Goals guide progress and meaning—both of which are vital to a happy and healthy life. Your goals provide purpose and a path to follow. And achieving these goals provides a sense of fulfilment incomparable to other short-lived pleasure pursuits.
Achieving your goals is never going to be easy. Because it’s doing the hard work that makes the destination all the more worth it. So in this article, we’ll look at some of the key components of goal achievement.
Setting the right goals
There are certain goals that people tend to gravitate towards, like losing weight or saving money. But these outcomes aren’t always guaranteed to bring happiness to everyone.
Ensure you’re setting yourself up for success by taking stock of the goals you want to work towards. Pick goals that align with your values and the life you want to lead. What gets you excited? What’s worth sacrificing for?
These questions will help you narrow your focus and pick goals that make you feel good when you achieve them.
Actionable aspirations
If you want to make headway towards your ambitions, you’ll need to align your attention to the specifics. How are you going to get to where you want to be? To narrow the focus effectively, many people opt to use the SMART method, which ascertains that all goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Think about how you’ll lay out your goal, measure it, achieve it, why you want this and when you’ll be able to get there. Breaking your goals down in this way helps you think about the habits you’ll need to adopt each day to get where you want to be.
Paint the picture
Set your goal in stone by writing it down in as much detail as possible. You can also draw an image if you’re more of a visual person. Whatever helps you start to visualise more clearly where you want to be.
Position this note where you can see it daily as a reminder of what’s important. It can also help to tell people about your goal and what you’re working towards.
Everyone is different, so you’ll need to find what works for you. But try to paint the picture of your goal clearly and revisit this regularly.
What smaller goals will make your big goal attainable?
When it comes down to it, it’s the small actions you make each day that will accumulate over time to get to where you need to be.
To achieve any goal, you need a method and a means of getting there. And this can be as detailed as you like. If we take the example of saving money, we can see the actions and habits we need to build are:
- Opting for cheaper alternatives
- Not spending from savings accounts
- Paying off all debts
- Choosing cheaper social activities
Enjoy the process
There are always going to be goals to work towards, ways to improve and methods of moving forward—and we have to take responsibility and accountability for this to make progress. However, we must stop to admire the view along the way.
Balance your desire for improvement with acknowledgement of the good things you are already doing, and make time for the things you enjoy still too. This work-life-improvement balance will allow you to enjoy the process without constantly pushing yourself, putting yourself down for mistakes or risking burnout.
