Eight Easy Steps to Help You Reach Your Goals

How many times have you been brushing your teeth and had a twinge of motivation about eating healthier, watching less TV, brushing your teeth more, or any other goals that would, in theory, be nice to achieve?  If you’re anything like me, most of that motivation is lost somewhere around the time I’m putting my toothbrush away.

What can we do to bridge the gap between twinge of motivation and actually achieving our goal?  I’ve been giving a lot of thought into where I’ve missed the mark on goals and where I’ve been successful.  I’ve noticed a pattern with the goals I’m able to successfully achieve compared to the goals that don’t ever materialize.  Having the correct mindset going into it can make or break your success before you even start.  Without further adieu, here are eight easy steps to help you reach your goals.  Hopefully a few of them work for you.

1. Rely on Habits, Not Motivation

Your motivation will ebb and flow.  Protect yourself from inevitable disappointment by preparing for these natural swings in motivation.  Motivation is great when it’s there, but make sure you set up a system to keep you going even when you don’t feel motivated.  Knowing motivation isn’t a static feeling will keep you from becoming discouraged when you wake up and your goal doesn’t seem as important.

Instead of relying on motivation, build yourself a framework of habits that keep you pursuing your goal whether you’re motivated on that particular day or not.

If you want to achieve a certain goal, make a daily habit of improving in that area. Habits are vastly superior to motivation when it comes to achieving goals.

If you only practice an instrument when you feel inspired you’ll never master that instrument.  If you build a habit of practicing your instrument every day, then you will have a much better shot at mastering it.

Don’t only exercise when you feel amped up. Instead, build a habit of exercise and use motivation as a welcome bonus.

2. Pick a Goal (or two) And Take Action

The second step is to narrow down your goals.  Find one or two and start the process of achieving them right away.  We all have dozens of goals kicking around in our brain at any one time.  The problem isn’t coming up with goals, the problem is figuring out which ones to put effort into.

Take a few minutes and write down all the goals you can think of.  Big goals, small goals, goals that are random and seem to come from nowhere.  Now, pick one or two that are important enough you want to achieve them first.  Put the other goals aside and don’t worry about going after them.  Instead, concentrate on making progress on a couple goals.

Life is short but it’s also pretty long.  If you’re lucky enough to live until you’re old and wrinkly you’ll have plenty of time to achieve almost every goal you can possibly think of.  You don’t need to achieve all your goals right now.  Pick a couple goals at a time and put serious effort into achieving them.

3. Set Specific Goals

Setting specific goals is crucial to actually achieving your goals.  By setting a goal for yourself you give your mind something to lean on when your motivation isn’t there.

Don’t set a generic goal like “Getting in shape.”  That’s too vague and it’s hard to stay motivated to hit an ambiguous target like that.  Set a specific goal such as running a 5k or lifting a certain amount of weight or lowering your cholesterol by X number of points.

Don’t set a goal of working out, set a goal of working out three times per week.  Don’t set a goal of practicing piano more, set a goal of practicing piano for five minutes every day.

My Exercise Goal

I’ve continued to stay in relatively good shape my entire adult life, but I’ve never written down any specific goals for myself.  While I’ve managed to stay in shape, I haven’t noticeably increased my strength and I’d constantly yo-yo between working out really intensely and hardly working out at all.

With my latest foray into fitness, I decided I wanted my workout routine to stick.  For the first time in my life I actually had a fitness plan and wrote down specific goals.

By the end of 2018 I wanted to be able to bench press two hundred pounds, squat three hundred pounds, deadlift four hundred pounds and have abs.  That was it.  That was my exercise goal.

I knew the numbers weren’t impossible but I knew I would have to be consistent and work my way up a little at a time if I was going to be successful.

4. Start Small

Slow and steady wins the race.  Granted, I’ve never actually seen a real race won this way, but starting small is important to avoid burnout.  You know what? Life isn’t a race. You’re not racing.  Start small.

If you want to get in shape you don’t want to start by going to the gym for three hours at a time.  The reason being, as soon as your starting motivation goes away, you’ll be left dreading the idea of spending three hours in the gym.  Instead, start small.  Build a habit of going to the gym.   Make that habit part of you so that you don’t even question it.

Not Starting Small is One of my Many Issues With Diets

Most people who diet gain all their weight back, plus a few pounds, within the first year.  A big reason for this failure is their diet is unsustainable.  Overall health and fitness needs to be a lifetime pursuit, not a three-months-in-hell crash diet.

If your goal isn’t sustainable, then you’ll revert back to your previous patterns and all your progress will disappear.  In order to be successful longterm, you need to change your habits.

Some goals, like health and fitness, are lifetime goals.  You don’t ever finish the pursuit, so start small.  There’s no rush.  Start small enough that you’re not overwhelmed by the activity while you’re still trying to build the habit.

There’s a famous story of a guy who was overweight and wanted to lose 100 pounds.  His goal was huge, but he started small.  For the first six months he went to the gym for 5 minutes every day, never any more than that.  Instead of rushing in and burning out, he built the habit and made that rock solid before attempting to increase the difficulty.  By the time he was ready to lengthen his workouts he’d built such a strong routine that he knew he wouldn’t quit.  He ended up losing something like 130 pounds and regaining his health.

5. Keep the Goal Simple

A key component to achieving success in my lifting goal above was how simple it was.  I didn’t have the goal of achieving certain weights or reps in twenty different exercises.  I picked three core lifts and focused on achieving better results in those areas.

The guy who worked out for 5 minutes a day didn’t decide he wanted to “get in shape,” he had a specific, yet simple, goal of losing 100 pounds.

Simple doesn’t mean easy, it just means easy to understand.

Don’t set yourself a goal of saving money, balancing your checkbook, spending less on groceries, spending less on entertainment and never eating ice cream again.  That’s too many things to concentrate on. Set yourself a goal of saving $100 per month.  If that’s too daunting, set a goal that’s achievable for you.

Keep the goal simple.

6. Set Realistic Goals

Don’t set a goal for yourself that’s physically impossible for you to reach, or so mentally taxing that you give up before you’ve actually reached your limit.  It’s good to aim high, but don’t aim so high that you lose hope.  My lifting goals are doable.  There are many people my similar size who are able to put up those numbers and substantially more.

Set a goal for yourself that is difficult but not impossible.  I suggest leaning on the side of too easy, rather than too difficult, at least until you get the habit down.  You can always increase your goal if you find you’ve achieved it too quickly.

Mr. Burrito Bowl The Failure

At the beginning of the year I made a goal of not drinking any alcohol for all of 2018.  That lasted about a month until my motivation wasn’t there anymore and I lost hope.  I was staring at eleven more months of complete sobriety and I got discouraged and quit altogether.  I felt like a failure for only making it one month.

Going an entire month without drinking when you’ve been having at least a couple drinks per day is nothing to be ashamed of.  My goal was too mentally taxing.  I should have started smaller and set a realistic goal.

When you set a goal that isn’t realistic it can entirely derail the point of your goal.  There was no reason why I had to  go an entire year without drinking. In a moment of hyper motivation, I made the proclamation that I wouldn’t drink all of 2018.  My real goal was to drink less.  Which brings me to my next point…

7.  Don’t be Afraid to Adjust Your Goals

After I failed my no drinking in 2018 challenge, I felt silly and frustrated, but I knew I needed to cut back on my alcohol consumption.  Instead of going right back into drinking too much, I made a pivot and adjusted what my goals were. I realized what I really wanted was to drink less and not let alcohol be a master of my life. Looking at my daily habits, I took notice of when I most wanted to have a drink.

I noticed that around 7pm I’d get the strongest craving.  Often I’d have a drink as soon as I got home from work, even though I didn’t really crave one.  It was just a habit I had formed.  Then, once 7pm rolled around I’d feel like having another one.

Once I was conscious of this, I found if I waited longer into the evening I could cut back to only having one drink per day pretty easily.

My initial goal was to not drink at all. This mentally weighed on me and I found myself in a deprivation mindset.  It’s no wonder I failed at my initial goal, but I could be successful at drinking less.

Knowing that I would allow myself a guilt-free drink as long as it was after 7pm meant that I didn’t sit there and think about how much it sucks not being able to unwind with a glass of whiskey.  Having one drink per day is much healthier than having three.

After I had cut down to one drink for a few weeks, I noticed a couple more triggers.  On days where I was busy around 7pm I wouldn’t have that reminder that it was time for a drink and I wouldn’t crave one at all.  I also noticed that I wouldn’t feel like having a drink right after I got back from the gym.

Being aware of this, I changed my habit to go to the gym later in the evening so that I wouldn’t feel like having a drink around 7pm.  This made it easy to cut back from having one drink per day to only having one drink a few times per week.

My addiction to alcohol was entirely mental, not physical, so changing a few trigger points in my evening helped make cutting back much easier.

8. Don’t Be Afraid to Fail

Not all of your goals are going to pan out.  You can do everything right and still find that the goal itself is either out of reach or it’s not worth the cost to achieve it.  Failure isn’t giving up on a goal, failure is never having the courage to pursue a goal.  Once you put the effort in, you find out more about yourself.  If your goals are always just between your ears then you never really learn whether or not you could have achieved them.

Failing at a goal is way better than never trying.  This is perhaps the most important sentence of the entire article.  My greatest regrets in life are times when I didn’t have the courage to just try.  I don’t regret a single thing I failed miserably at.  I regret several things I never had the courage to try.

Give yourself the permission to fail.  The important thing is to not be afraid to try.  If you don’t allow yourself the freedom to fail you’re going to be hesitant about ever trying.  Life is short, nobody will look down on you for coming up short.   Try a bunch of things and see what sticks.

Wrap-Up

Those are eight easy steps I’ve found to be helpful in pursuing my goals.  The best advice I can give is to get started and don’t be afraid to fail.  It doesn’t matter how well you plan if you don’t take the heroic leap of going for it.

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More motivation-y posts:

1. Ten Years From Now You May as Well Be Ten Years Ahead
2. How to be the CEO of YOU, INC.
3. How to be Proud of Yourself and Why It’s Important