I. Understanding the Secrets of Success
Success means different things to different people. For some, it is as simple as owning a nice car and a nice home. For others it is having a six-figure salary, having a successful business, being a partner in a firm or the CEO of a company. Success could be more personal – being able to travel more, get the degree you have always wanted, give your children the education you could not have. What is common for all of these is a sense of achievement, of setting a goal and the satisfaction that one gets after having achieved it.
However, while almost everyone has their dreams for the future; very few have a definite plan of how they intend to get there. Everyday they merely wish that they could achieve what they have dreamt about hoping that somewhere along the way they will achieve their goals. However, merely wishing for your dreams to come true is not going to take you anywhere close to your goals. Planning your course of actions carefully and then working towards your goals with determination will.
Through this book, you will learn some important strategies for setting goals and for motivating yourself to achieve these and much more.
Why Goal Setting is so important
Goal setting is a powerful process in more ways than one. It not only helps you to clearly set out your goals but also, more importantly starts a process that sets you thinking about the kind of future that you would like to have. You are motivated to turn this vision of your future into a reality. Let us see how the process of goal setting itself can be an energizing experience.
• Generally speaking, setting goals lets you decide the where or who you want to be in your life. This in turn leads you to understand what you need to achieve so that you reach that place or become the person you want to be. This will also allow you to stay away from things that do not help you achieve your goals and are just distracting or time consuming.
• When you set yourself well-defined goals, you will find that you are more energized and more motivated than ever before. Further, once you achieve one or more of your set goals, your confidence gets a well-deserved boost as you now feel that you are capable of reaching the goals.
• Goals give you a vision for a long term while having the ability to motivate you repeatedly over the short term. They help you focus on what you need most to help achieve your goals, thereby letting you organize your time and all your resources so that you can derive the maximum benefit from them.
• For all these reasons, most successful people like top businessmen, athletes use techniques of goal setting to drive themselves harder and go further.
You can set your goals at different levels. To begin with, you have to decide what the major goals are that you want to achieve on different fronts - on the professional front, personal front, for your family and so on. Then each goal is broken down into smaller and smaller goals with a working plan on how you go about getting to each one of these smaller goals.
How does one start setting goals?
We begin the process by deciding on the major goals of your life – these are then slowly broken down into smaller goals till there are a series of steps outlined for each one of them, which we can start working on each and every day. Having these major goals will give you a perspective in deciding what you would like to do with other aspects of your life as well.
There need not be just one or two major goals. In fact, try and give yourself the freedom to determine what areas in your life are important to you and where you would like to be in each one of them. For example,
1. Professional Goals: You may want to reach a certain position in your company and you have to decide what the reasonable time is, within which you can expect to get there.
2. Personal: You may have not been spending much time with your family. How do you plan to rectify that? Are you about to enter a long-term relationship? How do you plan to make it work?
3. Education: You may be stuck in a middle management job because you could never get that college degree. If you would like to get it now, what skills and information are you going to need?
4. Personality: Are there any traits in your personality that you think need changing? Do you think you need to be more disciplined or perhaps learn to be more focused? What techniques will help you with that?
5. Financial: What would you ideally like to earn at what stages and how much savings would you like to have?
6. Physical: Are there any habits you would like to kick like smoking, for instance? How fit do you want to be?
7. Other Interests: How do you plan to make your breaks and vacation count? Do you plan them well? What about your hobbies? Were you once a budding painter and maybe would like to get back to painting? Or perhaps you want to take up bird watching again?
There are many such areas in your life, which make you the complete person that you are. Give some thought to the ones mentioned above, maybe you will think up some more of your own. Draw a list of goals that you feel you would like to achieve in each one of these areas. Carefully go through your list and trim it down to a select few that you feel really motivated and driven to achieve. This will give you a smaller but important set of goals that you can focus on.
You have to make sure that the goals you have set out for yourself are ones that you want to achieve for yourself and not because your parents, partner or employer want you to do it. Only then will you feel sufficiently motivated to want to achieve them.
When you are setting your major goals, you usually should decide where you want to be one month from now, six months from now, one year, five years and 10 years from now. Thus starting from the big goals, you now have a series of smaller goals that will help you reach your bigger ones. With the smaller goals, take each small goal and create a plan to achieve it within your deadline.
This plan should then be broken down into systematic steps that you can take everyday so that you are continuously progressing towards your goals. Further, being able to strike off one thing from the list everyday will give you more self-confidence and help you feel motivated in reaching your final goals. These small tasks could be something as simple as reading up a few books to get information or making a few phone calls. Nevertheless these are important parts of your overall plan and will help you stay on course to getting to your goals.
Once you have the first set of plans, form a daily to do list which you can keep updating and also reviewing as you keep making progress. You also have to keep reviewing the long term plans just to make sure that they reflect exactly what you want to in your life at that stage. As a person grows, things change and priorities change. While your education may have been important to you at one point, maybe with marriage and kids, a job and career are more important. Review your long terms periodically and make sure that they are in tune with your changing priorities and lifestyle.
Goal Setting Tips
As you sit down to working on your goals, the first question you are faced with is how do you set effective goals. Here are a few tips that will help you get started:
• Make sure that each goal is a positive statement. Instead of saying ‘I will not be nervous before a presentation’, say ‘I will be positive and confident before a presentation’.
• Be as precise as you can be. Do not be vague about when you want to reach your goals. ‘I want to lose weight’ is a very vague goal. ‘I want to lose 10 pounds in the next six months’ is a more precise way of stating it.
• Setting priorities. When you have set yourself quite a few goals to achieve, you will obviously need to prioritize them. This will help you focus on the most important ones first.
• Write down each and every goal and as you work downwards, write down the specific details of what you need to achieve everyday. As you write down the steps you will know what is feasible and what is not.
• Break your plan down into very small operational steps. This will give you something to do everyday – in this way not only are you making steady progress but you will also have the satisfaction of striking out that step for the day, helping you know that you are on the right track.
• Be practical. When you set goals, you can only work on your performance. You should therefore understand that you can only work on that which is in your control and you cannot always control the outcome. For example, despite all your hard work and planning for a major sporting event, you may find yourself out of it because of a bad injury. This should not set you back. Therefore rather than basing goals based on a certain outcome, base your goals on the kind of performance you can deliver.
• Be realistic. Most of the times, in our life, our goals are determined by what our parents, our family or our peers want. At times, this is in complete contrast to what you yourself truly desire or beyond what you are capable of. Setting goals that are not realistic is a surefire way of setting yourself up for disappointment. This will have long-term repercussions as any failure is only going to make you more dispirited and less motivated to want to achieve anything further. Make sure you understand the kind and level of skills that you possess and what you need to achieve various goals so that you can set some realistic ones for yourself.
Getting Down To It
Now that we have understood why and how we can set our goals, let us look at some very basic rules that will help you identify your goals clearly.
1. Step 1: When you are setting goals, think of what you want to achieve for yourself, what motivates you best. This will ensure that what you are aiming for is important to you and achieving it will have great value for you. If the goals you are setting for yourself are decided in part by your parents or your friends or their opinions of you then chances are that you are not going to be sufficiently motivated to make them happen. Remember, motivation is the absolute key to your achieving your goal. So, choose goals that motivate you.
If you would like to be clear about the reasons behind your wanting to achieve a goal, then the best thing would be to actually write down the ‘whys’ for each one of them. Write down why the goal is important to you and how you will feel once you have achieved it.
Make sure that you get your priorities right and that you have a small set of high priority goals in your life. Setting too many goals which are too easy to achieve do not bring with them the kind of motivation or the sense of success that setting and achieving one single tough goal will. When you set a goal, you have to feel a real yearning to achieve it and realize the tremendous gains that achieving that goal will bring you.
2. Step 2: You may have often heard of the words ‘Set SMART goals’ while someone is advising you on setting goals. SMART stands for the following – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.
What does each one of them stand for? They provide you guidelines on setting reasonable goals that are tough enough for you to feel sufficiently motivated and yet realistic enough for you to be able to work hard and achieve them.
• Setting Specific Goals – As we have mentioned before, your goals have to be very clear and specific. This is the only way you can layout a clear road map starting from now till the time that you want to achieve the goal. Rather than saying ‘I will catch up on some reading’, say ‘I will read the first 3 chapters of this book by the end of this month’.
• Setting Measurable Goals - You have to set exact dates when you want to begin and the amounts that you want to achieve so that you can measure how well or how badly you are doing. If you write your goal as ‘Save money’, how do you know when you have achieved that goal? When you save $50 in one month or $1000 in one year? You have to write exactly what you are aiming at – the amount of money you would like to save as well as the time period in which you want to achieve that.
• Setting Attainable Goals – The most important feature of your goals has to be that they are attainable and you firmly believe that they are attainable. While aiming for physical fitness is a realistic and attainable one, trying to get a physique like some of the Hollywood stars may not be. If you set yourself goals that are too tough, then you may find yourself feeling demoralized very quickly. Setting yourself reasonable goals will get you started in the right direction and by reviewing your goals periodically, and achieving them one by one, you may actually reach the highest point. However, you have to learn to start by taking smaller steps. On the other hand, there is no point if there is no challenge involved in attaining your goal. If it is too simple and you manage to achieve it trivially, then even though you may feel some joy at having achieved it, you will certainly not feel the same sense of success or pride that you do when you set yourself a harder target to achieve and manage to do so after some difficulty.
• Setting Relevant Goals – The goals you set have to mean something to you and carry a certain priority in your life. You have to decide what brings value to your life and what defines success for you. This will help you to not only set your goals but also devote your time and attention to them whole-heartedly. Setting goals that are diverse from the philosophy of your life will only have you having doubts every now and then that will distract you from what you truly want to achieve. If in your heart of hearts you would much rather pursue a career in music than have a career in law then that is what you must do irrespective of what the consequences of those may be.
• Setting Timely Goals – You have to set a deadline for each and every goal, however small or big they may be. This way, every time, you finish something, you feel a sense of accomplishment, which is one of the keys to keeping you motivated as you work towards your goals.
3. Step 3: Write down all your goals – So far, you have followed all our guidelines and have actually thought of a set of goals that you think you most certainly want to achieve in your lifetime. However, they are still all in your head and after a few days, you will remember only a few of them and even for those, you may have difficulty remembering why you thought they were of value to you. The best way to make this entire process real is to write down systematically, the goals you want to achieve along with the specific deadlines and what you want to achieve through them. A small note alongside each goal reminding you of why this is important to you will be helpful when you are reviewing them later.
When you are writing down your goals, make them forceful and not wishful. Do not say ‘I would like to lose 10 pounds in the next six months.’ write it down, as ‘I will lose 10 pounds in the next six months’. Wishful thinking can only take you so far but the second statement gives you the power and makes you determined to achieve it.
Always be positive when you are writing down your goals. Do not write ‘I will not miss my workout in the mornings’. Write it down, as ‘I will wake up at 7:00 am every morning for my workout’.
Once you have written them down, make sure you keep reminding yourself of what you would like to achieve and why you are working on these goals. Post some of the most important goals in high visibility places like your computer monitor, refrigerator, and bathroom mirror and so on, so that you get to see them, think about them and work on them everyday.
4. Step 4: Devising an Action Plan – You now have a set of specific, realistic goals that you are all fired up to achieve. However, unless you have a very clear action plan before you, you would not even know where to start. Merely saying ‘I will lose 10 pounds in the next six months’ or ‘I will get my degree in the next three years’ is not sufficient. You need a plan of action with clearly outlined steps that will tell you how to get there in the time from now till your deadline.
To do this, consider each goal and break them up into smaller and still smaller sub-goals, such that each sub-goal can be done in a day. This can be as simple as making a phone call or reading through some pages of an information booklet. Compile a detailed to-do list that will list these various steps starting from the day you want to begin till the deadline. Do so for every goal. Then, as you keep progressing through various steps, strike them off for the day. This will give you a great sense of accomplishment, keep you motivated and at the same time, you know you are on track to achieving your main goal.
5. Step 5: Never say Die! – Achieving your lifetime goals is never easy, especially ones that are fairly long term. However, the one thing you have to learn is to never give up. This is why it is helpful if you write down how much achieving the goal means to you and what a difference it is going to make to you and your life once you achieve that.
We hope you now understand that goal setting is much more than just wishing that you could accomplish a few things in your life. It is a very methodical and disciplined process of understanding and defining what you want in life and then going about achieving it. Goal setting by itself provides you enough impetus to get started and as you proceed systematically through your plan, you will find various ways of energizing yourself till you reach your final destination. Of course, there is still a long way to go but by setting goals in the manner outlined above, you are onto a good beginning.
II. Planning for Success
We have been speaking so far of setting goals and how important it is to have a plan of action to achieve these goals. But now, you may ask, how exactly do I plan my course of action. If you are just starting out as a trainee and say your goal is to be a project leader in five years. You know this is a good, specific, measurable and entirely realistic goal. However, you want to be sure that you will make it as a project leader and want to have an action plan so that you can start working towards this definite goal.
Most of us break the main goal into a series of smaller sub-goals and try to understand what we need to do, step by step till we reach the final goal. Each sub-goal is treated as a milestone that is to be reached by a certain deadline. This is one of the simplest and most effective ways of devising an action plan – working on even a small piece of your plan helps you have a sense of satisfaction and helps you stay motivated.
There is however a relatively new approach to working out an action plan, less used but equally effective as the previous approach.
Heading Towards Your Goal…Backwards
Working backwards essentially means that you start with the goal and then see what you need to do just before you can achieve this goal. While the plan you devise with this method may for all outward appearances look just like the one you had worked out using the previous methods, this will help you bring into focus some of the more difficult parts of achieving your goals right away so that you can start working on those aspects from now.
And though you are approaching how to get to a goal backwards, there is nothing backward about the effectiveness of its methods. The main idea is to understand what your end goal is. Now you try to analyze all those ways and means by which you can reach this particular goal in the time you have set for yourself. Out of the various ways, there will be one way that is most realistic and at the same time challenging enough for you to take. This forms the milestone just before your end goal. This way you go back from the end goal all the way till we reach the situation you are in at present.
As we keep doing this, we become aware of the kind of hurdles that you may have to face a year, two years or even five years down the road and being aware of this gives us a head start on being better prepared to face them.
Let us consider the earlier example where your goal is to become a project leader in five years and see how we can work out our action plan should be to attain this.
• The final goal that you would have written down will be ‘I will be a project leader in five years by the year 2013.’ Specific, Realistic and Measurable. Now how do you go about planning to achieve this given that you are just a trainee at your job?
• The first question that you should ask yourself is what you need to achieve just before so that you have a good chance of being make a project leader. If you do not know the correct or complete answer, do some research, speak to a few people and come back knowing what exactly you need to do and by what date, so that you will be made project leader in 2013.
Suppose you find out that the answer to this is ‘I will be a part of at least ten software development projects by 2012, four in a senior capacity’.
• You now go further backwards and try to understand what you need to do to be part of these projects, particularly in the senior position.
Suppose your answer is ‘I would have completed my certification program as software process engineer by 2010’.
• You will continue in this way till you reach your very first milestone which may be ‘I will work on using new models and new quantitative methods to improve the quality of the software development process thereby reducing the time required for testing and hence total development time.’
When you look on the action plan, you may wonder why going backwards makes such a difference. The difference lies in the approach you take to problem solving while aiming for your goal. If you can anticipate the kind of problems you may face, you are better prepared to handle them. If you take the other approach, you may be working towards a sub-goal when you find yourself facing challenges that you then have to find ways of dealing with. Going backwards can save you not only time since you are at least better prepared but more importantly you will not lose any self-confidence when you face any problem.
Here are some more tips that will help you work out an effective action plan for you to achieve your goals.
1. Make sure that your goals reflect your values and your beliefs. If they do not and you are keen on achieving them either due to the sense of false pride or prestige they bring with them then achieving them probably does not bring you too much satisfaction either. You should understand what kind of consequences achieving that goal may bring you and if that is what you valued most.
2. You can consider discussing some of your goals and how you plan on achieving it with a few of your close friends, family members or your senior colleagues at work. This will help you get their perspective on ways of achieving those goals while at the same time; they may make you aware of some possible pitfalls that you may face on your way. If nothing else, you will find that having the support and encouragement of some positive people is always very helpful in staying motivated.
3. Understand what you need and have it ready on hand before you start working on your goals. If you need to get information about some degree colleges, make sure you have already collected all the relevant information like the contact numbers or emails before you start writing or contacting them. Running around for these things on the day of your deadline can only cause major delays in your plan.
4. The best way to create a complete action plan is to draw up a calendar with a daily to-do list for every goal. This will contain every single step that you need to take to reach your set of goals. Highlight the deadlines so that you are aware of when you need to do things more urgently. Make sure your deadlines are also realistic. You may need to make changes in these as you review your progress and understand where you stand.
5. Once a goal has been achieved, strike it out from your calendar with a sense of great pride. Try to set up your calendar such that there is one task, however small to be completed per day. Doing something consistently and working everyday towards your goal will help you keep clearing things off your to-do list and certainly help you stay motivated.
6. Understand who will be able to help you best if you are feeling discouraged or are faced by challenge. Who will be ready to provide you with some ready advice or feedback and if nothing else just a willing ear and a few words of encouragement?
7. Do not hesitate to reward yourself on completing certain milestones. Just waiting to achieve your main goal before you celebrate may get you down from time to time. On the other hand, simple rewards like a day out at the parlor or a special treat when you finish an important milestone are good ways of keeping yourself energized.
III. Working toward Success
Once you have set your goals and have actually worked out a detailed plan, you may feel that you have completed the most difficult part of the process. You are mistaken. While setting goals and devising an action plan to achieve them are very important to actually achieving them, the most challenging part is to keep working on them till you gain success. This is easier said than done and you will find yourself facing many hurdles as you try to get closer and closer to your goals. The steps outlined below will give you some useful advice on how to find ways to keep working on your plan.
1. As you start working on your goals, it is very important to periodically review the progress you have made so that you can understand where you stand, whether you are moving at the required pace or whether for some reason, you are falling behind deadlines. One of the reasons for falling behind maybe that you have decided to aim for too many goals. Select just the important few, in fact, if you so desire, choose only one. This will help you focus all your energy on achieving that one goal, at the end of which you will feel sufficiently inspired to start aiming for others.
2. The best way to start your process of working towards your goal is by starting simple. Do not aim very high. Think of something that you enjoy doing occasionally and may want to do on a more regular basis. Like working out or painting. You may find yourself reaching this goal fairly quickly, which should give you the self-confidence to aim higher; and to try and achieve tougher goals.
3. The best way to work on a goal is to break it up into small, very manageable pieces that you can work on bit by bit every day. Further, from these small steps identify a few, which you can mark as important milestones. Reaching these milestones is a way of reminding you that you are on track and also gives you an opportunity to reward yourself with a small treat.
4. Writing down your goals is a wonderful way of specifying what exactly you want to achieve and what achieving that goal means to you. Writing down something keeps reminding you that this is important to you and you have to be constantly working to achieve them.
5. Take a look at where you are holding from time to time. You should review how far you have reached towards achieving a goal, whether you are meeting deadlines in time and if not what is holding you back. In fact, it may be a good idea to review your progress on a daily basis probably at the end of the day so that you can take the necessary steps to get back on track starting the next day.
6. You may have set some goals in the mistaken notion that the prestige and money that achieving some of them bring, will make you happy and give you a sense of success. However that is not true. What will bring you a sense of success is achieving something that you truly wanted to for the betterment of yourself or your life.
7. The most heard about excuse when you start falling behind deadlines while working on your goals is that you do not have enough time. You may already be working on a job but may want to complete a degree. Attending an evening college may be your only option but then again that is not going to be easy. You are going to have make time for attending classes, working on assignments and preparing for exams. Or you may be a father who has a family to take care and yet you desperately want to get back to painting sometimes. There are many time management tips that you can use to make the most efficient use of your time. Here are just a few.
Learn to prioritize: After a long tired day, it is understandable if you would like to spend a few hours in front of the TV relaxing. You are hoping that this will help you feel more refreshed so that you can tackle other tasks including those that are mentioned in your action plan. However, the same time could have been used more fruitfully in working towards your goals.
• Learn to say No: When you are already hard pressed for time, you have to learn to say no to those who invite you for social events or even those who ask for your time, even if they may be friends and family. Saying no is sometimes one of the hardest things to do but doing so will save you a lot time.
• Learn to make time: If you do not learn to make time to work on your goals, you will never be able to achieve them and certainly not within the deadlines that you have set for yourself. You have to decide what a good time for you to work on them is – perhaps when the children are at school or maybe early morning when you are really fresh.
8. There may be many times when you feel that you should be satisfied with a much simpler goal, something more easily achievable. Stay firm when doubts start creeping in your mind. You of course, should review your goals and make adjustments to ensure that they stay realistic. However, making them too easy will take away any sense of accomplishment that you may feel when you achieve a tough goal.
There are various tools you could use to keep track of the progress that you are making.
Write down the action plan down to the last detailed task in a calendar. Write down the starting dates and the deadlines by which you expect the task to be done. The calendar can be any size that is convenient for you. If you would prefer to see it on the wall, pick a bigger one else a handy pocket book calendar will also be good enough. You can enter your notes for each goal, the progress you have made for the day and then when you complete a task, you can have the pleasure of striking it out.
Keep a journal. This is a very good idea of keeping track of your progress. Not only can you note down all that you managed to accomplish while working on your action plan but you can also include comments that others may have made to you – like some encouraging words or perhaps something inspiring that you read that day. All these will help you stay focused on working towards your goal.
Share your thoughts, plans and concerns with a friend or family member, someone whom you trust. Review your progress with them regularly so that you can get a different perspective on your problems and maybe get a word of advice on how to handle them.
IV. Motivating Yourself to Succeed
When you first begin working towards your goals, you are naturally highly motivated. You have just finished working on your action plan and you are brimming with energy and confidence to meet those goals. Then as days pass by you will find it a little harder to get motivated, the obstacles seem to get bigger till you find it a real challenge to motivate yourself everyday. If you stick to your action plan and work on it bit by bit, you will reach your goals. But you do need to know how to constantly find the motivation that will keep you wanting to work towards your goal.
In fact, this is what separates most successful people from the others. Ordinarily when we find ourselves running out of steam, we tell ourselves that the goal we are trying to achieve is too hard and give up on it. Those who manage at such junctures to find various ways of motivating themselves so that they can conquer their complacency and keep moving in the direction of their goals are the ones who will eventually be successful.
We will try and look at various sources, which can lend us inspiration but before that, let us understand what motivation is and how exactly it works.
Motivation is wanting to do something really bad. This is what gets you out of bed on cold winter mornings so that you do not miss a day of workout and this is what keeps you up at night trying to finish a report. Of course, there are positive and negative motivations. If you are working on an office report till late at night because your boss has threatened to get you fired, then that is still motivation but it is negative motivation. On the other hand, if you are working on a school assignment and trying to finish it because you know how important it is to your getting the degree, this is positive motivation. You will find that positive motivation works far better than negative motivation.
You will therefore need to know where you have to look for when you feel the need for some positive motivation. Every now and then, especially if the goals you are working on are long-term, you may feel dispirited. You need to immediately take action so that you are back to working towards your goals.
The best way of motivating yourself is to be really excited about your goal and constantly wanting to achieve it. Whenever you are feeling low in spirit, look for ways in which you can remind yourself of the importance of your goals, what they mean to you and the benefits or value they will bring to you. This way you can sustain your efforts till you have finally made it.
Here are some tips on how and where you can find the motivation to stick to your action plan.
• When you first start working on your action plan and start striking things off your to-do list, you feel highly excited and enthusiastic about the whole process. You are simply raring to go and do not mind listing quite a few things to do every day. You actually manage to finish them in the first few days and feel supremely confident. Then there will come days when nothing goes right and you are hardly able to achieve anything on that day. After working the whole day at a job for an over-bearing boss, you may find it difficult to get back to your books or attend your evening classes. Your enthusiasm level starts to drop and it affects your self-confidence too. The solution to this is to start slow. When you first start out, keep yourself to only half of what you think you should be doing, whether it is a new workout or reading the pages of a novel. This way you will find that you can easily achieve the targets you had set out for yourself. You may be tempted to attempt more but restrain yourself and just enjoy the satisfaction of having accomplished your task for the day. This will prevent you from raising false hopes but will also keep your self-confidence high as you keep moving from day to day.
• There will of course be some days when you simply do not feel like working on any part of your plan. You do not feel like heading out for your workout or you feel you are too tired to read anything. At such times, do not think too far ahead. Just get started and that too step-by-step. Get out of bed and wear your jogging shoes. Then head for the door and before you know it you are in the middle of your workout and actually enjoying it. Similarly if you have to work on homework assignments and feel too tired for it, just pull out your books and slowly start reading. Quickly, you will find yourself excited about your work. The key here is to get started no matter how you are feeling.
• If you are the only person who knows about your goals, your action plan and your efforts in trying to reach them, then chances are it will be much easier for you to quit trying. On the other hand, if you commit yourself in public, say by speaking to some of your friends, family members, support groups or even to supporters on an online blog, you will find that it is harder to quit. For one, you have many people supporting you and providing you words of encouragement. Secondly, when you speak to them, you want to report your successes to them and not your failures so that they too can take pride in what you have achieved.
• It is absolutely normal for you to have negative thoughts when you are working towards your goals especially the harder, long-term ones. However, you need to be able to identify them, clear your head of the negative thoughts and replace them instead with positive ones. When you are facing problems and start thinking ‘This is too hard, I cannot do this’, bring yourself to say’ I know this is hard but if that person can do this, so can I’.
• Part of avoiding negative thoughts is to avoid overly negative people or people who are only critical of you. While your friends and family members may only be wanting to protect you, at some point they have to realize that you are determined on achieving some of these goals and that they have to be supportive of you. If you find that they are only being critical without offering solutions, you may want to avoid them as much as you can. If it is difficult to avoid them tell them gently but firmly that this is your decision and that you would like their support.
• Always remind yourself of the benefits and values that achieving your goals is going to bring you. This is the advantage of writing down the reasons for your wanting a particular goal. When you start feeling a little dispirited, move your thoughts away from how hard something is to how good achieving that goal will be for you. Thinking about these benefits will help energize you.
• There is no doubt that it is difficult to maintain the same kind of excitement and enthusiasm you felt when you first started out. However, even thinking about or reliving those moments and what got you so excited is sufficient to get you motivated again. What made you so passionate about your goals? What is it going to bring to you, your life? Thinking about all this will keep you going in the direction of your goals.
• If merely thinking about your goals is not enough to motivate you, try and read up on the benefits of achieving them. Read books or online blogs that talk of stories similar to yours, where people with less than you managed to stay on track, achieve their goals and make a difference in their lives. In fact, it may be a good idea if you read a little bit everyday, so that you can keep your focus and stay determined.
• Working all by yourself can be tough at times. Especially on the long-term goals. It can be extremely helpful if you find a friend or someone who can partner you in your program. Perhaps a neighbor can join you in your workouts every morning. You can probably find another student from your school to work together with you on assignments. You can motivate and encourage each other to keep working towards the goal. If nothing else, you will have someone to share the problems that you are going through and maybe also offer some words of advice and support.
• Seek inspiration from various sources. Your goals and your reasons for wanting them need not be the only source of motivation though they are probably the best. Look for inspiration in other’s success stories. There will be many like you who would have achieved exactly what you would like to achieve or may currently be in a process of doing so. Read about them in books, magazines, and even online blogs. Understand how they managed to overcome the challenges they faced and how they stayed motivated throughout their journey to success.
• Make sure that you take time to celebrate. Do not wait till the final goal has been achieved before you do so. While this may work for smaller or small-term goals, waiting till your last final goal has been achieved may only leave you dispirited in the meantime. Identify what milestones are important to you and make a note to celebrate once you reach those milestones. When you celebrate even your small successes, you will have a sense of accomplishment, which you can take forward while working on the remaining steps or remaining goals.
• The best way to celebrate when you reach a goal is by rewarding yourself. However, you have to make sure that you do not get carried away and keep the reward proportional to the milestone you have achieved. If you have managed to stick to your diet and had regular workouts throughout the week, do not treat yourself to a royal binge all through the next week - just treat yourself to a small dessert that weekend. Similarly, getting the promotion that you wanted does not mean you should treat yourself to a holiday in the Bahamas – treat yourself at a nice parlor.
• It is very natural for you to experience some low points in your life when you find it very difficult to stay motivated. Do not fight these feelings or read anything more in them. This is just a temporary phase and all you need to do is to keep reading about the goals you want to achieve, why you want to achieve them and perhaps other life stories as we have mentioned here. Slowly the clouds will clear and you will again find yourself full of energy.
• You may find it very difficult to reach your goals if you are working towards it on your own. If you take help from your friends and family, you will find that it makes it that much easier. You may find someone willing to work with you towards your goals or they will always be available with words of support and encouragement. They will not let you go of your dreams so easily and will try at all stages to find solutions to your problems so that you can keep working towards your goals.
• You may also find the support and help you need not just in your friends and family but also in online blogs. There are some very closely-knit communities that provide great support to their members. They lend a willing ear and prove to be great sources of information when you need anything. You can also find help and assistance by joining some support groups. For example, if you are working on quitting smoking, it may be very helpful to join a support group where members try to help each other out in the most difficult stages of the program.
• Tracking your progress is very important as you keep working on your action plan. Not only does it have a practical value since you know if you need to modify or revise any part of your action plan but it also has some motivational value. When you look at the milestones you have achieved so far, you realize that even with all the difficulties you faced, you have made considerable progress and this will give you the confidence that you will be able to achieve all your goals. Of course, you will find that there are days on which there was not much or no progress made. You should learn to accept that this is natural and so long as you have been moving forward, this should give you enough motivation to keep working on your goals.
• When you are aiming for harder, long-term goals, you need something in the meantime to keep you motivated, for you to want to go on. The trick is to break up your one main goal in to smaller sub-goals till you have to do just one or two tasks per day. Identify some stages as your key milestones and take time out to celebrate. This way, while you stay focused on the main goal all the time, the smaller goals help you to stay motivated during the course of achieving it.
• You may find it very helpful to attend some classes or appoint a coach if you are finding things difficult to do on your own. For example, if you are trying to learn a foreign language, joining some classes may help. Or if you are unable to workout on your own, a personal trainer may be a good idea. Of course, these options do cost more money but they are proven to be highly effective.
• You will have days when you simply do not want to get up from bed. Or all that you want to do is take off from work and watch re-runs of some old movies. All of us experience this sense of lethargy from time to time. Taking a day off may in fact be a very good way of recharging yourself physically and mentally. The only precaution you need to take is that this does not spill into the next day as you will find it increasingly difficult to slip back into a routine. Grit your teeth and make sure that you are back to working on your action plan the next day, no matter if it is a Sunday or a holiday.
• You may have heard a great deal about the effectiveness of visualization techniques but may not know how to go about it. Perform this simple mental experiment. Choose any one of your goals that is very important to you and the achievement of which means a great deal to you. Now close your eyes and imagine that you have already reached this particular goal. How do you feel? Where are you, what are you wearing? How are others reacting? Form a very clear mental picture of the entire proceedings – the people, the place, the sounds and even the smell. Feel the sense of accomplishment and empowerment filling inside of you. Now open you eyes, you will still have the same sense of pleasure and experience the same sense of self-confidence. Here is the next step: Perform this experiment everyday for a few minutes, preferably before you begin the day as this will give you the necessary motivation to not only get through the day but you will feel energized enough to want to achieve your task for the day.
• Doing the same thing again and again everyday does bring with it certain monotony. You know you need to go for your workouts regularly but after some time, boredom starts to creep in. Guard yourself against this monotony, as it is a surefire thing to bring your motivation down. Try changing your routine from time to time to make it a little interesting. Perhaps instead of using your treadmill, you can try jogging in the nearby park. Instead of attending evening classes everyday, you might want to attend a related workshop for a few days.
• For some time now, psychologists have been informing us that humans tend to associate every action that is performed with either pain or pleasure. Obviously if the actions are associated with pain, there is reluctance in performing them and one finds it difficult to motivate oneself in performing these actions. On the other hand, if the action is associated with pleasure, one finds it a lot easier to perform those actions. When working towards a goal involves actions that are associated with pain, we may find ourselves slowly losing interest. For example, it is possible that when you are thinking of going for a workout, you are associating it with the morning rush to head for the gym, aching muscles and the boredom of working out alone. Now try this simple exercise - instead of associating this action with pain, try to associate it with pleasure. The pleasure of knowing that you are losing weight as you are working out, you will look and feel better and more importantly you will be leading a healthy life. As you slowly start associating only the benefits and advantages that any action will bring to our lives, you will unearth an internal motivating force and your attitude towards that particular task will undergo a sea change.
• Do not be disheartened by any false steps that you may take. As you work your way towards your goal, if it is a long-term one or a particularly tough goal then chances are that you will face some failures or make mistakes. If you are trying to quit smoking, you may relapse and get back to smoking. If you are working towards a college degree, you may fail in one of the exams. However, use each one of these failures as a chance to understand what you need to do to avoid making the same mistake twice. Perhaps you need some more support in your fight to quit smoking; maybe you need some tutoring to help you with your studies. However unpleasant it may be, carefully go through what may have gone wrong and include steps to rectify it in your action plan.
• Having friends and family to help you and support is wonderful. However, you should also consider having a mentor who may not only support you and encourage you but also provide valuable advice and guidance. If you are trying for a management degree, it is possible that a senior colleague may agree to act as your mentor. He may have had years of experience in this field and will be able to provide you with great tips on how to go about achieving your goal. After all, any success that you achieve will reflect well on him as well.
• Constantly evaluate whether your lack of motivation is because the goal no longer reflects your values or your priorities in life. You may have been very keen on gaining a promotion in our job but later realized that your young children need you more and that you need to spare time for them. Evaluating and revising your goals to keep in line with your changing priorities will help bring back the motivation to achieve them.
V. Planning for Future Successes
You are now well on your way to achieving your goals. After carefully carving out an action plan and working diligently towards your goals, you have achieved many a success on your way, with a few setbacks as well. However, as and when you reach a goal, remind yourself that this is a continuous process and that there is still so much more you can achieve for yourself.
It is also true that as you grow through life and have new experiences, your priorities and what are important to you will also change. While learning to paint was once a passion with you, you are now married and have kids. Your priority is probably the college degree that may bring you a promotion and higher pay with it. Your values may also change with time. While once you may have thought a grand sports car was worth possessing, you are now more aware of the environmental issues and would prefer a greener car. You need to thus regularly revise and modify your goals in keeping with your changing values and priorities. And the only way you can do that is by constantly giving yourself feedback regarding goals that you have achieved and goals that you have not achieved.
When you have achieved some of your goals, especially the hard ones or any of the long-term ones, you should most certainly take the time to celebrate and enjoy the sense of satisfaction that you get on having achieved them. At the same time, understand what exactly achieving this goal means to you, has it brought you the benefits or the value to your life that you thought it would and how does that affect the rest of your goals?
Learn From Your Failures
When you fail to reach a certain goal, do not be too disheartened. Use this opportunity to get some valuable feedback on where you went wrong and how you can change that when you start out the next time. Some of the reasons may be –
• You did not want the goal you aimed for badly enough. As a result most of your attempts to achieve it would have been half-hearted.
• Perhaps you lacked some of the skills, knowledge or techniques necessary in achieving your goal. Try and understand what these could be and then make suitable changes in your action plan so that acquiring the necessary skills and techniques form part of your goals.
• Perhaps you set the goal too high and felt discouraged midway.
• Or perhaps you just did not try hard enough.
If you use the setbacks you suffered to acquire feedback in this manner and then revise your goals accordingly, even failures will act as stepping-stones to your ultimate success. In fact, you will soon learn not to be unduly fazed by any temporary set back as that can be used as a positive learning experience to keep moving forward.
Learn From Your Successes
If you have been fortunate enough and managed to achieve some or many of your goals, it is even more important that you take the time to analyze what you did right and how you can improve on your performance. Try and use this feedback in the following manner-
• If you felt the goal was too easily achieved, maybe you need to raise the bar the next time around.
• On the other hand, if the goal was too tough and you felt dispirited very often while still managing to achieve it, perhaps you need to make your next goals a little easier.
• You may still feel that acquiring certain skills or improving on existing skills will help you achieve more goals. Again incorporate learning these skills and techniques in your action plan.
Remember setting and achieving goals is a continuous process and as your outlook on life changes, you should revise your goals to reflect these changes. If there are some goals that no longer hold any attraction for you, do not hesitate to let them go. Do not stick with them for the sake of nostalgia. You need to have a real desire to reach your goals because only then will you feel a real sense of satisfaction and a sense of achievement.
Sharing Your Success and Inspiring Others
As you go about trying to achieve your goals and your dreams, you may have many chances to share your success stories with others and to inspire them to aim for their goals too.
• Share your experiences, good and bad with others. Tell them what worked and what did not. Tell them about books they can read, people they can speak to. Point out other helpful resources that you found useful.
• Just as you may have had friends or a mentor to support you and guide you when you need help, there may be others who will benefit from your guidance. Make time for them and allow them to take advantage of your experiences.
• Set a good example. As more and more people watch you go about achieving your goals with grit and determination, they will be inspired to follow your lead. You would have thus successfully inspired many to aim to better their lives.
Goal setting and working to achieve the goals are continuous and lifelong processes. As you aim to lead a richer, fuller life you will find yourself feeling forever motivated and energized.