How You can Achieve Life Goals

Hopefully you will want to achieve life goals! Unfortunately many people don’t succeed. Here’s what you need to do to be someone who does? 

“Developing the plan is actually laying out the sequence of events that have to occur for you to achieve your goal.”
George L. Morrisey - Head of a Management Consulting Firm

It’s all very well knowing that you want to achieve life goals, it’s quite another achieving them.

Why do some people have lots of ideas that they initially pursue with great enthusiasm, only to give up because it’s too difficult, they’re bored with it or another idea they think is better has just popped into their head?

The key here is planning.  There’s a saying that ‘If you fail to plan – you plan to fail’. Therefore you need to:

• set out precisely what it is you want to do.
  
• create a detailed plan showing how you’re going to achieve it.
  
• work out the time-scale you’ll need to execute the plan.
  
• work consistently to implement it.
  
• focus on this project only with no other competing/conflicting ideas.
  
• fully commit to your plan and monitor its progress regularly against the time-scale set.

Once you’ve done this you’ll find that your level of motivation to get on with and stick to the plan will be significantly increased, because you know where you’re going, you know how to get there and you’ll know when you’ve arrived!

Many people think because they’ve had a good idea they can just get started, but they haven’t thought about those key planning tasks. They rush about with no particular direction, maybe starting in the middle instead of the beginning and wondering why they’re not making progress.

They become disillusioned so they find another idea to pursue. And if they continue in this vein, that will be their life-plan.

Other people have so many ideas going through their heads so they start on two or three of them at once. This saps their energy – mentally and physically – and they end up committing to none of them. They don’t realise that the ideas are not the thing – they can be two-a-penny. What matters is planning and commitment.

You need to be prepared to modify or ditch. Sometimes, along the way, you find that where you’re going isn’t where you want to be. That’s fine! You can divert to a different route (achieve life goals in a different way) and a different destination (change your goal) or you can ditch it all together in favour of something else.

Remember – you always have a choice. Just be sure if you’re going to change
that it’s what you want, and don’t forget to go through the same planning process with your next project.

Give yourself some slack. Don’t expect success or goal achievement to necessarily come quickly, and don’t give yourself a hard time if it takes longer than expected to achieve a goal. What’s important is that you’re making progress.