The Universal Key to Setting and Achieving Goals

Do you struggle with setting and achieving goals? It’s almost the end of 2019, which means you could be thinking about what you’ll accomplish in 2020. You might have a career change coming up or a big move to a new state. Whatever you have in mind for the new year, you probably have a few goals you’d like to accomplish too.

Everyone’s experienced the start of a new year where they have resolutions and goals that never come to fruition. It’s frustrating and discouraging, but that won’t happen again if you think about your goals and figure out how you’re going to achieve them.

Read on to learn the universal key to setting and achieving goals in your life. No matter what you set out for yourself, you’ll learn the ins and outs of each goal and accomplish them before you know it.

1. Give It Thought

Some goals are worth your time and others aren’t. You might want to learn to be more productive and also see if you can eat an entire large pizza in one sitting. It’s great to improve your productivity skills, but eating pizza won’t accomplish anything other than a stomach ache.

Give your goals some thought to decide on what you want to do. After you make a list, separate them into short term and long term goals so you know which will require more time.

2. Break Them Down

Take a look at your list of goals and figure out where you’ll start. You might want to exercise more in the future. There are many benefits you’ll experience when you exercise, so it’s a great habit to form. Even with the best intentions, you won’t magically get an exercising routine down overnight.

That’s why you should break down your goals. Make stepping stones to guide you on your path to completing each one. You could schedule out time to exercise for ten minutes three times per week, then bump it up to fifteen minutes the next week. Increase those baby steps gradually to achieve your goals and create healthy habits.

3. Make Them SMART

You know your goals and you’ve broken them down into stages. You could decide to become more organized. You might break that into checking your email more often, but that step isn’t constructive if it’s generalized.

That’s why every step you take should be SMART. It’s an acronym people use to set up personal goals because it stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

Your goal would change from, “I want to be more organized,” to “I will check my email once every hour and delete any unnecessary emails during the last ten minutes of my day.” Goals are much easier to accomplish when you know how to get them done.

4. Create the Right Mindset

What made you desire new changes in your life? Did you want to become a better version of yourself or end unhealthy habits? Create the right mindset for your goals by remembering what inspired them in the first place. It’s easy to get discouraged when baby steps feel small at first, but don’t stop! Adjust your mindset to focus your intentions and keep up the good work.

5. Encourage Yourself Daily

You know what you’re doing and why you want to do it, but that doesn’t mean it will always be easy. Starting a new healthy eating habit is fun at first because each meal is new, but everything becomes routine after a while. Change takes time, which is why you should encourage yourself every day to make your goals a reality.

Remember to Stay Focused

You can create SMART goals, break them down and encourage yourself, but it’s easy to get distracted over time. Remember to stay focused on what you want to accomplish so it becomes your reality. Create a vision board or get a friend involved so that setting and achieving goals becomes easy.