Achieving Your Goals With A Plan Of Action

If you’ve ever set goals before, but failed to achieve them, it may have been because you didn’t create a specific plan of action to accomplish those goals.

Taking the time to identify your goals is only part of the process of goal setting, and many people often overlook the other part - creating a plan.

Without a plan your goals remain incomplete. It’s like going on a journey and setting a destination of where you want to go, but without looking at a map to see how you’ll get there. You might get to your destination, with some luck and probably a lot of frustration, but if you plan how you’re going to get there, the chances of success of significantly improved.

Remember that your goals tell you where you want to go in life, and your plan shows you how to get there.

A goal plan is simply a list of scheduled activities that you will do at some point in the future to help you achieve your goal. These may include activities done over a series of days, weeks, months or even years depending on the type of goal you’ve set for yourself.

Your plan does not have to be completed perfectly the first time. Usually, you’ll find that your first attempt at creating a goal plan will be vague and incomplete. Don’t worry this is ok. You may not know all the steps that you need to take to achieve your goal, particularly if you’ve set yourself a long-term goal over a number of years. Goal plans should be flexible to allow you to change them if needed, and you could find yourself regularly updating your plan as you move towards completing your primary goal.

In your goal plan you should create a series of steps that you think you will need to take in order to accomplish the goal you’ve set. If you have a good idea of the steps you need to take to achieve your goal, you can set the plan yourself. If you don’t know the steps to take, you can talk to someone who has achieved a similar goal and find out what steps they took, and use that as a starting plan.

Creating a goal plan is frequently overlooked, and many people discipline themselves to write their goals every day but create no plan! So, make sure you take the time to decide where you want to go (your goals) and then create a plan that will tell you how to get there.