Tag: goals

Struggling to Reach Your Goals? 6 Steps to Get Unstuck

Photo by John Salzarulo on Unsplash

“Write down your goals, make plans to achieve them, and work on your plans every single day.” – Brian Tracy

 

Do your goals seem too lofty and far-off to reasonably achieve? Do you sometimes feel stymied by lack of discernible progress? Does this dearth of accomplishment make you lose interest and diminish momentum toward doing what’s necessary to get to the next level? It isn’t your goals that may need attention, but how you go about reaching them. Here are some thought-starters on how to make progress without struggle.

1.    Review your list of goals to ensure they’re ones you really want.

“It’s better to be at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than at the top of the one you don’t.” – Stephen Kellogg

Compiling a long list of goals you have no real desire to achieve is a worthless endeavor. Not only will you toss the list in a deep drawer never to revisit it, you’ll likely feel a twinge of guilt that you did so. Why? When everyone seems to want to talk about how much they want to do in life, how long their goal or bucket list is, you know that you’ve given short shrift to what you really want out of life. You have nothing to talk about, let alone motivate you to go beyond what you now know.

The simplest way to get around this is to dig out that list of goals and go through it, weeding out each one that hasn’t a remote chance of ever getting done and retaining those that may spark your interest, if only slightly. There’ll be time to flesh them out later. For now, you need to pare that unwieldy list to one that’s more manageable. In fact, if you wind up with a handful of life goals that you may be able to rework into some that will energize you, that’s making progress right away.

2.    Single out a goal you want to achieve above all others. This is the one to focus on.

“This one step – choosing a goal and sticking to it – changes everything.” – Scott Reed

You must begin somewhere, and that starts when you identify one goal on your pared-down list that you most want to achieve. There’s no sense diluting your energy by trying to go after too many goals at once. By zeroing in on a single goal, the right goal, you’re honing your focus to a laser sharp concentration.

Note that you may need to sleep on this goal in order to allow your subconscious to link threads of possibilities for you to review upon waking. Why is this important? What may be a natural progression of steps might not be readily apparent when you first think about what approach to take with this goal. You may, for example, be tempted to jot down easy-to-do steps that may look like you’ll be making progress when, in fact, they’re more busywork than anything else. What you want is a coherent plan, something that makes sense while it also spurs you to action. This may seem like an impossible outcome, yet you’ll be surprised what your subconscious can come up with. Let it go to work for you.

3.    Fan the fire within.

“When your desires are strong enough, you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.” – Napoleon Hill

When you can’t wait to get started working on your goal, you know this is something you really want in your life. It will not matter how arduous the path or how many times you stumble along the way, the vision you have of success is firmly imprinted in your mind and nothing will deter you. What’s so beautiful about having this fire within is that obstacles that might otherwise stall momentum have little chance. Instead, novel solutions may appear, seemingly out of nowhere.

Granted, there will be twists and turns as you work towards the goal. That’s to be expected and is nothing to worry about. If you find that you’re making phenomenal strides with little effort and no problems, it may mean that your plan was so well-crafted and executed that nothing could stand in the way. On the other hand, it could also mean that the goal you chose was not lofty enough.

It is good to have minor goals, ones that you can work on and accomplish so you have a track record of success. Just be sure you always put in time on the highest-value and most-desirable goal as well.

4.    All goals are possible – even those that seem impossible.

“What the mind can conceive and believe, and the heart desire, you can achieve.” – Norman Vincent Peale

If there was no challenge, there would be no satisfaction in success. The journey to achieving a heartfelt goal is perhaps as important as the realization of accomplishment. Goals that rank as highly impossible, as compared with just impossible, a comment generally used to dismiss difficult, time-consuming or seemingly improbable goals out of hand, may very well be the ones that others will talk about for years to come. After all, didn’t the world’s great inventors put their energy into solving riddles that confounded, perplexed, and for which no answer seemed possible?

They didn’t give up. They did persist, with enthusiasm, determination and follow-through. As a study from the American Psychological Association points out, monitoring the progress made toward goals helps promote goal achievement, especially when such progress is recorded or written down.

5.    Add variety to your action plan.

“The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new.” – Cato the Elder

Researchers at the University of Sussex found that pond snails learned and remembered more when learning two totally unrelated tasks. How does this relate to making progress reaching your goals? By adding variety to the action plan you’ve put together for achieving the goal, you’re more likely to learn faster what works and remember it than if you keep doing the same step (or one that’s very similar) over and over.

6.    Recognize that where you live is now.

“Small daily improvements over time lead to stunning results.” – Robin Sharma

Attaining that all-important goal may take some time, yet you do make progress on the end result with action you take today. This is, after all, where you live: in the here and now. Put your best work into making little improvements today. Do the same tomorrow. You’re bound to make progress – and it won’t even seem like a struggle. Research shows that immediate rewards today can help with long-term goal achievement.

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This article was originally published on Psych Central.

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How to Overcome Laziness and Get Things Done

Photo by Colin Watts on Unsplash

 

“Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.” – Anne Frank

 

Does your to-do list today fill you with the desire to chuck it all and chill out somewhere? Maybe you’ve gotten so jammed up that your schedule simply has no breathing room, no time for you to do anything you want because you’re overcommitted, unable to say no, or way behind on projects, tasks and chores already. You might, indeed, feel downright lazy. This laziness doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible or that you lack skills and abilities. Rather, it may mean that you need to do a little prioritizing, let some things go and learn how to get what matters done.

Do a needs-based analysis of your workload.

How much of what you’ve allocated to do today – or that others put on your schedule – is an absolute must? Is it a task or project you could delay for a time and focus on something else that’s more pressing, that has an urgent deadline, or you’re pressured to get done? Not everything you’ve penciled in on today’s list must be completed today. Some items can wait. The key is to carefully analyze everything to determine what’s necessary and what’s not. This isn’t an idle exercise. It’s an essential part of organization and crucial to getting things done.

Give every task a number.

After you’ve examined every item on your list, some stand out as more pressing than others. These are the ones to prioritize. Go through the list again and assign every task a number, with 1 being the most important to get done, and 10 and beyond less time-sensitive. Hopefully, your list doesn’t go much past 10, since that’s a clear sign you’re overcommitted.

Have a work list and a personal list.

One way to avoid getting lost in numerous tasks in one list is to carve out two lists: a work list and a personal one. What’s important here is to draw the line at the end of the work day and don’t allow work to cross over into your personal time. When work intrudes on home, family and relationships, or vice-versa, there’s bound to be unnecessary conflict. You’ll also get little accomplished as you waver between tending to one area of responsibility at the expense of the other. Clear work-home boundaries help a great deal.

Take a break – literally.

Feel your chest getting tight? A bad headache coming on? Jitters or queasiness? These may be signs of stress from internal and external pressures to perform, be the top achiever, nail the contract, settle the dispute, or find the optimal solution to a problem. The best way to relieve stress in this instance is to do a hard stop and get some fresh air. This is a literal recommendation, as being outside in nature is well documented to reduce stress and increase a sense of overall health and well-being. After your break – and it needn’t be much more than 15 minutes to a half-hour – you’ll return to your responsibilities feeling refreshed and more motivated to tackle what must be done. You may even find you’ve come up with an ingenious solution or idea.

See the end game.

Sometimes you can’t envision what your efforts contribute to the desired outcome. This may or may not be your own goal. You may be so tied up in minutiae of details that a successful result is not easy to see. Here is where it helps to step back and separate the individual pieces of the project or task and put them into perspective with the ultimate goal in mind. When you can better see how everything links together, it can serve as impetus to get moving again. While it’s better to focus on the positive aspects of your part well done, it can also be motivating to recognize what might happen if you fail to deliver on your responsibilities. In any event, seeing the end game can be a powerful tool to overcome laziness.

Ask for help.

Suffering with a piled-on workload or shouldering more-than-your-fair-share of responsibilities is enough to make anyone stall in enthusiasm. No wonder you feel lazy. One of the most effective ways to pare down a heavy workload is to ask for help when you need it. Be sparing in how and when you request assistance, though, as you don’t want to appear as whining, incompetent, shirking your duties, or lazy. Also, be sure you reciprocate by helping others when they ask, if you’re able to do so. Once you’ve asked for and received help, your mountain of assignments or tasks won’t seem such a hurdle. There’s a lot to be said for cooperative spirit in getting things done.

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This article was originally published on Psych Central.

Related Posts:

10 Ways Nature Helps Your Well-Being

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How to Keep Frustration from Blocking Your Goals

Photo by Joe Gardner

Photo by Joe Gardner

You get up each day and have in mind a list of things you want to accomplish. Some are short-term projects, others works-in-progress, and still others part of long-term goals. But what happens when you become frustrated, have to deviate from your task, or are forced to stop completely?

While everyone experiences frustration from time to time, it’s never pleasant. Often, it’s difficult to know what to do to overcome it. Here are some suggestions.

Always Have a Plan

Think of any goal as a kind of journey. Before setting out on a trip, the wise course of action is to have a plan. Without knowing what route you’ll take, where to stop for gas, a bite to eat, side trips you’d like to take or alternate means of getting where you want to go if you encounter road construction, bad weather or snarled traffic, the journey could be haphazard or worse.

Working toward any goal could become problematic when any powerful emotion gets in the way. And frustration certainly counts as a roadblock to goal achievement. That’s why it’s important to make a plan and commit to sticking to it, even if some parts of the plan cause frustration.

Even daily schedules can sometimes wreak havoc. Things happen that interrupt your flow. The point is to always have a plan. Then have a backup plan in case the original plan doesn’t work out. With more than one plan, you have options. You’re not stuck wondering what to do next. No longer powerless, your self-confidence increases at the same time your frustration level decreases.

Stay Flexible

It’s great that you have one or more plans, but don’t be so rigid that you’re unwilling to deviate from the plan when something goes haywire. In other words, don’t cast your plans in stone.

When you try to force your plan to work – and it doesn’t – this adds to your frustration. The more frustrated you feel, the more your stress builds, along with anxiety and a sense of failure.

But by staying flexible, you might come into contact with other solutions that will get you past this impasse. You could do things a little differently, rearrange tasks and reassign priorities. The key is to keep your options open by remaining as flexible as possible. As with most other good habits, you’ll get better at this with practice.

Set Expectations That Are Reasonable

If you’re too hard on yourself, always demanding perfection, you’re bound to amp up your frustration. While you want to achieve your goals as quickly as possible, when you take on challenges you’re not yet ready for or try to force a result that requires more time, effort or resources, you’re going to add to your frustration at the same time as you defeat your goals.

The workaround here is to take the time to set reasonable expectations for yourself. The most difficult task or project may not be the best one to tackle at this point. Perhaps it’s better to work on the easier ones first. This helps establish a track record of success, makes you feel good about your accomplishments, and reduces the frustration you feel from putting too much on your plate at one time.

Lighten Up

The recommendation here is to avoid taking life so seriously. Granted, life does deal some unexpected challenges and not everything you get involved in is light-hearted, easily accomplished or without difficulty. Still, the frustrations you experience today probably will be a distant memory six months from now.

When you lighten up and learn to take things in stride, you’ll greatly decrease the frustration that keeps you from your goals.

Learn from Your Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes. That’s a given. It isn’t the mistakes you make that matter, however, but what you learn from them that counts.

Granted, no one likes to fail. There’s something distinctly unsettling about falling down or obtaining results less than you’d hoped. It stings, no question about it. Yet there’s still something you can glean from the experience that will serve you well the next time you’re in a similar situation. You can also extrapolate lessons you can adapt to other circumstances.

Timing is also important. Maybe you rushed into things without proper preparation or tried to speed through a project when it required more time. In any case, looking back you’ll probably see how you could have done things differently. If you pay attention, this is a lesson well learned. This makes you smarter the next time.

Keep It Positive

It’s easy to see how frustration leads to negative thinking. But that won’t turn things around. What will help is to keep it positive. An attitude that’s positive in nature helps you see solutions that might otherwise remain elusive. When you do feel frustrated, a positive attitude will help ratchet down the frustration and motivate you to get back to work on your goals.

Evaluate Your Accomplishments

When you’re stuck, feeling frustrated, you need some motivational self-talk. You can do this by taking stock of the accomplishments you have already achieved. This helps remind you that you have what it takes to get the job done, notwithstanding any frustration you experienced along the way.

The fact that you have a supply of effective strategies that worked well in other situations adds to your self-confidence and self-esteem – especially when you’re thinking about or tackling something new.

Start Over

Stopping frustration from derailing your goals will be a unique approach to each person. It may also turn out to involve adapting techniques you’ve used before, adding to them with suggestions you’ve learned from others, or taking a completely different route.

The only way you’re going to reach your goals is to start over, begin again, try something new. This means regularly revising your goals, adding new ones, modifying or eliminating those that no longer apply. It also means striving to learn something new each day, applying what you know works to new situations, networking with others who may have good ideas on how to best deal with recurring problems, and maintaining a positive attitude.

You want your life to be as happy, healthy, productive and fulfilling as possible. In essence, then, when you are frustrated over not being able to complete your goals, you simply need to start over. Eventually, you will succeed in reaching your goal or determine that another one takes precedence.

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Can You Name Your Top 5 Goals?

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Chances are you want a lot more out of life. And you’re well aware that success requires ongoing effort, a plan and willingness to do what it takes.

So, why are you floundering? Or are you just confused, unclear or unmotivated?

When the thought occurs to you that you’re not where you want to be, the next question to ask yourself is, “What are my goals?”

This basic self-query is essential to achieving anything in life, whether it’s success in business or career, at home, school, in relationships, and in finding happiness and purpose.

Goals are the key.

With this in mind, can you name your top five?

If not, all is not lost. Here’s help to get you back on track.

 

What All Good Goals Have in Common

Goals are as plentiful as grains of sand on a beach. They’re also as unique. Your goal for achieving success at work is different from mine, from that of your friend and co-worker, the neighbor across the street, your best pal in high school.

Yet good goals have a few characteristics in common:

  • They’re meaningful, highly desirable to the individual.
  • They can be separated into smaller, specific goals for different parts of your life (such as career, relationships, health, self-fulfillment, hobbies, etc.).
  • They’re realistic.
  • They’re achievable.
  • They generate inner excitement.
  • They spark enthusiasm and drive to achieve them.

 

How to Understand What Really Matters

Everyone’s heard the story about the patient who learns she has only six months to live. What will she do with that remaining time? A lot gets clarified in a hurry when time is short.

Translate that to your situation – and that means putting yourself in the life and death scenario. Think about the people and dreams that are most important to you. Are you making progress toward doing what makes you most happy and fulfilled?

Suppose you always thought that having $100,000 in the bank would be a sign of success, that this was a worthwhile goal. Is the bank statement showing you’ve got $100,000 in your account a manifestation of what you believe is truly important in life?

Will it sustain you and bring you comfort over the next 180 days?

Granted, it’s painful to envision the end of your life. Yet this exercise may help you drill down to the essence of your values and beliefs. It may be easier to strip away the nonessential and hone in on goals that really do make a difference.

These will be the goals that are meaningful, can be broken into workable parts, are realistic, achievable, exciting and motivating.

 

Step-by-step Process to Achieving Goals

After you’ve completed your self-awareness analysis and gotten to the crux of what means most to you, you’re ready to begin work on goals.

Specifically, this is an eight-step process to achieving goals:

  1. Identify goals. Remember the various aspects of your life that matter? Take the time to write down goals that affect your career, attitude, health, relationships, financials and more.

 

  1. Prioritize goals. Assign a number to each, from most- to least-important. Do this for each category.

 

  1. Create sub-goals. While you have already identified primary goals, each of these need to have sub-goals that you create. A sub-goal is a goal that must be achieved before you can succeed in attaining the primary goal.

 

  1. Develop intermediate goals. Take each goal category and list what you feel you need to achieve in several timeframes: a month, six months, one year, five years and 10 years. Make these intermediate goals specific. Write them down.

 

  1. Do a present status assessment. Next, figure out where you are today relative to your goals. If you find that you’re far short of where you need to be, consider what you need to do to either change your circumstances or reconstruct your goals. This isn’t giving up on your goals. It’s revising them to acknowledge the constraints you’re experiencing while still giving you the opportunity to achieve them.

 

  1. Get used to achieving goals. You want to become familiar enough and comfortable with attaining goals. Once you succeed, instead of considering that you’re done, revise the goal again to the next level up. As you gain more self-confidence with continued goal achievement, you will experience continued growth.

 

  1. See yourself being successful. A crucial part of goal setting and achievement is actually visualizing yourself a success. Engage in a little daydreaming here to see how that success looks, sounds and feels.

 

  1. Set a timeline and plan. Having gone through steps one through eight, you’re not done yet. Now it’s time to put down a timeline and a specific plan in order to achieve each of your goals.

 

The more you go through this process, the easier it will become. After a while, it’s going to become second-nature. Instead of struggling to figure out where you’re going from here or not knowing what really matters, you’ll have an instinctive blueprint.

You may not end up with five top goals. You may have only three, or you could have 10. The number isn’t important. What matters is how these goals help you to live a vibrant and purposeful life.

If they don’t, are they really that important after all?

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