Continuing on in our discussion of attaining the goals you set for yourself, it’s important to recognize that even though you may have fairly clearly written down your goals, and written them in a way that makes them realistic and attainable, they don’t “just happen.”
Quite simply, you do need to “make them happen.”
The important words in the last sentence are YOU and MAKE.
YOU: It is interesting to note how many people, once they have perfectly articulated a goal, expected to take a life of its own and just happen. Sorry, that is just not the case. Part of creating a goal involves taking the responsibility to put it into motion. That is the YOU part.
MAKE: Once you’ve taken responsibility for successfully working towards that goal, your actions and intentionality become the next most important piece. These days, unfortunately, we can’t just let things happen anymore, we have to make them happen. That means, taking the goal by the horns, and wrestling with it until you have succeeded.
Here are some tips on how to make your goals happen:
- Break your large goals into subgoals, or quantifiable action steps.
- Set milestones, or checkpoints along the way to make sure that you are making progress according to a schedule that you have embraced.
- Identify obstacles that are in the way – these can be dealt with as their own subgoals, because once you acknowledge an obstacle, you can plan to navigate around it or to overcome it.
- Determine who can help you reach the goal. Then contact those people and request the assistance necessary.
- Plan your celebration. While this sounds like we may be putting the cart before the horse, envisioning how you will celebrate can actually give you energy towards working towards your successful completion of it.
*Action: The most important ingredient of all this is action. If you don’t take action towards achieving a goal, it will just atrophy.
Any action is better than none.
So what actions will you take to meet the goals you have set for 2014?
