effect of making you feel accomplished without actually having done a thing.

Just the act of saying you’re going to do something, feels like a tiny step toward a goal taken.

If you’ve ever personally done this—told a bunch of people about a goal of yours and then never finished it—that may be why.

Plan for Today & a Year From Today

It’s okay to have broad goals for the future. Don’t fear preparing now for future plans, but don’t force yourself to make drastic changes immediately to progress in those future goals quicker.

Anticipate that things may not always go as planned. Expect the unexpected. As our lives change and shift, so to do our overall goals.

Break down you larger long term goals into its elements. What makes up that goal?

Let’s say your broad goal is to boost up your small business, or to earn a degree. What then are the smaller goals that make up the more broad goal?

Maybe it’s signing up for just one or two online classes, or setting performance goals to help your long term business plan.

Each broader goal blossom into smaller, more attainable goals; ones you can take day by day.

Action!

Stay Accountable

I mentioned before that you don’t have to shout out to the world each and every goal you set. This is still true, but it’s also true that the further you get into your set goals and the higher the risk factors are, the more important it becomes for you to stay accountable.

Sometimes this means entrusting another person to help you with that. In the long term, having a person there to hold you accountable when you cannot is a way to keep your eyes on the price when you’re unable to. There’s no shame in needing extra help to achieve something.

Stay Present

It’s okay to be committed to the goals you’ve set yourself, but it’s easy to get stuck in the tunnel vision of it all.

There’s bound to be times you’ll miss the forest for the trees. Remember, there’s ideally a balance to all things.

Focusing solely on meeting your goals can lead to burnout. Try to stay present when you feel that burnout coming along.

It’s okay to place some of your future accomplishments on the back-burner momentarily to focus on the other parts of life. That leads me to…

Short term vs. Long Term

If you look at your written goals, which would you categorize as short term, and which are more long term?

Separate the ones still on your list into two columns. On one side, we have the short term goals.

These could be the daily life goals like, get more exercise, or eat a healthy dinner.

Now, maybe in your long term column you have the more broad goal of “get healthy”, or “run a 5k marathon”.

Can you see where this is going? When we get overburdened by our short term goals, we sometimes can no longer visualize the ultimate, long-term goal.

All of your smaller efforts will add up over time. Never let them bring you down, but also, try not to view them as a momentary waste.

Short term goals can bring you a quicker feeling of satisfaction, and can act as a continuous motivator for the future.

Celebrate!

How often do you finish something you started and feel a sense of pride? How often do you finish something you’ve started and think that it’s just not good enough?

If you feel the latter, stop what you’re doing right now. You’re allowed to feel good; to take a second, pat yourself on the back, and celebrate.

Even the little goals can prove difficult, so don’t forget to celebrate yourself and your achievements whenever you see fit.

Celebrate, reflect, and get back to the grindstone!

Tags: life goal, Plan for Today, Set Your Goals

Category: Career