7 Steps To Achieving Your Goals

How many times have you heard that once you’ve set your goals you’re half-way to achieving them?

But what are goals, and how exactly do you go about achieving them?

In this article, I’ll give you 7 steps to help you set your goals and follow them through so that you can achieve the things that you want to achieve in your life.

1. What is a goal?

Before you can set any goal, you first need to understand what a goal is. A goal is a target which you can achieve in measurable and attainable steps. It is more than just a desire, wish or need. A desire or a wish is less tangible and is often just fleeting. Who doesn't desire or wish to win the lottery? A goal is a desire, wish or need that is achievable by clear actions that you can take.

2. How do you set a goal?

Setting a goal is a process which starts with identifying an achievable need or desire, i.e. the end result and outcome. First you must decide what you want. Some of the questions that you can ask yourself include:

• "What do I want to own?"
• "Where do I want to live or travel to?"
• "What status, career or qualifications would I like to have?"
• "How much money do I want to have?"
• "How do I want to spend my time?"
• "Who do I want to spend my time with?"

A goal can relate to any desire, wish or need that you have and be achievable by clearly defined actions that you can take.

You then break the goal down into small individual steps or actions. Achievable goals are goals where you can influence their outcome through your actions and measure your progress towards them. Achieving long-term life-changing goals is a process of achieving, step-by-step, short and medium-term goals and actions.

3. What actions are required?

Goals require action on your part. You must first decide what actions are required to achieve your goal. Your first action is to always write your goals down. Putting pen to paper gives your goals an existence of their own.

Writing a plan of the necessary steps is an essential step in achieving your goals. You don’t need to have every step worked out (for your longer-term goals you may only have an outline of what the later steps will likely be), but without a goal plan you’ll eventually reduce your goal to a wish or desire, and wishes only become real by chance.

4. Analyse the plan

Once you’ve set your goal plan and identified the actions and steps to achieve your goal, you then need to analyse your plan. This helps you to identify whether you need to change any actions, or move them around, what resources you might need to tackle those actions, and when you can possibly achieve those actions. This analysis allows you to start working out the detail of how you’re going to accomplish each individual action. This helps you provide some substance and detail to your outline goal plan, which will help you get clearer in your mind what you need to do to achieve the steps in your plan.

These actions can become smaller shorter-term goals leading to major longer-term goals.

5. What actions do I need to take today?

Every day ask yourself "What actions do I need to take today to make progress on my goal?". By now you should have a good plan in place, so check your plan and make sure that you take the identified actions every day. As you progress towards your goal you may discover that additional actions, or changes to the actions you first identified in your goal plan, are needed. That’s okay, just adjust your goal plan as required. Remember to keep your goal rigid, but be willing to be flexible on how you get there.

6. Review your achievements every week and month

Every week review your progress against the actions you identified for the week. Check what you've done and what you may have missed. Adjust your plan for the next week or month to help you get back on track.

Your plan should take into account what you will need to do today, tomorrow, this week, next week, the next month, the next 3 months, 6 months, and so on (depending on how big your goal is). This longer-term planning helps you to see the work that will likely be involved and get it clear in your mind. This longer-term planning will also help you to be realistic when working on long-term goals, and reduce the chances of you feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work involved or impatient when the goal hasn’t materialised immediately. Always write down your results so that you can keep a track of your progress and to see how far you’ve come. Writing down the results of your reviews will also help you set better plans for future goals, as you’ll have more experience of setting and working on actions and goal plans.

7. What if things go wrong?

Maybe this step should be ’When things go wrong‘! Goals should be difficult because they move you outside your comfort zone and require you to do things differently than you’ve been doing. To be successful you have to face your own fear of failure and to take risks. There will inevitably be setbacks. The majority of them will be minor, but it’s likely that you’ll experience a large setback at some point, particularly when you’re working on long-term or big goals. It’s important that you expect them and remember that they are part of the process.

When you’re analysing your goal plan (see step 4 above), you can take time to identify what potential setbacks and challenges you may face at each step, and then plan how you could respond to those setbacks and challenges. By doing this, you’re increasing the likelihood of staying positive when things don’t go to plan as you won’t be as surprised or disheartened when the setbacks and challenges arise. You’re also more likely to pass through the setback and challenge quicker as you will have already thought about the actions that you can take in response to that setback or challenge.

So, now that you have 7 steps to help you achieve your goals, what goals are you going to set for yourself?