2 Steps to Help You Reach the Goals You Long to Achieve

2022 starts in 4 days and with a new year comes New Year’s Goals! I’m sitting here writing to you and I know the cycle you’ve been through with your goals because I live it too. Christmas is over, I’m thinking about the upcoming year, and New Year’s Resolutions come to mind. I think about all the big plans I had for this last year and maybe it was actually a really great year and I did some amazing things (YES I DID)! I think about all the good times I had and the goals I did reach. Perhaps I set some goals that I completely forgot about or felt too overwhelmed by and didn’t do a thing towards achieving (yep…). I might have set some goals or resolutions at the beginning of 2021 and can’t remember what they were…I know I did it…but what were they?

Keep reading about what I’ve learned and practiced about goal-setting and achieving! It is possible to reach your goals, to make progress on your goals, and to remember what your goals are more than this one time a year. This formula can help you to get out of your ruts you find yourself in year-after-year.

STEP 1: What is your goal? Dive into details about the desire behind your goal. The more details you iron out about why you want it, the better equipped you’ll be to keep working towards your goal when the path to your goal gets hard. And anything worth having is going to be difficult at times.

Here are the questions you should answer:

1. What is your goal?
2. Why do you want it? How will it impact your life? What will it do to improve your life?
3. Where will this take place?
4. Who is going to benefit from you achieving this goal and why?

I think the best way to illustrate this will be to answer these questions myself. I am setting a goal this next year to run a half marathon. I’ve never done anything like that before…well, I ‘ve run a couple of 5K’s, but never more than 6 miles at a time before so this is a big, somewhat scary goal for me. Anyways, here is how I use this formula:

1. What is your goal: I want to prepare for and run a half marathon.
2. Why do I want it: I know that to achieve this goal I’ll have to up my health game with eating, sleep, water intake, and exercise. I really want to take better care of myself for me and my family. If I run a half marathon, that will mean that I’ve been training and doing what I can to become a healthier person, mom, and wife.
3. Where will this take place? I’ll do my training around my home and near my grandma’s house. The race I found that I want to run takes place in the mountains at a higher elevation, so training near my grandma’s house (in the mountains) will help my lungs get used to the higher elevation.
4. Who is going to benefit from you achieving this goal: I will benefit because I will be taking better care of my body, I’ll be exercising more to train for this race which means I’ll be improving my mental and emotional state with all of the endorphins that will be released. My children will benefit because I’ll be cooking healthier meals, setting a better example for them of healthy exercise and eating, I’ll be able to play with them because I’ll have more energy the healthier I become, and I’ll be happier as a result of the endorphins and knowledge that I’m taking better care of myself. My husband will benefit because he’ll be eating the healthier foods I cook too. He’ll probably go running with me a lot too, and he’ll have a happier, healthier wife. People who see or hear about my progress will be inspired to think that they can do hard things too!

The above steps are the inspiration for the goal…they are what fuels your desire to get your goal. If you want to get your goal as quickly and painlessly as possible, use the above information as you take action and you’ll see the results of it happen so much more quickly than if you were try to let things happen on their own or at their own pace.

STEP 2: Logistics

1. When will you get your goal?
2. How will you do it/get there?

Not all goals have an exact date, but for all goals, having an idea for when you’d ideally like to have accomplished them can help you to get it faster, simply because an opened ended “due date” isn’t as effective as a set timeline. Here’s how I answer these questions for myself:

1. When will you get your goal? The race I found and want to do takes place on July 30, 2022. I am going to start training this week and will train until the race.
2. How will I do it/get there? I have a tool belt stuffed with useful techniques to help me get my goals faster. Some of them are:
   1. Vision Board
   2. Make my big goal more manageable by breaking it up into smaller steps
   3. Accountability (reporting to a support system that I set up)
   4. Having positive and negative consequences set up along the way for when I do or don’t accomplish my action steps on a daily or weekly basis.
   5. When I’m on the high end of feeling motivated leave positive quotes around my house, record videos of me saying positive things about how I can do it, and paint a clear picture in my mind of what it will be like when I get my goal. This helps me to get over the road bumps faster when I hit them.
   6. Celebrate my little wins
   7. Have a coping plan in place for any resistance I feel