As if writing down your goals may be challenging, or overwhelming at times, creating a plan to achieve the them is equally challenging. That is nothing compared to taking action. Most of the people may follow through with writing their goals down and even writing down an action plan.
Sadly there would be no following up with action. However obvious it may be that you have to work the plan to achieve your goals in life this is often the step that is never taken. Action is an inevitable step.
How To Achieve A Goal Successfully
After setting and planning make sure to take action to achieve your goals. Writing them down or having them at the back of your head will not help.
You are going to learn the importance of fostering new and helpful habits in order to not struggle following the steps in your action plan. The idea is to work the plan to achieve your goals in life.
Once you’ve created a plan, you need to get started putting everything in motion. You have to work your plan in order for it to bring you what you want from any area of your life.
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Foster New And Helpful Habits
Everyone has habits. Some are good, some are bad. The key to getting what you want in life is found in fostering new and better habits that are based on successful actions and a go getter mindset.
You’ll limit your growth potential unless you foster habits that are productive because surprisingly enough, not all habits, even good ones, are productive ones. Habits are divided into two categories: physical and mental.
Identify And Nourish Constructive Habits
Since many mental habits (such as excessive worrying) can impact your physical habits, you should make sure that you establish new, good habits on both levels. With your goal in mind, you identify the habits that you need to work on in order to help you achieve your goals.
For example, if your goal is to have better health and you struggle with getting to bed on time in order to get a good night’s sleep, then the new habits you’d want to foster might be changing the routine of whatever you do in the evenings.
You might want to pursue habits that lead to a soothing night ritual – like taking a bath instead of watching a tense, action-filled television show before bed. When it comes to fostering new habits, there really isn’t a one size fits all method because no two people are alike.
Each person’s lifestyle will impact how he’s able to develop new habits. One person might have more free time to devote to reaching his or her goals than another person, so their timeline for developing new habits would be different.
Identify And Ditch Destructive Habits
Once you identify the habits that you need to adopt to reach your goals, you should also identify the ones that are holding you back from reaching those goals – the ones you need to eliminate.
It might be that you don’t have enough time to get everything done because you waste time on non-essential tasks or you’re easily sidetracked. Or it could be that you need to ditch habits such as having trigger foods in your house when you want to lose weight.
You want to replace the old habit of having foods that can make you binge eat with foods that will fill you up and not hurt your health goals. Once you discover the habits you need to foster and the ones you need to let go of, you’ll discover that you’re not only happier, but that the ability to achieve what you want comes much easier, too.
Develop A Plan To Create New Habits
What you have to do is to develop a plan to create new habits based on how that change will work out for you. The timing that works for someone else might not work for you – and that’s okay.
One person might be able to successfully work on relationships bright and early every morning while you find you deal best with developing and nurturing relationships in the evenings.
Don’t Make It Difficult To Adopt New Habits – Timing Is Key
You need to have the right timing in place when it comes to fostering new habits for your goals. Don’t start trying to start new habits if you’re in the middle of a crisis because stress always plays a role in how well you’ll be able to achieve your objective.
Times of high stress will work against you. You don’t want to put new habits on the backburner, but you do want to start them when they have the best chance to stick with you.
Adopt A Habit And Reward Yourself
It’s important that you create a habit and reward system. When you usher in new beliefs using a balance of rewards, it helps your subconscious recognize that what you’re doing is good and admirable.
The more you practice developing these new habits, the more your brain will adjust the thought pattern and subsequent behaviors. Rewards help your brain urge you to pick your new habit over an old one that wasn’t as productive in helping meet your goals.
Always identify how fostering these new habits is going to help you. Doing this will help you narrow down the objective of the habit. In each area of your life where you want to create goals and find success, it’s important that you keep your motivation high when you’re implementing new habits.
Find Ways To Stay Motivated
For example, if you’re trying to lose weight and get in shape, you will have days when you’re trying to create habits and it’ll be easy to lose sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing.
That’s why you should take a 3×5 card and write down the top ten reasons why you want to lose weight. Take that card and post it somewhere so that you’ll see it every day.
It will help remind you – as well as encourage and inspire you to keep developing new habits that are best for helping you reach your goals. You can also keep a photo album on your smartphone of before and after pictures to remind yourself of the progress that you’re making.
Often, health changes will show up in photographs or in the way things fit – such as inches lost – long before they show up on the scale. If you’re someone who wants to get healthier because you want to be around for your loved ones, you can also keep pictures of them on hand to help you foster new habits and make wise choices.
Be In Constant Learning Mode
When trying to implement new habits in the area of wealth, make it a goal to learn one new thing about money every week. This might be in the area of how to better save, how to lower your bills, or where to get the best deals.
It could be how to streamline your business or how to get a higher paying job in the career that you have now. You can find good financial information on money blogs, by reading books written by financial experts and by finding a mentor.
If you’re trying to adopt new habits in the area of relationships, it’s always best to study the habits of those who’ve had successful, long term relationships and who are happy. You can also learn about the personality of the person that you’re seeing or are in a relationship with.
As you learn more about them, you’ll discover which communication style works best with that person. You can also work on getting rid of any old emotional baggage that has weighed you down and made it impossible for you to move on to healthier relationships with others.
Anticipate And Learn How To Deal With Setbacks
It’s a given that with any endeavor, there are going to be problems that will create setbacks on the way to your goals. Sometimes these problems are minor and easily overcome.
Other times, they can be major issues that require some effort to get through. For people who have a goal of getting healthy, a setback might be something like falling back into bad habits that negatively impact their health – or an injury that causes them to be sedentary and gain weight.
It might mean someone who quits smoking and then has a great deal of stress, causing them to go back to smoking – or someone who drinks too much and it trying to stay sober, falling off the wagon.
Some Setbacks Can Be Discouraging
Men and women who have a goal of trying to lose weight and get into shape might be doing everything right to try to get rid of the excess pounds, but discover they’ve gained instead of losing.
That kind of setback can be discouraging – especially if you know you’ve given it your best shot. Setbacks like this can strongly tempt you to give up. If you feel like you’ve tried hard, you’ve cut out the junk foods you like, you’re eating healthy meals and you’re exercising faithfully, it can make you feel like your effort is useless when progress isn’t happening.
Maybe you’ve set goals for yourself to get into a relationship or improve the one that you have – yet it seems like all you ever do is argue or you can’t seem to come to any agreement on small or big decisions.
Communication just isn’t happening, and the other person won’t give an inch and you don’t feel like you can either with compromising what you believe or need. It starts to look like you just want different things out of life and you see no way to reconcile those differences.
Setbacks aren’t the end of anything. They’re a pause in your journey. All they mean is that it’s time for you to stop and readjust what’s going on or how you deal with situations.
Some setbacks won’t cause much of a ripple, while others will make you feel like you’ve reached the end of your rope. They’ll make you question whether or not you’re on the right path and whether or not your goals are achievable.
Be Weary Of Doubts And Where They Come From
It’s natural for doubts to start to bombard you when setbacks happen, so keep that in mind. It doesn’t mean that you’re on the wrong track. It only means that some debris has fallen in your path and needs to be cleared up first.
One of the worst things about experiencing a setback is the way that some people deal with it and you want to take care that you don’t handle it the same way. What some people do after encountering a setback is they set up a negative reel to play inside their mind.
They use negative language to think about the setback. They’ll think things like, “Great! Now I’ll never get ahead financially. I’ll always be broke.” Or they might think, “I can’t lose weight. I’m just meant to be overweight.”
They might have a setback in a relationship and immediately think, “I’m going to end up alone,” or, “There’s no way we can work this out.” That negative mindset will only make your setback loom over you larger than it might really be – and seemingly insurmountable.
Maintain The Right Mindset
You have to stop the negative mindset by shutting it down the second it pops into your head. Change the way that you talk to yourself by acting like your internal dialogue is the same as the one you’d have with a friend.
Treat yourself as kindly as you would them. Acknowledge the setback. Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make it go away and it’ll only compound the problem. Sometimes encountering a setback will make you feel like a failure and cause self-doubt to grow.
Timeously Take Stock Of What You Have Already Done
It might make you afraid or leery to try again. That’s why, when you have a setback, you need to look back at what all you’ve accomplished. This will help you see how much progress you’ve really made and when you do that, it can be motivating and give you the strength of mind to want to keep on going despite the setback.
Once you have the right mindset, then create a plan to overcome what happened. Look at it and ask yourself, “How can I fix this?” You may need to do something like reach out for support and have a friend or doctor look over whatever health issue you’re struggling with.
If it’s giving up a bad habit, seek an accountability buddy. If it’s a weight loss issue, have a supportive friend look over your diet and exercise log to see if they see something you may have missed or could change.
Setbacks in relationships can be dealt with by taking a step back and putting yourself in their shoes. You can read self-help books, take relationship classes or go for counseling.
For people who have setbacks in the area of wealth, such as a loss of income, look at ways you can get that income replaced. If you wanted a promotion and didn’t get it, look at where you could go to get the same or a similar promotion.
Give Setback A New Meaning
Keep in mind that a setback isn’t the end – it’s only part of the journey. A setback means that you’re growing, you’re spreading your wings and stepping out of your comfort zone.
Setbacks don’t have to be negative times in your life if you let them be tools to help you.
They can help show you just how much you really do want what you’re striving for. They can make you stronger, more determined and make the accomplishment of your goals that much sweeter.
Celebrate Your Milestones
Any journey toward success is going to have steps forward – and what feels like giant steps backward. If going after success were easy, everyone would do it. Success comes to individuals who have learned the art of perseverance.
That’s why you should celebrate milestones. You’ve earned that celebration. When you celebrate milestones, it helps you feel encouragement. The encouragement gives you a boost and makes you want to keep on striving for more success.
By celebrating your milestones, it allows you to feel proud and be able to tell yourself, “I did this.” Milestones need to be celebrated – whether they’re small or big. The celebration of what you’ve accomplished also allow you to have time for reflection.
Examples How To Celebrate Your Milestones
It causes you to look back and see how far you’ve come and what you’ve learned during the process. There are many types of milestones to celebrate. If your goal was to stop smoking and you’ve been smoke free for a month, celebrate that.
Quitting a habit like that is difficult and you’ve managed to stick with it. Maybe you’re on a weight loss journey and you’ve lost your first ten pounds. You should celebrate that loss.
It could be that you’ve been faithful to exercise for a week – when in the past you’ve never made it that far. Celebrate that. If you’ve made good food choices, haven’t overeaten or you’ve given up emotional eating, celebrate that.
You can buy new clothes, get a mani-pedi or a new haircut. Do something you enjoy. Buy a book, see a movie or go to a concert. Celebrate you – because you deserve the recognition for all your effort.
Some people hit milestones in the area of wealth. Maybe you hit a savings goal. Celebrate the fact that you’re building your financial future. Or it could be that you made the decision to go back to college to further your career.
The day you set foot on campus or take your first online class, celebrate that – or your first A or the end of the semester. Maybe you’ve started your own business and you’ve reached the place in the business where you need to hire other people to help you.
Celebrate that. It shows that your business is growing your profits to the point you need others to come along. Some wealth milestones are simple – like you signed up more clients or you reached an income level where you can afford new software because you’re going to branch out.
Celebrate reaching that point. Buy that new technology you wanted. Invest in something. Relationship milestones should be celebrated, too. Big milestones like anniversaries are a given – but celebrate little milestones, too – such as working together where you’ve met a goal or you solved an issue.
Maybe you bought a house together. You both began a weight loss journey. Or you supported each other in your career goals. Celebrate each other’s milestones such as getting a new job, going back to school or overcoming a problem.
Go out to dinner. Have a date night. Take a mini vacation or a buy a special gift to commemorate the milestone. It doesn’t have to be anything expensive or cost anything at all – it’s the sentiment and recognition that matters.