Everyone has goals. However, it can be difficult to reach them. Sometimes, you might give up after thinking about what’s involved, determining if it’s too much effort, or not knowing where to start. Other times, you may dive right in and get started, only to become frustrated when you don’t get the results after a short time. Achieving goals can be challenging, but setting yourself up for success isn’t hard.
What Are Goals?
In short, a goal is an idea you envision achieving for your future self. You know it involves some actions or changes to reach your desired outcome. Setting goals involves planning. The benefit of planning is that you work through the steps to achieve your goal before you begin. In the process, you may realize the goal is impossible. This can save a lot of time and effort. On the other hand, you could redefine the goal to make it possible. So, how do you redefine a goal?
Whether you have your sights on a large or small goal, it’s easy to get swept up in your initial motivation and dig in. However, you may easily miss your goal if you start without knowing what success looks like.
Defining success involves being a little more specific about your goal. For example, let’s say Charlie wants to lose weight. They decide to accomplish their goal by eating better and exercising more. After three weeks, they had lost two pounds, were constantly hungry, and looked no different in the mirror. At this point, they are frustrated and give up. What happened?
Defining success helps paint a better picture and gives you something more concrete to assess your progress. Perhaps Charlie would have felt they were making progress if they had defined a better goal. Good goals are specific and realistic. Charlie could have set their goal to lose 20 lbs in 3 months since it’s realistic for their body type. If so, they may have realized that they were making progress.
No matter your goals, they should be specific and realistic to achieve.
Breaking Down the Goal
With a well-defined goal, you can start planning for success. Previously, Charlie gave up after looking in the mirror while feeling hungry and frustrated. They probably felt their efforts were in vain. What could they have done differently to help themselves succeed?
They should have broken down their goal into smaller, obtainable milestones. As a result, they could measure their progress more meaningfully. If their goal was to lose 20 lbs, they might have stuck with it if their milestone was to lose a pound a week or to weigh less than they did the previous week.
However, planning how to achieve a milestone and knowing what actions to take is essential. This is a critical step for you to keep moving forward. For Charlie, what will they do to lose weight? Will they walk 30 minutes a day? Will they reduce their daily calories by drinking black coffee instead of a mochaccino? Many options exist, but they must decide what will work best for them.
No matter the goal, the best chance of success is to break it down into smaller, more specific, realistic, and easy-to-accomplish milestones. There is no correct number of milestones. Sometimes, there is only one milestone that’s repeatable. Other times, several milestones have to happen in a specific order. Typically, bigger goals have more milestones and require more planning.
Now, The Real Work Begins
This is the part where you get started. You have a specific goal in mind, and you know the steps you need to take and the next milestone to work on. It’s about consistency over motivation. Consistency builds momentum. Once you have momentum, making continuous progress toward your goal is more manageable.
In Charlie’s case, they split their 20 lb weight loss journey into 20 milestones of one pound per week. To accomplish their weekly milestone, they will walk 30 minutes a day at lunchtime, reduce dessert portions, and drink black coffee in the morning instead of a mochaccino.
No matter if there is one repeatable milestone or a series of different milestones to do, knowing your next step keeps you moving toward your goal. Also, keep it positive, stay optimistic, and be kind to yourself. You don’t have to be perfect. All you have to do is try your best.
Don’t Forget to Celebrate
Celebrating all the little successes is important. Whether you celebrate alone or with friends, it helps you recognize all your progress. Also, this is an excellent time to reflect on your hard work. Reflection highlights what is working well and what could have been done better. Unfortunately, people aren’t great at remembering details over time. However, you can record your progress in a journal and reference it anytime for reflection and encouragement.
Celebrating and reflecting reinforces your commitment and helps maintain momentum toward your goal.
What If You Miss A Milestone?
It’s ok. You can’t execute a plan perfectly all the time. Sometimes, unknown factors make it hard to achieve your milestone. Therefore, you brush it off and start again.
However, if you find reaching a milestone difficult, redefine it to be more reasonable. For example, if Charlie couldn’t lose a pound each week, they may find it easier to redefine their milestone to lose half a pound a week instead. The secret is to make a small change, not a big one. Big changes are hard to do abruptly, but small daily nudges can lead to significant changes over time.
Instead of giving up, redefine your milestone to something you can achieve. No matter what, trial and error is normal and can teach you something new about yourself. Moreover, redefining helps maintain momentum and keeps you moving toward your goal.
Reaching Your Goal
As time passes, you work through your milestones one by one. Eventually, you reach the end and achieve your goal. Congratulations! Hopefully, you have learned a lot along the way and something about yourself. You may even have formed new habits and methods to make it easier to accomplish other goals.
More importantly, you can start on your next goal. However, don’t do too much at once. You can certainly plan out many goals, but your best chance of success is to focus on one goal at a time.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your workouts, weight, mood, calories, and more. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect supported gadgets to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
