How to Make Powerful Goals You Can Achieve

We use goals to evaluate how well we are doing now relative to where we want to be. Sometimes big goals do not motivate women. They tend to feel so outside their realm of possibility that it feels pointless even to try. And, poorly defined goals can lead to weak intentions to accomplish the goal and consequent procrastination.

Make goals that feel genuinely possible for you within a concise time frame. Realistic goals at the forefront of your consciousness, tap into your creativity more productively. You can see and feel the possibility of achieving those goals. You believe that they are doable.

Use this simple three-step approach to establish practical goals you can reach. You will not encounter a lot of failures because you can constantly adjust your timeline and goals as you learn. The key is to give each goal a lot of consideration, study, and think before setting it.

1. Maintain Your Values

The more goals fit into one of four primary areas in your life - Family, Financial, Physical, or Personal - the more prone you are to establish a realistic goal that you can achieve. When your goals for some reason do not fit into one of your core values, it is unlikely that you will achieve very much success.

2. Be in Control

Goals relying on others are not wrong, but they are tougher to achieve. A goal that you are 100 percent in control of is a goal you can achieve. Be sure that you are not allowing fear to get in your way. And, do not blame fate for any failures. Self-limiting beliefs can get in your way. Be truthful about whether you really have control or not and give yourself more credit. For instance, if you think you do not have control over your financial future because “that is just how it is,” you are misguided and must get rid of that way of thinking.

3. Visualize Your Goals

When you cannot see the result, it will not be easy to push forward toward achieving the goal. When you need to draw a picture, put together a vision board, or take a day out to conceptualize your big dreams and see how they all fit together in the big picture of your life, do so. It would help if you saw the end to be able to truly achieve it. And, having specific goals allow for better monitoring of progress toward the goal. 

SMART Goals

To set powerful, achievable goals, take some time to research the dreams you have to find out if they are even doable. You want to challenge yourself, but you do not want to make the goals so hard that you only experience failure. To guarantee success, be sure that your goals follow these principles.

Your goals should be:

Specific

Each goal you make must be very specific. A highly abstract goal may not be actionable. If you wish to attain a goal, you must have a way to know when you reach it. Do not say, “I am going to start my own business.” State precisely the kind of business you will start, who your ideal customers (or avatars) are, and other data that makes the goal tangible.

Measurable

At what point will you have reached the goal? You will not have a tangible goal unless you can give a number or measurable value. Using the start-up business example, you might include that you want to earn a certain dollar amount each month and how you will earn it by a specific date.

Actionable

As the adage goes, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” To reach a goal, there must be steps you take on a path to get there. Like using a map to reach the destination, you want to go to for a trip, map out your success with the steps you will take along the path to get there. Put when and how you will accomplish every step.

Realistic

You do not want to create a goal that is too difficult to achieve or, worse, impossible. Be sure that each goal is feasible to do by researching everything realistically. For instance, you will likely not start a business today and earn six figures tomorrow, or even your first year of business. Look at the research and determine both what is doable and how you will do it. Turn your focal point from the ultimate goal to a series of doable intermediate tasks.

Timely

Each goal must have a time limit; otherwise, you may never attain it. Start at the end and work your way back to today, creating the list of things to do each day to reach the result. But do set a time limit. As you get into the project, you can adjust when it works to be more realistic but resist the impulse to change the time because you are not sticking to your task lists.

Goal setting is something that women should all take seriously and that we should all strive to become very good at in our personal and professional lives. It is part focus, part motivation, and part seeing the steps required to get to the finish line.