How to Create and Achieve Your Goals

HOW TO CREATE AND ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS

A STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO SETTING AND ACHIEVING YOUR GOALS

It’s quite simple really, you pick what’s important to you, identify what your big long-term goal is (ambitious but not ridiculous), set your stepping stones and daily processes, and make sure you’re being held accountable. Simple right? Well, let’s break it down precisely for you.

PICK YOUR GOAL CATEGORIES

There are several Different Themes of Goals that cover different categories that feed into our lives. The first step in creating your goals is to understand where needs attention. For example, you may be doing really well at work, and have a stable relationship, whilst these are things that you want to continue, you may not need to have big long-term goals around these categories. You may also look at this list and be inspired as to what area of your life either needs the most attention or would make the biggest difference in your overall contribution to your happiness. When doing this exercise remember that the goals you work on should INCREASE YOUR HAPPINESS. You have to turn up to this exercise authentically, don’t make assumptions on what you want to achieve (money, relationships, possessions, promotions) think about what would actually make you happier once you have achieved them than you are now. This isn’t for anyone but yourself so be honest with what you want. Once you have identified what would increase your happiness, pick your top categories that will form the basis of your goal setting.

IDENTIFY YOUR LONG TERM GOALS

You have your categories now, ideally, you have between 2-4 categories, 4 is a stretch but I use 4 as it is also my lucky number; but definitely don’t have more than four otherwise you will create paralysis of over-commitment and limited time and resources. For each of your important categories choose ONE Long Term Goal. A long-term goal is a big chunky ambitious but not ridiculous goal that will positively change how you feel and what your life looks like. It should be lofty enough that you can dedicate the next year to it, and there is a possibility you won’t get there as it is going to make that much of a difference to your life, but it is within the realms of possibility based on your circumstances and abilities.

SENSE CHECK YOUR LONG TERM GOALS

So you have one Long Term Goal for each important category. Before committing your Long Term Goals to your plan, check them against the SMART framework

⭐ S – Specific (or Significant).

⭐ M – Measurable (or Meaningful).

⭐ A – Attainable (or Action-Oriented).

⭐ R – Relevant (or Rewarding).

⭐ T – Time-bound (or Trackable).

WRITE THEM DOWN

There are many reasons to write down your goals – here we talk about eight specific reasons to write down your goals but simply writing them down is the next big step in creating and achieving them. Whatever Long Term Goal you have decided on, write it in RETROSPECTIVE language.

For example, instead of: I want to get better at my finances and invest my money

Try rewriting to: I actively invest in multiple products which increase my money by 18%

This does two things, it’s using positive language which has been shown to help aid goal achieving, but it also creates a certain mindset, by writing retrospectively you can propel yourself to a years time where you have completed your goal and help build even more of a picture of how that achievement will feel, increasing clarity and forming more of what state you are working towards improving motivation.

WORK BACKWARDS

You have your long-term goals as vision statements, now you have to understand how you’re going to get there. Taking each goal individually (and remember this should be 2-3, perhaps four but no more) start at the end and work backward to now for all of the steps that need to be completed in order to reach your goal.

SET YOUR STEPPING STONES

Your stepping stones are your medium-term goals. Now you have your roadmap of how you are going to go from now to goal completion you can understand what medium-term goals to set. These stepping stone goals should still be ambitious, they are achievements above the norm that lead you to your long-term goals, but achievable over a shorter period of time. If you have set linear annual goals, you don’t have to set stepping stones all at once, you can be flexible quarterly to make sure you are dynamic in how you set your stepping stones.

WRITE THEM DOWN

Again, so many reasons to write down your goals. But writing down your stepping stones also enables the presentation of cross-function actions. At this point, you may see some crossovers, behaviors, attitudes, or skills that help reach your stepping stone goals.

PICK YOUR PROCESS GOALS

After your stepping stones, the way to achieve your goals is to introduce them into your routine daily process goals. These are the simplest daily actions that correspond to progress and bring compound gains towards your overall future state. Again, keep the numbers low. Introduce 2-3 daily process goals, don’t over-process your life, you want to add value not overwhelm.

SET UP YOUR TRACKING

We’ve been writing everything down for a reason because to achieve goals you have to track them. Our notion template is the culmination of years of experience in goal setting and tracking and includes Long Term Goals, configured with stepping stones and feeding into a daily process so that you can track everything that you are doing. Make your daily process goals easy to achieve, and we mean REALLY easy. So if one of your process goals is to read about investment, make it one page. Just one page a day. Our brains love to win, so being able to complete this easily will bring a sense of achievement that can be built on. As you have set up SMART goals, you will have a date for each stepping stone and Long Term Goal, so input this into your tracking as well. Use this DAILY. Literally every day you should be checking your process goals off.

ADJUST WHERE NECESSARY

Whilst your Long Term Goals should be pretty much set in stone (aside from massive life events or sudden changes in circumstance if you have followed the process properly your goals should remain important and relevant), everything else is a journey. Start small with your daily process goals, revisit your stepping stones. Make sure you have enough flexibility to both overachieve and adjust when you aren’t quite hitting the mark. The end goal is what’s important, everything else moves around to help get you to where you need to be.

KEEP YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE

GROW DAILY

And….the reason we’re called Good Mornings and why we’re so obsessed with a morning routine is because turning up every day is how you get what you want in life. Our Goals and Visions are deeply embedded into our Morning Routines, each day when we wake up we are working at getting 1% better than the day before, making sustainable changes that create compound growth. And you can too! Join our community on Twitter and Instagram and sign up for our newsletter to Grow Daily and achieve what you want in life.