How to set goals and reach them

We all have goals. There wouldn’t be a lot of meaning in life if we wouldn’t have things that we wanna reach before we die. A lot of us fail at reaching their goals or didn’t do it the right way. That’s why I’ll show you how to set goals and reach them today.

SMART goals

You probably heard this before if you are an avid Pinterest user. SMART goals is a specific way of setting goals, a recipe if you will. S stands for specific, M stands for measurable, A stands for attainable, R stands for relevant & T stands for Time Based. This means you need to set a specific goal, that you can measure in some way, that is attainable to you and also relevant to your life and it should have a time frame.
For example: I wanna lose xy amount of weight in xy amount of time. It’s specific, you can measure it, the goal needs to be attainable in the time frame you set and it is relevant to you since it helps your health

Action Steps

Of course you can’t just set a goal and start into nothing. If you want to be able to work on a goal even after the initial motivation you should make an action plan with all the action steps you need to take towards the goal. If you wanna write a book for example: You need to write down ideas, make a rough outline of the events, research on the things you will mention, find more interesting things to use as transitions between parts of the story, write, edit, proofread, and so on. There are action plans for a lot of big projects a lot of people have but even if your goal is a little bit more unusual you will be able to make a plan like that.

Consistency

This is where the biggest amount of people fail. Consistency is super important when working towards a big goal. If you have a long project in front of you, you need to expect fluctuation in productivity & moods. I wanna throw it all away every few days for 1-3 hours but I don’t and make myself plans and little steps to make it easier to work towards things. If you do something daily it also gets easier. I, for example, do something creative everyday. Most of the time I write for this blog, a digital product or one of my stories, sometimes I draw on my iPad or in a sketchbook and sometimes I work on stuff for social media or my shops in Photoshop and Illustrator. Humans work based on habit. If you do something every day you will not even think about it anymore after a while.

Having things to motivate you

You need to have reasons why you wanna reach that goal and those reasons shouldn’t only be society standards wanting you to do it. Know why you are working on this thing every day so you can remind yourself on the days you aren’t in the mood to work hard on it. Think about the positive effects after you reached the goal and the effects it will have on your daily life. Write all of these little things down and carry them around with you in your thoughts every day. This will make the consistent work way easier.

Have a reward at the end

If you reach a big goal that you worked on for months you might wanna go on a little weekend trip to celebrate or if you worked on losing weight for weeks and weeks and reached your goal weight you can book a professional photo shooting. Maybe after 3 months of daily work on building a business you should go to the spa and pamper yourself. There needs to be something to look forward to when you reached your measurable goal. For my monthly income goal I have a little list of things I wanna buy myself and friends for example.

Learn that the goal won’t make you happy if the way doesn’t make you happy

If you are not happy while you are working on the goal and have some level of flow while you are working towards the goal, reaching the goal won’t be as good as you imagine it. You need to be able to enjoy the process of something. Of course there will be hours and days where working towards a goal isn’t fun and stresses you out but you should be able to think positively about it at the end of the day. No matter if it is working out, writing every day or doing a social media posting challenge. It’s like with your job: It can be stressful but you should be able to look at it at the end of the day and be happy with it, otherwise there is something wrong with that job.

This is how to set goals and reach them. I have a freebie for you in my freebie library. Two packs of motivational printables that could help you with the motivation part of goalsetting. The only thing you need to do to access the library is signing up for my newsletter that I send out 1-2x per month with even more resources:

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