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Achieving goals
HOW CAN I ACHIEVE MY TOUGHEST GOALS?
Decisions are one of the most powerful forces that shape our lives. That means setting goals, developing strategies and breaking them down into achievable steps. In short, learning how to achieve your goals is one of the quickest ways to transform your life.
While a solid roadmap of clear goals is essential, it’s also important to learn that no problem is permanent. Failure is the part of the process that helps you grow and opens up a world of possibilities. With resilience and perseverance, incredible things will happen.
This article will cover everything you need to know about the power of constant improvement, how to set goals and achieve them, your mindset’s role in your success and more.
CONSTANT AND NEVER-ENDING IMPROVEMENT
No matter how slow your progress or the number of mistakes you make, you are still ahead of those who never started. You might notcrush every goal you set for yourself, but anyone who has reached some level of success knows that the secret to achieving goals is not just what you do but how you react to failure.
Failure is simply feedback on how to improve. In other words, when you learn from failure, you’re creating a breakthrough. And if that new approach doesn’t work, you learn again and try another approach. You keep pushing until, eventually, you succeed. Winners aren’t born knowing how to achieve goals – they persevere and improve until they reach their objectives.
Looking at the world’s most successful people, it’s never a straight line toward success. Michael Jordan, arguably one of the greatest basketball players of all time, got cut from his high school team. In Walt Disney’s youth, someone fired him from a job due to a lack of imagination. Now, the Walt Disney company is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even Henry Ford failed twice as an entrepreneur before revolutionizing the American automobile industry.
While all these top performers failed, they also had more things in common – they grew from failure, changed their strategy and kept pushing forward until they succeeded.
Think about times when you struggled to reach a goal or overcome a problem. Did you give up when faced with failure? Or did you learn, grow, and change your strategy until you succeeded?
You can’t just keep pushing through toward success. You have to learn from your mistakes and find ways to grow from those lessons. If you repeat the same ineffective strategies repeatedly, you’ll never reach your goal.
So, instead of getting stuck in that cycle, learn from your mistakes and develop a new plan. Doing this is critical for learning how to achieve your goals.
Larger than life goals are about taking a deeper calling inside of us and having so much resolve in their purpose that we see them through, no matter what. — Tony Robbin
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GET FREE ULTIMATE EDGE GUIDESETTING CLEAR, COMPELLING GOALS
When it comes to setting and reaching goals, clarity is power. You need to know WHAT you want and WHY you want it.
When setting goals, it’s crucial to remember that reasons come first and answers come second. With strong enough reasons, you get excited and feel compelled to make them a reality. Compelling goals might even scare you a little because dreaming big requires stepping outside your comfort zone. Knowing why you want to achieve it also helps you be more flexible in your approach because you realize there are likely several paths to reaching it.
The next step is to set clear and specific goals. When you know what you want, it becomes easier to get what you want in life. After all, you can’t achieve success if you don’t know what success looks like to you.
As Tony says, larger-than-life goals are about awakening a deeper calling within us. When you resolve this meaningful purpose, we see through the challenges, no matter what.
THE “SMART” GOALS STRATEGY
Another approach is to use the SMART goals strategy when learning how to set goals and achieve them. SMART is simply an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timebound goals. This strategy has gained popularity and been used repeatedly by people to propel them to success.
To make your goals feel more attainable, follow the SMART strategy:
- Specific: Instead of saying, “I want to be successful,” change your goal to “I want to earn $500,000 in the next two years.” Being “successful” is vague. It provides no actual guidance. By setting a specific goal, you have something to work toward.
- Measurable: You have to be able to measure your success to know how close or far you are from achieving it. For example, instead of saying, “I want to grow my business,” define how much you want to grow your business. Setting a goal like “I want to grow my conversion rate by 20%” will give you a measurable number to work toward. This lets you see the incremental benchmarks toward that 20% and when you’ve hit each one.
- Attainable: If you own a side hustle currently bringing in $15,000 a year, it is probably unrealistic to say you want to hit the million-dollar mark in 6 months. Instead, look at data and analytics to set a goal that you genuinely believe is attainable. When you set goals that aren’t realistic, you set yourself up for disappointment.
- Relevant: You must also learn how to make goalsrelevant to your overall life picture of success. If your ultimate goal is to become a sought-after speaker, setting goals related to scuba diving will get you nowhere.
- Timebound: For example, instead of saying, “I want to earn $350,000,” say, “I want to earn $350,000 by January 1, 2025.” When you set clear deadlines, you can monitor your progress and adjust when necessary. Humans are visible creatures. We need to see our success or we tend to give up. SMART goals solve this problem by giving you visible signs of success.
OVERCOMING FEAR TO ACHIEVE GOALS
One of the most common obstacles that holds people back from achieving goals is fear– the fear of failure, the fear of uncertainty, or the fear of not being enough.
Fear of failure can paralyze you from taking action, limiting your progress. The truth is, we all need to fail. Failure is how we learn. Failure is how we know what works and what doesn’t. When you are too afraid to fail, you are also too afraid to succeed.
Uncertainty is another way fear might show up when reaching goals. You might be unsure of what works, how it will work or even what success looks like. You paralyze yourself, thinking about different potential situations. Staying in your comfort zone might make you feel safe but also makes you feel stuck.
Instead, overcome fear by having courage. Courage doesn’t mean you have no fear — courage is taking action despite the fear. Once you name your fears, you can build your goals around overcoming them. As you work up courage, don’t give in to excuses and focus on taking action. This sends a powerful signal to your brain that you’re stronger than you may have initially realized.
One of the biggest things about overcoming fear is to accept it. It happens to everyone. But how you react to fear makes all the difference because overcoming fear is how you learn and grow.
PEAK MINDSET AND GOAL ACHIEVEMENT
As Tony says, success in life is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics – setting a goal doesn’t do much if you aren’t in the right mindset. So, how do you change your mindset? It all starts with changing your state. To do this, you have to understand that it really boils down to three things: changing your focus, your physiology, and your language (words assign meaning to things).
When setting a goal, be sure to change all three to ensure you’re in a peak state. If you’re in a lousy state, you’ll set a lousy goal. If you’re in a beautiful state, you’ll set a much more meaningful, more fulfilling goal.
As you start making progress, you also want to remember: where focus goes, energy flows. Your brain will prioritize the goals that mean the most to you and those you focus all your energy on. If that still doesn’t get you going, it may simply be your physiology affecting you – are you hunched over, or standing proud? Is your blood flowing from energetic exercise, or stagnant from too much sitting? These all can play a powerful role in adjusting your mindset when striving to reach your goals.
No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you are still way ahead of everyone who isn’t trying. — Tony Robbins
PRACTICAL STEPS TO GOAL ACHIEVEMENT
Now that you understand how your state and psychology work together to achieve goals, it’s time to take action. Here are the five steps to reaching goals that will help you succeed.
- Set smart goals
Leverage your state to discover how to achieve goals. Your brain loves goals that are specific and challenging, yet achievable. When a goal is too vague to visualize or too lofty to attain, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Setting SMART goals makes them much easier to achieve. By writing down exactly what you want, how to accomplish it, and benchmarks for measuring your progress, you set yourself free from the fear of failure and chart a course toward the extraordinary life you deserve.
- Visualize success
Mastering your emotions and thoughts starts in your head and plays an important role in accomplishing your goals and ability to be empowered to accomplish anything. Visualizing the outcome as if you’ve already achieved it helps shift focus and aligns your actions with what you want to accomplish. When visualizing, imagine how that success feels and how it affects every part of your life.
- Create a massive action plan (map)
Knowing how to achieve goals also involves taking massive action. A massive action plan is simply a roadmap that includes everything you might need to do to reach your outcome. You might not need to do every action, but creating a Massive Action Plan maps out the options and connects your purpose to the goal. When your emotions align with achieving goals, you jumpstart your brain’s ability to focus on what matters most.
- Find supportive means of accountability
If you don’t take total accountability for your life, then no one will. Without accountability, you’ll never master the skills on how to achieve goals. Achieving goals is easier when you stop blaming your circumstances or forces beyond your control, and start learning from your mistakes and changing what you can. However, taking accountability for yourself and your decisions is sometimes easier said than done. It can be hard to see a situation outside of your perspective. When this happens, a third-party perspective can offer support and encouragement, as well as help you develop a new strategy for success. If you have trouble holding yourself accountable, consider working with a Results Coach who can push you to reach your full potential.
- Celebrate victories
Learning how to achieve goals is much like losing weight: If you don’t acknowledge smaller wins as they happen, you’ll burn out quickly. From there, it’s a slippery slope to giving up on your goals entirely, which creates a downward spiral of self-doubt and defeat. Don’t wait until you’ve reached the ultimate goal to reward yourself. Transform your mindset by celebrating small victories along the way. You’ll adopt an attitude of gratitude and make it easier to stay on track with your goals.
GOAL SETTING IS YOUR KEY TO AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
We all want to be successful. The desire for success is part of human nature, and learning how to accomplish goals is the first step toward success. When you set clear and compelling goals and use effective strategies like the SMART goals framework, you equip yourself with the tools to find success.
Goal setting also involves emotional resilience and the understanding that failure is a part of growth that leads to success. After all, one of the biggest steps to reaching goals is learning how to respond and adjust after a setback.
Now that you understand how to make your goals a reality, it’s time to close the gap between where you are and where you want to go. With purpose-driven goals and tools like the SMART goal system, you can move the needle forward, stay focused and fight through fear to become one step closer to the extraordinary life of your dreams.
Tony Robbins is the ‘ultimate coach’ for that special breed of men and women who will never settle for less than they can be. — Pat Riley, NBA “Coach of the Decade
FAQS ABOUT ACHIEVING GOALS
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