I believe that we can get what we want in life by identifying our goals and then creating strategies for achieving those goals. More importantly, I know that you can create meaningful results by implementing and following through on the strategies that you create for achieving your goals.
Identify what you want out of life
Before you create any strategies, you first need to decide what you want out of life. To do this, think of what you would like to achieve in each area of your life. What are your career goals? What do you want to achieve financially? What health goals do you have? What do you want to achieve in your personal life?
Take time to brainstorm what you want to achieve in each area of your life. Write down anything that comes to mind. Don’t be critical of your ideas. Write down anything that comes to mind, even if it seems unachievable or even silly. Getting all of these ideas on paper or on an electric note taking system is the beginning of the goal setting process.
Once you have brainstormed your ideas, go through your ideas and pick out the ones you most want to achieve. These will be your goals. If done right, you should have goals for your career, goals for your finances, goals for your health, and goals for other areas of your life as well.
For example, if I do this exercise my goals are to run my own software development company, to become a district director for my Toastmasters district, to build up enough savings to have a a good nest egg when I retire, and to reduce my body weight to 200 lb. This is not an exhaustive list of goals but they are goals I want to achieve.
Break a goal into tasks
Once you have goals, look at each goal one at a time. Think about what you need to do to achieve that goal and break that goal into a set of tasks.
For example, imagine you have the goal of running a speech contest for your Toastmasters club. This is a large task, but it can be broken down into a series of smaller tasks. After doing this, your task list could look like this:
- Find volunteers for your speech contest
- Print the speech contest forms
- Find a venue for the speech contest
- Create the agenda for the speech contest
Now that your goal is broken down into a set of tasks, you can track your progress towards achieving your goal by tracking which tasks have been completed. You also now have some direction on what you need to do to achieve your goal.
Define a strategy for each task
Once you have broken a goal down into tasks, you can create a strategy for achieving that goal. The tasks themselves could outline the strategy for achieving your goal, but you may need to go further and define a strategy to follow for each task you have identified.
As an example, consider the goal of losing weight. You can break this goal out into the following tasks:
- Eating homemade meals
- Exercising every day
For the first task, which is eating homemade meals, you can create a strategy to make your task achievable. For example, you can create a strategy where you plan ahead each week as to what you will eat at each meal and your plan can include which days of the week you go shopping for the food you will need to make your meals. Your strategy could also include making your meals for the week ahead of time on the weekend to reduce meal preparation time during the week.
For the second task, which is exercising every day, you can create a strategy to plan when you will exercise. For example, you could create a strategy to go for a walk every morning before work. You can also include plans for what to do when bad weather or other circumstances prevent you from using your primary strategy. For example, your secondary strategy could include having a gym membership so you can exercise at the gym on days when bad weather prevents you from going for your daily walk.
Once you have broken down your goals into sets of tasks and you have created strategies for achieving those tasks, the most important thing you need to do is to implement and follow those strategies. This means actually going for the walks you planned for if your strategy is going for daily walks. If your goal was running a speech contest, then you need to perform the actions you planned for, such as phoning volunteers and printing speech contest materials.
Conclusion
You can achieve success and make progress towards your goals by creating and following strategies to achieve those goals. You can do this by breaking your goals into smaller tasks and defining strategies to accomplish each of those tasks. Most important of all, implementing and following those strategies will bring you closer to completing those tasks.
I encourage you to identify your goals in each area of your life and to create the strategies that will bring those goals to fruition. Then follow through on those strategies and enjoy the success and accomplishment that will come to you by actively working towards you goals.