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How to Set Achievable Goals
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Do you make New Year’s Resolutions every year and never seem to see them through until the end? Do you start the new year motivated but find yourself in the same old rut after just a few weeks or even days? How can you make resolutions and achieve your goals? Well, maybe you don’t need any New Year’s Resolutions at all. In this blog post, we’ll explore what you can do instead of typical resolutions. And the great thing is: You don’t need to wait until the next year to start, you can do it anytime.
New year, new chapter?
The calender we follow all around the world for daily life is only one way to measure time intervals. There are different calendars, for example the Lunar Year or the Islamic year and many more. So for setting goals and improving yourself, you don’t need to wait for a specific event, but you can start anytime! Starting off 2021 could still be a good start though, especially if you have a feeling of starting a new chapter. I also like to reevaluate the previous year and create a visionboard as well as plan out the new year. But if you find yourself making unrealistic resolutions that you never see through, maybe it’s time for a different mindset.
Set goals for different categories
You may call them responsibility pools, life areas or categories. I like to make separate goals for different categories as, like most people, I have several roles / responsibilities in my life and I want to improve on a broad spectrum. You don’t have to do it for every area of your life and in fact, you should not overdo it. To start off, you can for example just choose 2-3 categories. This way, you have a clear vision for the areas you want to work on and you have several areas, which means that there is not just the one goal, which might make you feel miserable if can’t achieve it or if there are delays.
Your categories could be:
- Personal goals (Health, habits, skills, milestones etc.), this could also include your skincare: Do you want to start with the K-Beauty routine? Do you want to invest more in yourself?
- Spiritual/religious goals
- Family related goals
- Professional goals
- Financial goals: Do you want to save more money to fulfill your dreams? Start investing and buying stocks?
- Social goals (charity, events, friendships etc.)
What do you want to have? Be? Do?
To visualize your goals, write down things that you wish HAVING, BEING and wish to be DOING for your categories. You can do this in a column. Remember to save some space either in each column or in the doing-column. What do you want to change or achieve regarding your categories, what do you want to improve in yourself, how can you contribute to the community? What do you want to learn more about? Which skills would you like to gain or improve? Make a list of everything you can think of. This is important, so you don’t have any goals lurking around in the back of your mind while you try to focus on a specific goal.
Be SMART about your goals
In the next step, you should pay attention to the wording of your goals. For the best foundation for your goals, you should keep them smart. This is an abbreviation for the following:
- S = Specific
- M = Measurable
- A = Attractive
- R = Realistic
- T = Timely
Your goals should be specific, so that you know what it is exactly that you want. They should be measurable, as far as that’s possible and attractive, like the idea should ideally be motivating for you. Your goals should also be realistic, otherwise it will be frustrating to work on and timely, which means that you need to have a certain timeline, in which you want to work on your goals.
Set priorities
But of course it’s not possible to work on everything at the same time. So circle all of the actions for the goals you want to achieve as soon as possible. Which goals feel the most urgent? In the next step, look at your notes in the columns. What do you need to DO, to achieve these things or get closer to them? Write down the necessary actions. At the end, you should have a list of actionable goals. Now you know what it takes to get closer to your goals.
Build momentum
This is where most people take a break, already feeling like they accomplished something for the day. That’s right, you did achieve something if you followed all of the steps. But we don’t want to stop here, instead we want to BUILD MOMENTUM. Get started right away! Think of something you can do right now or the following day, it should be easy to achieve and not take too much time. This way you can get the ball rolling. You will feel even more accomplished, more motivated to keep striving and you already invested work and effort.
Write down what you can do now, what should be done within the next few months and where you should ideally be towards the end of the year. At the end you have a short- and midterm to-do-list to achieve your goals. If you are able to accomplish all of your goals before the year ends, you can go back to your list and pick more goals. If it takes a long time to achieve the things you’ve written down, that’s fine, too – all that matters is that you start.
What goals are you working towards?