Strategies To Achieve Your Goals

Setting your own goals, whether they be long term or short term is the first aspect to seeing positive changes in your life. Action planning what needs to be done is all part of the process. But as easy as it is at the thought of always being motivated and always staying on your A game, the reality is that you can suffer from knock backs and become demotivated. This should never dishearten or throw you off course, we are bound to run into hurdles. This is part of the process. You will have the good, the bad and the ugly, but you just have to be consciously aware of this and be smart about how you plan on bringing yourself up again. Therefore, finding strategies to overcome these hurdles is key to working one step closer to your goal.

Taking a step back and reshuffling your mindset to look at the bigger picture can be really useful. Looking back and revisiting the main reasons why you are striving for this goal can help put you back on course. Sometimes we forget why we are doing this and the benefit that we achieve out of it. It might be that you are trying to live a healthier lifestyle and attain a particular body goal but you are not seeing results and feeling demotivated. It might be that you are looking to cut down your spending and save a specific amount of money by the end of the year. Whatever the goal, looking at foundation of WHY we are doing this and HOW we can re-plan our actions or behaviour can help lead us back on the right path of progress.

Having a strategy journal/notebook when we are going through these hurdles in our goals progress can be a really useful tool to use. But firstly, what is the purpose of a strategy book? It is essentially for you to look at on days that you are struggling to be motivated and need that extra little push to keep you going. On those days you want to give up, it can always be a good idea to open up your journal/notebook and revisit your purpose for your each goal and look at the good and bad actions you are taking and see what you can do differently. This works really well with long term goals but can also be effective for shorter term goals.

Below are a list of the things you want to note down when you are assessing each goal:

1. What is not working? - why are you feeling like this towards your goal and what results are you not seeing?

2. What barriers are coming up? - what steps are you currently taking? But what results are you not seeing? Think about how your action is reflecting in your result. Clearly if you are not seeing the results you want to see then you need to think about shifting that action.

3. Write out 5 ideas per barrier on how you can change your strategy. Look at ways to readjust your action plans to be able to reach your goal. You can do this in the form of an "idea dump page" or whatever works well for you.

4. Now that you have all your new strategies in place, think about which ones you can action right away. Easiest way to do it is write down 3 habits that you can implement RIGHT NOW. What is most likely to work? What is the easiest to implement?

Making sure that you are reflecting on your goals regularly is a crucial aspect of progress. It gives you that time to reflect on the positives of your journey but also the areas of improvement. There are so many different ways of doing this, and there is definitely no right or wrong method, you just have to find what works for you. If you are assessing long term goals, I would advise you sit down and evaluate your journey every 2/3 months. Of course if there are shorter goals, it may be useful to re-evaluate every couple of weeks to ensure you are staying on track.

What methods do you use to help achieve your goals? How do you overcome the hurdles when you are struggling with staying on track?