How to Be Successful with Setting and Achieving Goals

You’ve got a dream and you’re positive you’ll make it a reality. Maybe you want to start a successful online store or website or you already manage a group of people and you want to foster camaraderie and make your team the best it can be.

Setting goals is a powerful tool to give us focus. It gives us a way to zero in on what steps we must take and what action we need to accomplish to ensure the desired result happens. Goals encourage us to grow and stretch in new ways and to reach beyond our comfort zones. Goals make us become better people.

Because life works the way it does, we look at the long-term and live in the short-term. In other words, we envision the future and all the wonderful things it has to offer and we live in the here and now. The present, unfortunately, may not look like we want it to. It can create challenges. However, goal setting for the long-term gives our lives direction. Long-range goals are powerful tools to help us overcome those short-term challenges. The more powerful the goals we set are, the more likely we can take action on them and we can guarantee they will come to fruition.

How can we more effectively set those goals? Here are some tips and critical components to think about when actually studying and writing your goals:

Use the SMART Method

SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-sensitive.

Specific

Define exactly what you want. Vagueness or ambiguity only produces vague or ambiguous results.

Measurable

The outcome you want needs to be tangible and able to be measured. That plays into the specificity part of the SMART method.

Attainable

Many people have grandiose ideas of what they want and that’s actually detrimental. Make sure your goals are realistic and attainable.

Realistic

If your goal is attainable, that means it’s also realistic. If you want your dream to be real, it must be something you can reasonably accomplish. We’re not saying you shouldn’t reach for the moon, we’re just saying that it would be a heck of a lot easier to get there if you have a rocket ship. A tremendous goal can be a stretch for you to accomplish, but it must be something you can manage. You will have to take baby steps to get there, and you will reach your destination.

Timed

Attach a timeframe to your goal. Any great goal should have an endgame, in other words, a time in which you want to accomplish it. If you give yourself a deadline you’ll be more likely to not fall behind because you’ll be putting in diligent effort to meet it. An effective strategy is breaking down your lofty goal into several different parts with their own measurements and timeframes. That’s fine. Setting smaller goals and working them out in their own time frame enables you to accomplish your big picture goal in its time frame. Track your time. A countdown tracker will help you stay on target.

Be Accountable

Have an accountability partner — someone who knows about your goals and what they are. Have them ask you to give you an account of where you are in your goal achievement process periodically. If you set a goal, and you’re the only one who knows about it, then you might be setting yourself up for failure. However, if you have someone encouraging you along the way you’ll be more likely to meet your deadlines because you must be accountable to the other person.

Record

Start a journal or a blog to record your journey. Blogging is a great way to track your progress and let everyone else keep up with your progress too. Starting a blog doesn’t have to be a big project. Choose a platform, domain, and hosting. Once that is made, start blogging. Start from the beginning.

Talk about your current status and your end goal. This will be great for motivation when you can look back and see that you’ve overcome challenges or setbacks. When you are in a slump you can look back to the beginning and get a second wind when you see how far you’ve come. This blog can help others too. You can inspire people and help them reach their goals too.

Goal setting is a great way to facilitate self-improvement. Dream big and take care of every necessity along the way. You’ll get there.