Today, many people feel as though they’re wandering around in the world -they work very hard, but don’t seem to get anywhere meaningful.
According to a study by Statistics Brain, it was discovered that 92% of New Year’s goal turns out to be a failure. Furthermore, 25% of goal setters gave up in the first week of setting their goals.
One of the main reason behind these statistical results and feeling is because people don’t spend enough time pondering about what they want from life and they haven’t set formal goals for their life.
After all, would you set goals that are not achievable or begin a journey with no perfect idea of your destination?
Definitely not.
Goal setting is a very great process that’ll help you to think about your ideal future and motivate you to transform your vision of this perfect future into fruition. Creating healthy and achievable goals will help you to choose where you want to go in life, by precisely knowing what you want to achieve, you can quickly identify where to concentrate your efforts.
You’ll also get to identify the distractions that can easily lead you astray.
Even though goal setting is crucial for getting what you want, most goal setting articles out there lack the additional vigor needed to get you taking action and attaining your goals faster than you thought possible.
We wrote this article to fill that gap.
In this article, we’re going to talk about the Importance of Creating Healthy Achievable Goals briefly then we’ll dive into how you can set smart goals and program your unconscious mind to propel you into success and action.
Let’s read on.
Why Create Achievable Goals?
Successful business-people, achievers and top-level athletes in every field all create goals. Creating goals give you short-term motivation and long-term vision. It helps you to focus your knowledge acquisition and organize your resources/time so that you can make the most from your life.
By creating healthy, achievable, clearly-defined and smart goals, you can easily measure and take pride in the accomplishment of those goals, and you’ll experience forward progress in what might have seemed to be a long pointless grind in the past.
You’ll also get to nurture your self-confidence as you recognize your competence and ability in achieving the goals you’ve created.
Creating Your Goals
If you’ve not been setting goals in the past, it’s time to set your hindrances aside and use goals to intensely increase how much you get done in life and how fulfilled you feel.
Apparently, goals aren’t spontaneously going to make you more productive or make your life better. It’s all up to you to set goals that are right for you and will make you happy.
One of the effective ways to create goals is to utilize the SMART criteria; that’s what the first five tips in this section are centered about.
If you’re looking to create healthy and achievable goals, then you can follow these tips below to stay on track.
1. Specific
One of the essential elements for creating healthy and achievable goals is to set specific goals. Think about what you want to achieve, when it should happen, where it should happen, why you want to achieve it and what you need to get there (if you know).
Today, many people set unclear and imprecise goals because they want to “stay open,” but then we’re both aware that those who set vague goals never go anywhere.
For instance, if you’re looking to earn an exact amount of money yearly just doing what you love, then you can set a specific amount such as €100,000 every year or €10,000 every month.
2. Measurable
Once you make your goals measurable, you’ll be able to quickly know when you’re on the right track, when you’re making progress, and get motivated to take action.
The essential question that you should be asking yourself here is: how will I know when I’ve accomplished my goal?
That’s why you need to make your goals measurable!
For instance, “eat better” can’t be measured but “eat ten serves of vegetable daily” is very easy to measure.
Try as much as possible to only set goals with tangible measurement criteria.
3. Attainable
Your goals have to be achievable, and you have to be sure that you can achieve it.
It’s worth noting that sometimes, you might have beliefs that bring you down. Now, that’s customary, and you can get rid of these undesirable beliefs if you wish to do so.
Set goals that you can attain and objectives that motivate you. Boring goals aren’t the perfect motivators especially if you’re looking to take massive actions and transform your life for the better.
4. Realistic
Hitting a goal feels awesome! However, the contrary can be disappointing to say the least. So before you commit your goals to those sheets of paper on the fridge, ensure that they’re “do-able” as per your commitments and abilities.
An unrealistic goal will discourage you from taking action or even taking a bold step.
For instance, if you’re looking to run a marathon, an unlikely goal might be to prepare for the marathon in two weeks. That’s not going to happen. Furthermore, “walking in the neighborhoods for thirty minutes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday Morning before work for the next 15 days” will not go so well if you travel a lot for work.
In that vein, always remember to set realistic, attainable and exciting goals- all these will motivate you to take the right action.
5. Timely
Setting a deadline will dramatically enhance your motivation and focus. If you’ve ever worked under the strict pressure of time, then you’d probably understand how it can help you to produce excellent and quality works.
For instance, saying “I’ll lose 30 pounds in four months” is pretty good but then saying “I’ll lose an average of 3 pounds every week for 10 weeks” is much better for motivation because it’ll help you to track your progress.
Putting a date on your goals gives them a sense of accountability and urgency. Ensure to remember the “R” above in mind and set realistic timeframes.
Model
Now we’re getting to the cool stuff. The first five tips are significant to goal creation, but the following tips will catapult you in the direction of your goals.
One of the great ways to attain your goals is to look out for people who have already done what you’re looking to do, learn what they did and follow their pattern and steps. You don’t have to reestablish the wheel again when there is nearly always someone who has already gone ahead of you that you can follow.
It doesn’t mean you should follow them sightlessly, but you can pick what feels right and make quicker progress than if you were to learn everything from scratch.
Visualization
Over and over again, visualization has been proven to be effective in improving performance, changing behaviors and attaining big goals.
When you envision your most important goal as something that’s already being achieved, you’ll feel good and tell your unconscious mind precisely what you want.
We recommend that you visualize for some minutes very early in the morning and before you go to bed. Envision your goals as already being accomplished and enjoy the feeling of success that comes along with that.
After you’ve seen your goals as already accomplished, try to visualize your next steps. For instance: if your goal is to compose a book, you can imagine yourself sitting down and writing. Next, you can transfer those positive feelings into an action step.
Affirm
You’d probably heard of affirmations. They’ve been a lot of bad press about them but what people think about them doesn’t change the fact that affirmations remain effective. Nonetheless, don’t force yourself to do them if they don’t feel right. Take out time to listen to yourself first.
For instance, if your goal is to write 1,000 words article every day, then your affirmation could be “I consistently and easily write 1,000 word articles every day“.
You’ll then have to repeat the affirmation to yourself throughout the day. But don’t just repeat them in your head, remember to see the results and get to write your 1,000 words article every day.
Affirmations don’t work for people because:
- They’re not used properly
- They’re not used consistently
- They don’t FEEL them
- Their doubts take over
What we mean by your “doubt taking over” is that whenever you say your affirmation, your mind might as well be like “yeah, right you’re not going to get a large amount of money because you don’t deserve it.”
That’ll immediately destroy the power of your affirmation only if you allow it.
Release Doubts
When it comes to talking negatively to self, many people are great at doing that. They’re telling themselves that affirmations aren’t useful while they’re using the exact opposite of affirmations.
Here are a few instances of some common negative self-talk:
- I’ll never amount to anything
- I’m not good enough
- Why do bad things often happen to me?
- I’m not worthy of €200,000 per year
- Life isn’t fair
- Why did he/she do that to me?
The more you tell yourself that bad things will happen to you, the more they’ll because you’re a product of your thoughts.
Believe In Yourself
It’s significant for you to believe in yourself and your capacity to reach your goals. Logically, you can begin to realize that you already have amazing qualities that make you a genius or you have already accomplished many goals in your life. Even if you’ve not, believe in yourself.
You’re the only person standing between yourself and success.
Additionally, you don’t even necessarily have to know how you’ll accomplish your goal just like little children don’t need to read books on how to walk before they can start walking.
They merely do it till they succeed.
TAKE ACTION
While affirmations and visualizations are incredibly useful in pushing you towards your goal, you also need to consistently take action every day.
A more straightforward way to explain this is that the more action you take on your goals, the faster you’ll achieve the goals. Just by understanding these words, you can be aware of the steps you can take at the moment, to achieve your goals.
You can begin to move in the direction of your dream life. Initially, this might seem hard but then as you keep going, the haze will clear, and you’ll begin to feel better and better.
Be Determined
One of the most common features of those who continually achieve their goals is that they’re relentless and determined.
They don’t give up.
Imagine yourself being relentless in the face of challenges and obstacles. See yourself blasting through every roadblock and boldly advancing to your goals.
You’ve already got the ability in you. All you need is to dust it off and begin to use it.
Read, Listen & Learn
Creating healthy and achievable goals isn’t all about achieving things as much as it is about personal growth. You see, when your goals are challenging, you’ll have to become a better person to accomplish those goals.
That’s why it’s essential for you to read, listen and learn about personal growth and how you can become better in every aspect of your life.
If you want to make a million dollar, don’t just do it because of the money – do it for the person you’ll get to become at the end.
Conclusion
It’s worth noting that most of the goals you set might not be reached before you begin to reap the benefits. Some goals need to be there for you to have something that you’ll aim at.
So stay positive, stay open and go with the flow of life because you never know where it’ll take you and remember, you don’t necessarily have to exhaust all the tips in this article.
You also need to be aware that knowledge is useless until it’s applied. So we recommend that you can pick what resonates with you and merely apply it into your life right now.
It doesn’t have to be something pretty big. In fact, you can focus on the tiny tips and see where that leads you.
Have fun, experiment and enjoy this wild ride that we call life.
Do you have further questions about how to create healthy achievable goals? We’d be happy to hear from you; leave us a comment below.