Achieve Your Goals: The 4 Steps to Goal Achievement

Step 1: Identify Your Goals

What do you want this year? This is where all the advice on knowing yourself and what you want comes in: from pondering your vision to Making SMART goals. Once you’ve identified them, visualize yourself achieving them-or what it would mean to achieve them.

Translate your goals into pictures. Take a photo album or a scrapbook and make a goal book.
Paste pix of clothes you want to wear when you’ve lost those 10 pounds, scenes from the trip Mom will reward you with when you get on the Dean’s list, or a photo of someone you admire and whose accomplishments you’d like to match. This makes your mission clearer and gets you excited. Starting is often a hardest part. Looking ahead to what you want is a great motivator.

Step 2: Set Your Goals Into Action

This is when you break your goals down into specific tasks or steps. There’s no need to make any huge jumps you are not ready for.  If your goal is to be healthier you need not become a vegetarian, swim 30 laps in the pool, meditate and go to the gym all in one day. Start with drinking that glass of milk you always forget in the morning and do 15 sit-ups before you get out of bed. Keep on adding to your list of steps as you go along.

Step 3: Polish Up and Follow Through

Don’t run out of steam when you’re so close to forming your habit! If things have gotten a bit boring for you, up the level of enhancement and enjoyment. Use different colored ink for the notes you’ve been taking so diligently. Cook a new vegetarian meal. Practice a new song on the piano. Polish off your tasks. Get excited at the thought of adding that little red cherry on the top of your sundae. There’s nothing like a little follow through the carry you a long way.

Step 4: Enjoy, Reassess, and Move On to Higher Goals

Give yourself a part on the back for a job well done! (Actually, you should have been enjoying step 1 to 3 as well.) This is also a good time to reassess who and where you are now that your first set of goals are complete. Never stick to a plan only because you said you would–at least not in this case. Your goal is to reach the vision of who you want to be. It is not to check off all the items on a to-do list. So enjoy your little 3 step victory and get some R&R for the higher goals that you’ve set for yourself. Pretty soon, you see that your dreams can come true because you make them.