To actually stick to the goals you set, it all comes down to the way you approach them. You need to develop a pattern of success to achieve every goal.
The story of Wilma Rudolph
In the 1960s, Wilma Rudolph was the fastest woman in the world. At the age of 20, she made history becoming the first American woman to win three gold medals during a single Olympics. An achievement made even more remarkable since, as a child, she was stricken with polio and told by doctors that she’d never walk.
Wilma Rudolph was the 20th of 22 children born to poor, working parents. At the age of four, she contracted polio that left her leg paralyzed. Doctors told her she’d need to wear a leg brace and orthopedic shoes for the rest of her life. But she was determined to prove them wrong.
It took years of daily, painful physical therapy, but her leg eventually healed. At the age of nine, Wilma said goodbye to her leg brace and, two years later, her orthopedic shoes. She soon discovered a passion for track and field and caught the eye of a coach who invited her to join the region’s premier woman’s team.
Due to her inexperience, she lost every race she entered. Undaunted and determined to improve, she learned breathing techniques, strategy, physical training, and self-discipline. Her efforts paid off. At 16 Wilma made the Olympic team, winning bronze in the 100-meters relay in 1956. Four years later she won three gold medals and she was crowned the ‘fastest woman in the world’.
Wilma Rudolph overcame poverty, sickness, paralysis, rejection, and failure becoming the embodiment of success in her field. How did she do it?
How did she do it?
She set challenging goals and set to work on them, she developed a pattern of success to achieve her goals. Whether it was to walk without a brace or win an Olympic medal, Wilma believed in herself. She knew what she wanted and committed herself to achieve her goals. She learned from her failures. She displayed patience and perseverance when faced with huge obstacles. She took action and she worked hard.
While our own ambitions might not include overcoming a crippling physical disability or competing at the Olympics, by identifying and cultivating our own traits – self-belief, patience, commitment, determination, hard work, etc. – we can create our own formula for success.
Success is surprisingly simple. Success is simply the experience of getting where you want to go.
When you re-define your concept of success to more closely match your values and desires, it’s a lot easier to move toward. Once you start that journey, the next step is to access classic, time-tested techniques…then use them to achieve your dreams.
Do you know what your Core Values are? Download this Guide to find out.
Achieving your dreams
But before achieving success we must first explore what we really want to achieve, how our dream life would look like. First, we need to identify our Life Purpose; why we get up every day. Then we create a Life Vision, by imagining and writing down how our dream life would look like. Then we break down this big Vision into actionable steps: goals. Ideally, we should have some goals for all areas of life, such as work, health, relationships, financial, etc. However, you also need to have the main goal, your passion, your dream, that keeps you going.
Achieving your dreams is extremely important.
The goals you accomplish pale in comparison to the feeling you get from achieving your goals. The process of working toward a dream helps you discover your power & reveal your abilities…and the feeling of knowing your own power & using it for good is worth more than any fame, fortune, or other outward signs of success.
Those victories fill you with a sense of pride, joy, exhilaration, and inner peace.
And that’s what we all want, isn’t it? Fulfillment, purpose, happiness…these are the benchmarks of true success in any arena.
8 Ways to Approach Setting Goals & Achieving Them
Setting goals to work towards sounds like a pretty straightforward task. However, as you may already know, following them and achieving them can prove to be surprisingly difficult.
If you’re looking to actually stick to the goals you set, it all comes down to the way you approach them. Developing a success pattern to achieve every goal is crucial. There are a lot of mistakes you can make with goal setting that can sabotage your chance of success. So, to help ensure you avoid these mistakes, below you’ll discover 8 ways to approach setting goals and achieving them.
1. Make sure the goals are small and measurable
One of the key mistakes you can make when setting goals, is making them too big. While it’s important to have an end goal in mind, it’s even more important to break down the goal into smaller, easily achievable ones.
For example: “I will read 10 books this year” is a big goal, which might be daunting for someone who does not read a lot. “I will read at least 10 minutes every day” is, however, an easily achievable, smaller goal.
You’ll also want to make sure the goals are measurable. This means, knowing how it will feel and what you’ll see and hear once you reach the goal. They can also help you to fully identify exactly what it is you want from life too.
For example: “I will save money” is not a measurable goal. “I will save X amount by the end of the year” is, however, an easily measurable goal.
So, start by making sure your goals are small and measurable if you want to improve your chances of achieving them.
2. Ensure the goals are as specific as possible
Another thing you’ll want to ensure is that you are making your goals as specific as possible. The vaguer they are, the less chance you’ll have at actually achieving them.
This is because it’s pretty difficult to stay focused on a vague goal. Your mind needs to know exactly what steps need to be taken. So, take your overall goal, such as losing weight, and break it down into more specific, smaller goals such as losing a pound or two each week, or exercising for a set number of days each week.
3. Make a commitment to your goals
Whatever goals you choose to work towards, you’re going to need to make a commitment to stick to them. This means, doing everything you can to achieve each goal that you set.
It starts by writing your goals down and then coming up with an action plan to achieve them. This way you develop a success pattern to achieve your goals. Remember, make the goals small and specific for the best chance of success. It’s also important to realize that you’re not going to see overnight success. Committing to your goals is a long-term process that you’re going to need to continually work on. When it gets tough, motivate yourself by looking at your Vision Board and remind yourself of your Vision and the dream life you imagined for yourself.
4. Have Actionable Steps
As I mentioned in the previous point, you need to have an action plan with actionable steps that allow you to achieve your goals.
You need to know exactly what is required to achieve for example your health goals, such as blocking time for exercise and cooking your meals, gathering recipes, making a meal plan, buying a gym membership, and getting a diet/fitness journal.
Try this productivity Planner to set your goals and plan your actions: Printable Productivity Planner for Women
5. Consider making them public
If you’re worried you won’t have the willpower to stick to your goals, it can help to make them public. That is, sharing them with your friends and family. Once we tell others about our goals, it makes us more accountable to actually achieve them.
Knowing that your friends and family are expecting you to progress with your goals, can help to give you that push to continue on.
6. Make sure you set a deadline
It’s all well and good setting goals, but if you don’t have a specific deadline in mind, it’s going to be more difficult to achieve them.
This is because if you give yourself free rein to just work on your goals whenever it’s more than likely you won’t actually work on them at all. It’s easier to put them off and think “I’ll start on them tomorrow”, then before you know it months have passed and you’re no closer to your goals.
So, give yourself a deadline for each goal you create. Make sure it’s realistic and personalized to suit each individual goal.
7. Track Your Progress
Make sure you have chosen a good way to track your progress, as that will let you know exactly how you are doing. This is important because as you see the results reflecting in fewer inches, dropping clothing sizes, or increasing amount in your saving account, it is the perfect motivation to continue with your health or financial goals. There are different ways to track your progress. It is very effective and convenient to jot your results down in a planner. By using a planner you can not only track your progress but it serves as an accountability partner too. Some of them even contain motivational quotes and other inspirational content, such as affirmations and stickers to keep you going towards your dream life. They are an important part of developing a success pattern to achieve every goal.
In this post, I review the 5 best-undated planners that you can start using any time of the year. You don’t need to wait till January 1st to set new goals or review your old goal. With these planners, you can hugely boost your productivity, health, fitness, and even happiness. This undated productivity planner and the coloring planner and tracker below I made myself. They are printable and undated so you can use them forever. You will never need to buy a new planner again.
8. Set your mindset right
You may think the most important thing in your workout routine, new diet plan, saving plan, or business plan is the plan itself. The truth is, your mindset is equally as important to the success in achieving your goals. In order to make the changes to reach your new long term goals, you need your mindset to be in tune with those goals. Here are a few ways to master your mindset, get it on track, and line up your mind to your goals.
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Meditation
Meditation is one of the easiest ways to master your mindset. When you think of mediation, you may think of just sitting back and freeing your mind or being quiet. The truth is mediation can simply be focusing on one topic, as your health goals, and let your mind roam over that topic. You may be surprised by the outcome and thoughts that occur when you just focus on that one topic alone. Your mind can be powerful in seeking out obstacles you have and working through them when given the chance to be quiet and focus.
- Positive Words
Positive wording is a huge issue when it comes to the mindset regarding your goals and the long term results. When you sit down and look at your goals or at your journaling, make sure you are not using any negative words or phrases. Focus on when and why these negative words and phrases are used and make efforts to remove them and replace them with positive and affirming phrases.
Instead of saying: “I will not eat sugar”
use the words: “I will eat lots of healthy, natural, whole foods that nourish my body.”
Chose yourself a few affirmations or mantras that you tell yourself a few times a day. Have them on your phone or desktop wallpaper as a constant reminder. You can download 17 desktop and phone wallpapers with positive affirmations for free from here.
- Journaling and Review
Journaling is something that many people mention, but few people actually put into practice in their daily lifestyle. You don’t have to sit for hours journaling about every aspect of your life. Journaling can be something as simple as writing down your feelings or thoughts when you are stressed or upset. You don’t even have to have complete thoughts. Just jotting down what you are thinking or eating can help. Go back a day or so later and review your journal entry. Look for things that are recurring and those cause obstacles in your daily life and goals. Make it a point to work on these issues either by replacing them, removing them, or coming to terms with the issues that cause them.
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Listening to inspiring podcasts
The initial motivation can soon fade away if you are not reminding yourself constantly of your goals or receive motivation from some kind of source. This source doesn’t have to be a person you know personally, it can be someone talking to you from podcasts. Check out my favorite inspirational, feel-good podcasts here.
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Self-hypnosis
Using self-hypnosis can easily help you achieve your toughest goals that you may not be able to tackle on your own either due to lack of motivation or some ingrained limiting believes about yourself.
They will surely help you develop a success pattern to achieve every goal. It is so simple and easy to download a few NLP (neurolinguistic-programming) self-hypnosis MP3s, put your earplugs in and listen to these relaxing audios while deleting your limiting believes or receiving the necessary motivation. It’s 100 % safe and you can try it here for free.
By ensuring you’re approaching goal setting in the right way, it really does improve your chances of actually achieving them. The above are just a few ways to approach your goals if you want to ensure your chance of success.
Remember, you need to revisit these methods and change them slightly every now and then. This is because our goals change, our outlooks change, and the way we need to reach our goals changes. You will need to adjust your methods with these changes, but you can use the same methods each time.
Do you have a good tip on how to achieve your goals?
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