How to achieve your goals?

Today I am going to discuss a few tips on how to achieve your goals based on my experience and steps I take to achieve my goals. This is my process on how to go about being goal oriented and I hope this helps you too.

First of all, goals depend on what we desire most. It might be to lose weight or to get through an exam or pass an interview or something vocational like becoming a blogger. You need to be specific about what you want to achieve in life and then work your way towards it.

Make it realistic and start with small steps i.e. baby steps. For e.g., you might like to be more of a stronger and happier person. So what is it that you need to do? You might research on the internet and it will give you suggestions to follow a healthier lifestyle, such as exercise everyday and follow a healthy diet. It might also ask you to follow holistic practises like meditation and yoga.

So first thing you need to do is to write down your goal. Then research by reading articles and talking to experts on how to go about achieving it. So once you are specific and have some knowhow, make an action plan on how to go about it. This will make your goal feel more real and practical, in other words achievable. It will actually bring some sense of structure to your goals. Make a routine and write it down in your planner. Set the time in your planner for that particular task every day.

Say, you want to lose weight. Don’t be vague and think I want to look like Beyonce. Be more specific, considering your current situation. For e.g. you are twenty pounds overweight. So write down your goal as, ‘I want to lose 20 pounds’. Give it a time duration. Be realistic. Don’t try to achieve that goal in one week. It might lead to you falling seriously ill thereby damaging your health. So write down your goal in a sheet of paper with a time frame, say I want to lose ten pounds in two months.

Then, next comes the process. What is the action plan to achieve that goal considering the lifestyle you follow? Like for e.g. you might be a busy mother of school going children. So you need to fix a time after the children goes to school. This will help you follow that time schedule regularly without allowing any break to it, except for unavoidable circumstances of course. Or you might be a student who is busy in school the entire day. So in that case the best option would be to finish off your exercise schedule in the morning. Or you might be an office goer who has some free time in the evening. So the best course of action is to fix a time in the evening. Whatever your time is, keep it fixed and develop a routine round it. Follow it diligently till it becomes a habit. Follow a diet schedule. Decide first what would be the diet you are going to follow. What foods should be included in your breakfast that will aid in your weight loss? It might be that the dietician or the fitness blogger or website you follow might ask you to load yourself with fibrous food such as oatmeal or fruits in the morning. So write that down in your breakfast diet column of your diet planner. Keep more options so that there is variety and you are not bored. Decide what would you have for your lunch – the time when you feel tired and still need to keep going through the entire day. Maybe you can have some carbohydrates or protein food. So write that down. Then next comes your dinner. It should be a lighter affair this time, so write down the light foods as advised by your fitness experts. You can also write down the snacks to be followed too. In this manner you can have a proper diet chart to follow and this will aid you in your weight loss. When your diet becomes a pre-planned routine, it helps you to stop cheating and thereby giving in to your senses whenever the impulse catches you. Make a column in your diet chart that contains the checklist which makes you check off the things you were able to complete successfully. That gives you a sense of achievement. Also include a column for the junks foods or sugary stuff you had that day so that you are aware of what you are eating that might have led to a slowdown in your weight loss. Once you have that record you are more aware of your diet intake and next time you will be more conscious of your food habits. You can also have an exercise chart which combines the different exercises you might do on a particular day of the week. This might be a combination of cardio or ab exercises or weights. So you can have a structured exercise plan to follow each week that especially works on the problem areas of your physique. Keep the timetable or planner pasted on an area where you can see it every day. This will help you follow it with more dedication and not be lackadaisical about your goal. Download exercise planners from the internet or you can design some of your own and print them out. You can have a wallpaper of someone who’s physique you admire on your desktop or laptop if you use that. This will can enhance your desire and make your goal even stronger. Or you can have a screen saver of that person in different dresses or have a wall poster where you can always see them. This will motivate you to follow your exercise and diet plans till it becomes a habit. Here I have pasted a self designed exercise planner to keep me motivated in my exercise and diet schedule.

Let me give you another example. For instance your goal is to become a blogger. In that case, first you need to create a free blog offered by different websites such as wordpress and blogspot or take professional help to create one. I will not talk in detail about this, as lots of information regarding it is already available on the internet. So what would be the next step for you to do? Fix a certain time everyday for your research and writing. You can fix one hour for your research and another hour for writing. So by the end of a month you can have as much as 8 to 9 articles easily. Same goes for writing a book which might also be your first novel. If you are a busy holding a job, then you can fix an hour everyday early morning for your book. Start working on your research for a month. Then for another 10 days start making a plot for your novel. After that aim to write 500 or 1000 words everyday depending on your speed. Hence by the end of the month you can have as much as 15, 000 to 30,000 words already completed for your novel. If you go by the lower count then by the end of five months you would have completed 75,000 words at least. If you consider another three-four months for editing and polishing your novel, then within less than a year you have a novel ready to be submitted to the agent or a publisher.

Hence with proper planning we can set to achieve whatever we want or dream of. We need to start with baby steps by writing down our goal first. Then next we need to make an action plan. Keep your timetable or plan visible by making printouts and pasting it where you can see it every day – maybe in your planner or on the wall facing your desk. Make it a habit to follow the routine everyday with dedication. Of course don’t make it so unrealistic that you are burnt out in the first few days itself. After exerting your will power for the first week or so, it almost becomes a habit and gets much easier. Once you have checked off those small goals your sense of achievement will propel you to aim for more goals. Your past success track record will give you better focus and thereby make you more determined and goal oriented. This paves for more success in your life and in time all your future endeavours.

Author:        Pratibha R DH
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