HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY SET AND ACHIEVE GOALS
In this blog, I'm going to share with you how to set meaningful goals and create an action plan to actually achieve them.
Set Goals That Matter To You
The first and most important part of the process of setting goals is to set goals that matter to you.
This sounds so obvious, but it is often overlooked.
Having a goal is not enough - you need to possess a strong desire to reach it.
So first of all, you have to ask yourself, what is important to you? Maybe you care about your health, or maybe your career is really important to you. Or your priority might be your relationships.
Different people have different values, and they have different priorities in life. And that's okay. But if you want to set goals that:
will be meaningful to you
you'll care about achieving
you'll be motivated to work on.
You need to get clear about what your priorities are.
Then think about what goals you could set related to those priorities.
Define Your Goals
Step number two of this process is to define your goal. You are much more likely to succeed and achieve your goal if you know exactly what the goal is.
In this second part of the process, you need to answer these three questions:
What exactly is the goal?
How will you measure the success of the goal?
What is the deadline for the goal?
What exactly is the goal?
First of all, what exactly is the goal? We want to be super specific here because if you're specific, the goal will be easier to achieve. It will feel less overwhelming. And it will be easier to know exactly what you need to do in order to reach it.
For example, rather than “I want to lose weight”, it should be “I want to fit into my favourite jeans by July”.
Or rather than “I want to earn enough money each month to hire a gardener”, it should be “how many hours would I need to work/how many clients do I need to have on my books to be able to pay for a gardener?”
How will you measure the success of the goal?
Once you know exactly what the goal is, answering the second question, ‘how will you measure the success of the goal’, should be fairly straightforward.
For example, if your goal is that you want to start a business that will support your family, then you could measure the success of the goal by reaching the point in your business where you're making enough money to be able to support your family. So maybe you need to earn £5,000 a month to support your family. That will be your measurement of success.
Or if you're trying to get healthier then maybe your measurement of success is that you're consistently achieving 10,000 steps every day. Or you can run twice around the block without stopping.
What is the deadline for the goal?
Finally, in order to keep yourself on track, you'll want to give yourself a deadline. When do you want to achieve this goal?
There are some goals that are really big and you might not know how long they will take you. But if you give yourself a deadline to work towards, it will motivate you to take action every day to move closer to achieving your goal.
Creating An Action Plan
Now that you've come up with a really meaningful goal, and you've defined it, it's time to create your action plan.
In order to do this, I want you to remember the letters RRPP, which will help you remember the steps you need to follow in order to create this action plan.
Research
The first R stands for research.
I'm assuming that right now, you probably don't know everything you need to do in order to achieve your goal. If you do already know exactly what you need to do, then you can skip this part of the process. But most of the time, you're going to need to do a little bit of research to find out everything that you need to do in order to reach that goal.
Refine
The next R stands for refine.
This is when you sort through everything you've learned in your research and refine the list of things you could do to reach your goal.
Most likely, you will have discovered all sorts of different things you could do to help you move forward and make progress. But if you tried to do it all you're going to be overwhelmed and you probably won't make that much progress.
So you need to refine your list of steps down so that you have a list of only the most important steps that will help you make the biggest progress.
Plan
Next, we come to the first P in RRPP, and this P stands for plan.
You need to turn the steps that you've come up with into a clear plan that you can follow to reach your goal. Work out exactly what you need to do in order to achieve each of the steps on your list.
Prioritise
The second P stands for prioritise.
You need to identify what the prime movers will be.
In your plan, you will have several steps you need to follow to reach your goal. But if you want to see the biggest progress and you want to have the clearest focus and reach your goal as easily as possible, then you need to identify which main steps you should focus most of your energy and attention on. This will give you the biggest results and help you to reach your goal as quickly as possible.
I hope that you now understand the three-step process of how to set meaningful goals, define them clearly, and then create an action plan to achieve them.
I wish you every success in achieving your goals this year!
If you found this blog useful and would like more tips about time management and productivity then take a look at my other blog posts.
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