5 Steps to Achieve Your Goals This Year

If you are like me and have one of the ancient paper calendars, you have flipped (or thrown away) the first page of 2012—January is over! How are you doing on those resolutions or how many baby steps have you taken towards accomplishing your goals? Do you have goals for this year?

Last year, Wil and I created 100 Life Goals (click to read goals for our lives) and then broke them down to yearly goals (we didn’t post our 2011 goals but you can read our 2012 goals here).

Steps to Take

1. Create goals: Read 7 Steps to Creating Life Goals with Your Spouse for detailed information about creating goals (you don’t have to be married to follow these guidelines). Basically, categorize your goals, be specific (measurable goals), write everything down, take action, and revise.

2. Share your goals: Get together with a group of friends or just one other person and talk about your goals for life and for the year. Sharing your aspirations with others has four benefits:

·         Challenge: Sometimes people see things in us that we do not readily see in ourselves. The friends or relatives you choose to let in on your ambitions can push you to think even bigger and really examine your gifts.

·         Creativity: Similar to the above point, others can help us to stretch our thinking. You may have mentioned something that you “always wanted to do” but when it comes time to put pen to paper, the idea is escaping you. Your loved ones can help you to remember the yearnings of your heart.

·         Perspective: You may want to read one book per week but being that you have three children, work full-time, volunteer at a local charity, go to school part-time, not to mention you want to have some semblance of order at home and want to have fun sometimes—this might not be a realistic goal. Friends can help you keep perspective on your goals. It’s good to try and stretch yourself but, at the same time, you do not want to get down on yourself because you were not able to accomplish any of your goals at the end of the year.

·         Accountability: I did not share my goals with anyone (other than Wil) last year. Had I, I probably would have stayed on track better. One goal, for example, was to cut all fried food out of my diet. I definitely minimized my intake but, if we were hanging out with people, I would indulge. If I had told my friends what I was trying to do, maybe a different entrée would have been on the menu. Who knows. Either way, if others know where you are aiming, they can help you keep your sights in focus.

3. Make a vision board: The below vision board took a long time but it is well worth it! You are more likely to make positive strides towards your goals if you them in front of you. We are very visual creatures so when we have an idea in our heads, we see an image—not just the words.

Creating a vision board is like downloading all of your dreams and ideas from your brain and uploading them to a large, tangible object that you see everyday! I didn’t check all the goals off my list last year but constantly seeing them on my board helped me to remember. Also, it made me feel good to look up and see things checked off.

Steps and materials needed to create vision board:

• Get images: I searched online to find all of the images I wanted. You can also look in magazines.
• Poster board: Get any color you want. I have also seen people use large picture frames. Or you can nix the board and just use your wall.
• Adhesive: Glue, tape, thumb tacks, gum…whatever to get the images to stay on!

4. Keep moving: I just looked over my goal list for the year and I saw that I already failed on one of my goals (to read the Bible every single day). I am not going to throw in the towel for this goal and say “What’s the point of trying?” (that would be really bad) but I can see how, for other goals, I would be inclined to feel that my future efforts would be futile and just save the goal for the upcoming year.

Don’t quit. Maybe you won’t accomplish everything you had hoped. Maybe you won’t partake in every list item to the extent that you had wanted. That is okay! Keep going.

5. Make plans: “A goal without a plan is just a wish,” says Antoine de Saint. You can have all the goals you want, you can steal other people’s goals, you can have goals flowing out of every crevice in your body but if you don’t have a plan, very few of them will come to fruition.

Plan your work and work your plan!