Ways to achieve your personal goals are invaluable pieces of information for everyone of us. Each of us carries with us personal goals, hopes and dreams that we hope to fulfill. Whether it is getting rid of those extra three kilograms, developing the hobby that we somehow never have time to get to, getting out of the red or starting a private business – these dreams and goals accompany us and keep us busy but often, in the midst of our daily routine, seem impossible to achieve. What is stopping us? And how do we still motivate processes of active and goal-oriented action? Below are five ways that will help you achieve your personal goals.
Definition and the focus of your personal goals
Want to get rich, be happier, invest more in yourself, or adopt a healthy lifestyle? Great, but how do you continue from here? One of the factors that prevents many people from achieving their personal goals is that the goals they set for themselves are vague and general. As a result, those goals are perceived as abstract and unattainable, and the path to achieving them is also experienced as vague and unclear. Accordingly, the first step to achieving personal goals is a clear definition of the goal, while referring to concrete and tangible aspects. For example, setting a goal as “getting rich” is much less effective than choosing a goal as “learning a skill in the coming year,” and the likelihood of achieving a goal such as “registering for a master’s degree and regularly engaging in sports” increases when it replaces an abstract goal such as “investing in and developing myself.” For some people, this stage is relatively simple since they know what specific dream they are aiming for, but other people may find this stage particularly challenging since they feel that their lives are not fulfilling as they are, but have difficulty “putting their finger” on the factors or actions required to change this situation.
Read also: How to Stay Consistent With Your Goals
Planning and control as regards achieving your personal goals
Defining a clear and defined goal is an important first step on the way to achieving personal goals, but the road to realizing the dream is still long. Many people know what their goal is, but in the context of busy daily life, they find it difficult to commit to the goal and work towards achieving it in a systematic and organized manner. Accordingly, even well-defined goals often remain “hanging in the air” and dissolve after a long period in which no steps are taken to achieve them. Accordingly, one of the most important steps to achieving personal goals is creating an organized work plan. A number of tips can help you in this regard:
Break down the goal into sub-goals – set sub-goals that will make up the main goal. For example, if the goal is a healthy lifestyle, set sub-goals such as signing up for a sports club, removing sweets from the house, bringing healthy snacks to work, and so on. The process will help you identify what are the concrete steps required to achieve the goal and, no less importantly, will create a feeling that you are dealing with realistic goals and not with a huge, distant and unattainable goal.
Work with schedules – Do you tend to procrastinate and procrastinate on tasks? Yes, almost all of us do. Therefore, don’t just set sub-goals, but place them on schedules, and you will create a more binding framework for taking action.
Address possible inhibiting factors in advance – optimism and self-belief are extremely important factors for the success of the process, but it is also important to take into account and prepare in advance for factors that may prevent you from achieving your goals: time and money resources that will make it difficult to start a personal business, disputes with your business partner that will make it difficult for them to develop the business in a direction that interests you, a partner who will not support your attempts to replace the internal inhibiting factors (which will be expanded on later), and so on. After you identify these factors, try to think of possible ways to cope.
Also, there are the external resources needed – these are tasks which you cannot perform yourself and which require external consultation, guidance or assistance. Based on your understanding and according to the schedule you set, define who you should contact and at what stage.
Monitoring – The defined and effective action plan you set will lose its meaning if you do not maintain a regular process of monitoring and tracking its progress. Define in advance a day or even an hour a week that you will dedicate to checking your progress and learning how you are meeting the schedules you have set. If monitoring indicates difficulty in meeting the plan, devote time and attention to investigating the causes of the difficulty: Have you set unrealistic goals? What internal or external inhibiting factors are preventing you from achieving your goals?
Read Also: How to Overcome Procrastination
Identifying internal inhibiting factors
You’ve made a choice, prepared a work plan, organized yourself, started, even taken some significant steps… and yet you find yourself at full throttle on neutral, and things aren’t really progressing? One reason for this could be internal inhibiting factors that you’re not aware of. For example, you may be unable to take the steps you’ve set out to invest in yourself more because your low self-esteem is whispering to you that you don’t deserve any of this, or starting a business is being delayed because the possibility of success is also causing you to have subconscious remorse and concerns. Identifying these internal factors is a crucial step to success because their influence could hinder any practical and successful step you take. In some cases, simply identifying the internal inhibiting factor is able to re-energize active action to achieve the goal, and in other cases, professional help ( psychological therapy ) will be required to help process and neutralize these inhibiting factors.
Mobilize environmental support for achieving your personal goals
Many people tend to underestimate the extent of the impact that external environmental support or lack thereof has on the possibility of achieving personal goals. A supportive environment can offer not only concrete help (financial support, changing the division of roles at home, advice or guidance) but also create an atmosphere or environment that will encourage, enable and not block movement towards achieving goals. For example, most people will have difficulty maintaining a diet in a home environment full of temptations, invitations to corrupt meals and pressure to break the diet (“Well, that’s how it is at the event, tomorrow you will be more careful”). Similarly, disdain or distrust can also weaken the hands of a person who is very determined to achieve a certain goal. Therefore, as part of organizing to achieve goals, it is important to allocate resources to also recruit environmental support from the people who are significant to you, while clearly addressing the aspects that help and hinder.
Read Also: 5 Unconventional Principles for Effective Time Management from Bill Gates
Seek professional help
As you can see, the path to achieving personal goals is often strewn with challenges and obstacles, and in many cases determination, perseverance, and many resources are required to achieve the desired goal. Furthermore, emotional factors and ineffective thinking patterns that we automatically resort to (“I probably won’t succeed,” “If this fails, I’ll ruin my whole family’s life”) may affect us much more than we realize, and hinder our progress. Accordingly, when significant difficulties and delays arise on the way to achieving goals, it is recommended to seek professional help and specifically personal coaching – a short-term consulting process that helps create a binding and effective framework for achieving personal goals. In the framework of personal coaching, the coach accompanies the trainee through the stages of choosing a goal, building an effective action plan, and monitoring its progress, thus helping the trainee to remain motivated and committed to the process of achieving the goal. Additionally, the coach’s skills allow him to more easily identify external and internal inhibiting factors, and help the coachee develop effective coping strategies that will allow him to progress safely and steadily toward the desired goal.
