Why do you need to be setting goals in the first place?

Setting a goal is an incredible instrument for moving forward. It’s so much easier to make progress in whatever you’re doing when there is a definite end point – when you have a goal in mind, you have a destination to which you wish to arrive.

Whenever you have a project or an idea for something, it can be pretty exhausting to work on it. Making a certain checkpoint will give you an opportunity to be pleased with how far you’ve come so far and a reason to celebrate. Remember that it’s easier to make a few small steps than take one giant leap.

Goals can be set in pretty much any area of life – work, relationships, health, hobbies, appearance – anything you can think of. Try approaching everything from a standpoint of setting a goal and see how you like it.

There are four key points of achieving any goal, which simultaneously can be the reasons for failure if you don’t keep them in mind.

Realism. 

First and foremost, it’s important to do a reality check every single time you want to set a goal for yourself. It has to be doable. Sure, you can have anything as a goal, but what’s the point if you won’t be able to go through with it? 

See, if you set a goal of getting married tomorrow, but you don’t even have a boyfriend, how in the hell is that supposed to work? Or making a million dollars by next week. The thing is, you want to be setting goals you can actually achieve and then the process of getting there is going to be a piece of cake. Well, maybe not exactly a piece of cake per se, but it definitely will be doable as long as it is realistic.

A sensible plan.

Okay, you have a goal that actually can be achieved. Now what?

You have to make a plan. Think about all of these:

• How will you get there? 
• What will you need? 
• What will have to happen? 
• Will anybody else be involved in it? 
• Can this goal be split into a few smaller ones?

Let’s say you want to get a thousand followers on Instagram in the next year. 

• How will you get there? You’ll post great pictures consistently, put in keywords in description, interact with other people on the platform, maybe put your @ on your business card and so on and so forth.
• What will you need? Probably you will need a lot of ideas for pictures and stories, a good camera and some photography and design skills or somebody to do this for you. 
• What will have to happen? A ton of work, patience, belief in yourself. Your page will have to look good for people to follow you.
• Will anybody else be involved in it? Will you need a photographer, marketing specialist or a designer? Do you do your own hair/makeup/clothes styling?
• Can this goal be split into a few smaller ones? Sure, if you want a 1000 in 12 months, you need to get roughly 84 people following you per month, so that would be the twelve smaller parts of your goal.

Then, taking all that information into consideration, you would create a written step-by-step solid plan of how exactly you will be achieving your goal, including all of the small goals and the final destination.

It’s significantly easier to accomplish something following a good plan.

This way you don’t have to think about it that much in the process, you just have to check in with your plan to figure out what you need to be doing next. I recommend creating a schedule along with a plan – it will be more convenient for you to see which day you’re supposed to do one thing or the other for your plan to go along smoothly.

Why do I suggest splitting your big goal into a few smaller ones? 

It’s pretty simple, our brains like gratification and whenever you achieve a goal you’re feeling satisfied and happy about it. Sure, it’s great to have this feeling one time, but how about ten? Each time you successfully reach a point you wanted to reach, you get a burst of emotions and a ton of motivation to move on to the next point.

Imagine you’re climbing a mountain and there are three tiny villages on the way to the top. If your goal is to get to the top of the mountain and the route doesn’t even include little villages at all, you will get the satisfaction of an achievement only when you actually get there. What if you make those villages your small goals? Seeing what they look like, enjoying the view from the height you’ve got to, finding out what kind of people live there. It would make climbing so much easier, right?

It’s the same way with pretty much any goal you can think of. Breaking it down into smaller pieces will give you some extra motivation along the way and make the whole thing look a lot less intimidating.

Perseverance. 

No matter how much you like the idea of accomplishing whatever it is you want to accomplish, there will be no success without perseverance. You need to overcome everything on the way to your dream, because there inevitably will be the low points where you will feel like you’re failing and nothing is working. You still have to move forward. The way you react to those obstacles defines who you are and how successful you’re going to be at the end of the day. Most of the people who fail achieving something, do so at these times of uncertainty – they decide that it’s over, that the top of the mountain is unreachable, that they’re simply incapable of the thing they’ve put their mind to. 

Even if you fail, remember, failure is a part of a success.

Hard work. 

This is probably the most obvious one (though all four are quite obvious), but the one that gets overlooked the most at the same time. While perseverance is the engine of the goal machine and your desire of accomplishment is the fuel, the work you are putting in is a set of wheels which will actually get you to the place you need to be at. Whether the problem is the laziness or an actual inability to put in enough effort, the lack of work will definitely be something that won’t let you get to your destination. 

Can you imagine any of the great people you know being this way if they wouldn’t put in a lot of effort into the thing they’re doing? 

Life will give you obstacles on the way to your goal, whether it’ll be your own thoughts or limiting beliefs that are going to prevent you from getting there easily, other people or forces of nature.

See, you won’t go very far in a row boat without actually rowing – unless of course you’re going down the stream, but how many of your goals are “down the stream”? Not that many, I imagine.

That being said, if you’ll apply all these things to your journey, you will achieve any of your goals with utmost ease, feeling as if you’re capable of everything in the world.

Good luck!