7 Tips For Setting And Achieving Your Goals

culled from:businessinsider.com

Dream, but be motivated

It's OK to dream and have big goals. But if you're actually going to accomplish them, you have to DO something about them, and that takes motivation.
The very first thing you need to achieve a goal is a reason and deep desire to achieve it. The path to achieving goals is fraught with boredom, excuses and difficulty. You will have a lot of opportunities to talk yourself out of the goal. But if you can keep going back to the reason and your desire for the goal, those will help you stay on track.

Break it down into 24-hour bites

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The brain has a built in B.S. monitor that rings out when all you do is set an enormous goal but then don't manage it to 24-hour cycles--daily mini goals. If your goal is to shed 50 pounds, your brain doesn't see you 50 pounds lighter in 24 hours, but it can see you five ounces lighter in that time.
Set your goals so that your B.S. alarm doesn't go off. To prevent that alarm bell, the mini goal must be reasonable and sustainable. Losing one pound in a day is doable, but it's not reasonable or sustainable, so the B.S. sentinel will scream its head off, and you'll eventually stop going after your big goal.

Do something daily

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Nothing replaces repetition and creating momentum like doing something to get you closer to your goal every day. You will naturally take some time off, but if you don't take seriously the first 30 days of work on the goal and use them to create momentum, it's almost guaranteed you won't get there.
The first 30 days are critical to convincing your B.S. monitor that you're serious. Organizationally, it convinces colleagues you're serious.

Adapt and adjust

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As you work on your daily mini goals and toward the bigger goal, be willing to adapt. Make the mini goals more difficult if they seem too easy. Make them easier if they become too taxing.
The main thing is that if your brain deems the mini goal to be too difficult, you'll quit. If it's too easy, you're running in place. Find the middle so you have advancement each day.

Feedback and reward

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The human brain responds to two things to learn and attain new behaviors and knowledge: feedback and reward. As you go about your goal-getting, be brave enough to request feedback from others, and then reward yourself each day for accomplishing your little goals.
Research has shown that even keeping a calendar where you put a little gold star on the days you are successful (a la kindergarten) can be effective positive reinforcement. The visual is enough reward for the brain to know it's doing something right.

Schedule slop time

When I was a television news producer, the worst thing you could do going into a newscast is be so tightly scheduled that there was no room for error. Every newscast was filled with anchors reading more slowly than you counted on, reports going longer than they were supposed to and other time-gobblers.
The good producers always included "slop time" in their show. They would leave one to two minutes of unscheduled time to be stolen by the gobblers. You should do the same with your goals.
Schedule time when you're not focused on your goal, when you get to cheat on it or not do it at all. You're going to do it anyway, so you might as well allow yourself the room to be human so you don't feel dejected by temporarily ignoring your goal. Just don't make it a habit.

Know you're going to get bored

Doing something in small pieces each day can lead to boredom. Do it anyway.
Achieving goals isn't always about a daily cork-popping ceremony to celebrate something sensational you did. It's usually about sticking to the daily, boring small stuff. Get that right, make it slightly more difficult each day, and do it again and again.
People who achieve their goals usually do it because they kept going when it gets tough and boring.

In conclusion:

There is no secret formula to success. Sure, luck comes into play, but it's foolhardy to count on that.
Mostly, it's having a direction and place you want to get to and then showing up for the daily grind.
Go get 'em.