Reposted from the Spiritual Sunflower's wordpress blog, originally posted November 2nd, 2018
I have a little treat for you all today.
Lately I feel like I have soooo many things I want to do/accomplish in my every day life but they're just flying over my head and I can't keep up with them! So I decided to sit down and think about just how to set a good goal, and then how to hold yourself accountable to actually succeed in it.
How to Set Goals You’ll Actually Accomplish
There’s always one thing or another we’re working towards achieving in life, but sometimes that goal becomes something we’re working on for a couple weeks, then a couple months, and so on.
The key to accomplishing goals is simply knowing how to set them. You can’t just think “I want to earn a raise” and expect to get it. Setting and accomplishing goals is a process that should be well thought out and taken into careful consideration.
“Goal setting not only allows you to take control of your life’s direction; it also provides you with a benchmark for determining whether you are actually succeeding,” the Mind Tools Content Team said.
According to Mind Tools, a golden rule of goal setting is the goal should be something motivating and meaningful to you. If you don’t have an interest in the outcome, there’s no point in setting a goal for it. When the goal is a high priority, you’ll be more inclined to focus on it.
Another recommendation for setting goals from Mind Tools is to set “SMART” goals. Lots of us have heard of these goals in grade school, where it is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound.
This means your goal should be meaningful to your life, reasonable to reach, and you should be able to define what can be done to accomplish this goal and have a certain time frame where it’s accomplishment is successful. It’s helpful to write all of this down in a safe place, where you can look back on it to reflect on your progress and make any necessary adjustments.
Writing the steps down to accomplish your goal is a very beneficial way to commit your goal to memory and hold yourself accountable. These can be simple things like, “every day I’m going to stretch for 10 minutes” because you want to be able to do a split in the next two months.
“Remembering why I wanted to do it in the first place and seeing the progress I’ve already made helps me hold myself accountable for my goals,” Jerri Hunt, Florida Southern student, said.
According to Molly Cain at Forbes, another way to visually represent your goals is by creating a vision board.
“A goal that you can actually see is massively more powerful than a goal you write on a checklist,” Cain said.
A vision board is composed of cut outs from magazines or printed images that motivate its creator. For example, if you want to travel to Spain, select pictures of places in Spain you’d like to visit or anything that speaks to you on that
Setting goals is about committing to yourself, because you’re the only person in the process that matters. Commit to your goals, and then re-commit again and again even when you fail.
No one else can accomplish your goals for you.
Thank you so much for reading!
Love & Light,
E