Achieving personal goals deserves a huge amount of celebration, but setting these goals in the first place is a massive achievement in itself.
While the big goals serve as a destination, the journey is probably the most important part of the process. It reflects your progress, your growth, and your ability take control and steer your life towards positive change.
Whatever your goal is, whether it’s losing 20lbs or learning a new language, there will always be a set amount of steps you need to take in order to achieve it. Once you’ve set your sights on your goal, the next stage is to decide how you will get there.
The aim of this article is to guide you through how to take action towards your personal goals in a way that will help you achieve them strategically and successfully (read more on how to accomplish goals).
1. Get Very Specific
When it comes to setting your personal goals, honing in on its specifics is crucial for success.
It’s common to have a broad idea of where you want to go or what you want to achieve, but this can sabotage your efforts in the long run.
Get clear on what you want your goal to look like so you can create solid steps towards it.
Say you have a vision on retiring early[1]. This goal feels good to you, and you can envision filling your days of work-free life with worldly adventures and time with loved ones.
If retiring early is a serious personal goal for you, you will need to insert a timeframe. So, your goal has changed from “I’d like to someday retire early and travel the world” to “I’m going to retire by 50 and travel the world.”
It may not seem significant, but creating this tweak in your goal by specifying a definite time will help create and structure the steps needed to achieve it in a more purposeful way.
2. Identify the Preparation You Need to Achieve Your Goal
It’s easy to set personal goals and excitedly yet aimlessly move towards them. But this way of going about achieving goals will only leave you lost and feeling like you’ll never achieve them.
You have to really think about what you need to do in order to make this goal possible. It’s all very well wanting it to happen, but if you just sit back and hope you’ll get there one day, you’ll likely never achieve your desired outcome.
Self-managing your goals is a crucial step in the process. This involves taking control of your goal, owning it, and making sure you are in a great position to make it happen.
In the early retirement example, this would mean you will need to think about your financial situation.
What will your finances ideally need to look like if you were to retire early and travel the world? How much money will you need to put into your retirement fund to retire at 50? How much extra savings will you need to support your travels? You could also start researching the places you’d like to travel to and how long you’d like to travel for.
Outlining these factors will not only make your goal seem more tangible, but also create a mind shift to one of forward motion. Seeing the steps more clearly will help you make a more useful plan of action and seeing your goal as a reality.
3. Break Down Each Step Into More Manageable Goals
The secret to achieving your personal goals is to create smaller goals within each step and take action. Remember, you’re looking for progress, no matter how small it may seem.
These small steps build up and get you to the top. By doing this, you also make the whole process much less daunting and overwhelming.
In the early retirement scenario, there are several smaller goals you could implement here:
- Decide to make an appointment with a financial advisor asking what financial options would be available to you if you were to go into early retirement and travel. Get advice on how much you would need to top up your funds in order to reach your goal on time.
- Set up and start to make payments into the retirement fund.
- Research savings accounts with good rates of interest and commit to depositing a certain amount each month.
- Make sure you meet with your financial advisor each year to make sure your retirement plan remains the best one for you. Research new savings accounts to move your money into to reap the best returns in interest rates.
- Start investing in travel books, building up a library that covers where you want to go.
- Think about starting a language course that will help you get the most out of your travel experience.
4. Get Started on the Journey
Creating a goal planner in which you can start writing down your next steps is where the magic happens. This is where the real momentum towards your personal goals starts!
Create a schedule and start by writing in when you will start the first task and on which day. Commit to completing this small task and feel the joy of crossing it off your list. Do this with every little step until your first mini goal has been reached.
In the early retirement example, schedule in a meeting with a financial advisor.
As I mentioned before, it may seem such a small step, but it’s the momentum that’s the most important element here. Once you cross this off, you can focus on the meeting itself. Then, once that’s ticked off, you are in a position of starting a profitable retirement fund, and so the momentum continues.
5. Create an Annual Review
Taking a step back and reviewing your progress is essential for keeping yourself on the right track. Sometimes you can be moving full steam ahead towards your goal but miss seeing the opportunities to improve a process or even re-evaluate your feelings towards the goal.
Nominate a day each year to sit down and take a look at your progress. Celebrate your achievements and how far you’ve come. But also think about changing any of the remaining steps in light of new circumstances.
Has anything changed? Perhaps you got a promotion at work, and you feel you can add more to your monthly savings.
Do you still feel the same about your goal? It’s normal for our desires to change over time, and our personal goals need to reflect this.
Perhaps you’d like to take someone new with you on your travels, and you need to take this into account regarding timelines. Are there any new steps you want to add and start working on as a result?
Remember, reflection is a useful tool in realigning your goal to any changes during personal growth, and it’s important to keep on the right trajectory towards it.
The Bottom Line
Having personal goals gives you purpose and the feeling of becoming a better version of yourself, but it’s the smaller steps within these big goals that the growth and achievement really lies.
Keep going and always have the end goal in sight. Remember the “why” behind your life goals throughout to keep you motivated and positive.
Featured photo credit: Maria Teneva via unsplash.com
