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Are you sick of just going through the motions? Did you make some resolutions you’ve already broken? Do you want to achieve more but you’re not sure how to pull it off?
No worries! You can design the life you want if you know the secret for creating powerful goals and achieving them.
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Design Your Life: 7 Tips For Creating Powerful Goals
Life moves at lightening speed. There’s too much to do and never enough time to get it all done. If we’re not careful, we end up squandering what little time we do have without ever reaching our goals.
There’s no magic way to stop time, slow it down or speed up. It moves at its own pace, and the key is to go with it, not against it so you can work smarter, achieve more, and be efficient while creating the life you want.
Do you know what the difference is between a dream and a goal?
Nothing more than a piece of paper.
You see, people who reach their goals, design their life and create the circumstances that feed their soul and inspire them to be all they can, is found on a simple piece of paper.
What’s on that paper is their goals. The goals they have thought about, dreamed about and propelled them into purposeful action.
So how do we pull it off and set up the type of goals that will have us creating our best life?
Evaluate and Reflect
You won’t know where you’re headed unless you’ve reflected on where you’ve been. This means looking at your life right now and determining your level of satisfaction. Think it through and write down what comes up naturally for you. Then ask of each point: Is that ok?
Evaluating your level of satisfaction has two purposes. First, it allows you to objectively look at your accomplishments and the pursuit of the vision you have for your life. Secondly, it shows you where you are so you know where you need to head. Evaluating your life provides the baseline.
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Define Your Dreams and Goals
Close your eyes and imagine your life five years from now. Where do you live? Where do you work? What is your job title? What do you look like? What does your house look like? How much money do you have in the bank? Where did it come from? What is your relationship with your kids? Spouse? How do you spend your time? What are your hobbies? Where do you volunteer? Spend a few minutes daydreaming about what your ideal life would look like five years from now, then write it down that vision you see.
Don’t self-sabotage here. You’re dreaming so let thoughts fly and don’t think any dream is too big or too outlandish.
Now, prioritize the dreams. Which are most important to you? Which are most feasible? Which ones would you love to do the most? Put them in the order of how you will try to attain them.
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Make Your Goals S.M.A.R.T.
The acronym for S.M.A.R.T means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time Sensitive.
Specific: Without being specific about what you want to achieve you then sent yourself up for vagueness and you can’t measure or achieve what’s vague in your mind. Get specific here when identifying your goals.
Measurable: Always set goals you can measure.
Achievable: Set your goals just high enough that you have to stretch a bit to reach them. But don’t set them so high they’re unattainable.
Realistic: Your goals must be something you can reasonably make happen. Some goals are simply not realistic. You have to be entirely realistic even if you were stretching way out there that you could make it happen.
Time: Every goal you develop must have a timeframe attached to it. You must know when you’ll achieve something. You need to know what the end date is so you know where’s the deadline.
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Back to Goals:
With your vision fresh in your mind, it is time to set your long-term goals. List out five major things you would like to accomplish by this time next year. Be as specific as possible by making sure that you use the S.M.A.R.T. format.
Five goals are plenty for one person to aim to achieve in a given year, so don’t do formulate more than five.
From here you’ll take those long-term goals and create shorter term goals. This is where you’ll be thinking about the steps it may take to reach your end vision. You’ll break it down into smaller bite-sized activities that will help you achieve what you want.
Sometimes these are called objectives. Set five objectives, one for each goal for the things you would like to accomplish in the next month, then repeat this process every 30 days.
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Tackle Your To-Do List
If we’re not careful, we can quickly get sucked into the mundane tasks of everyday life. We spend our time handling other people’s issues, wasting valuable time on social media, or pouring through endless emails. None of which have anything to do with what we are aiming for.
If you want to see your life change dramatically, reorder your to-do list.
Take a moment to decide which tasks you will do first thing in the morning and which you’ll put off until later in the day. Make a goal you’ll set aside some amount of time each day to focus on your long-term goals.
I used to have a much different morning routine until I realized this routine was sapping my energy and doing nothing to help me move forward. So I revamped it.
Today my routine looks very different, and as a result, my productivity has skyrocketed. I stopped looking email and now write first thing in the morning when I’m at my best. Other tasks that don’t require as much brain power go later in the day. It’s been a game changer for me.
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Create Daily Habits
One of the things I learned early on in my coaching training was about the importance of creating daily habits.
When we create a habit, a part of our brain takes over and we begin to perform these tasks on autopilot.
The benefit being we no longer have to use mental energy to perform the tasks which leave our brain free to focus on getting other things done.
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Eliminate Those Things You Tolerate
What is a toleration?
Tolerations are the things you put up with every day that distracts you from other more important things. Sometimes the underlying source of the continued toleration is to avoid taking full responsibility for a particular circumstance or issue in your life.
These tolerations typically hold you back from reaching your goals. They stand in your way of you achieving everything you want in your life. When you handle the toleration, you make room to achieve what you want; you free up time and energy to devote to creating a higher quality of life.
Drama is a source of energy. So are the rest of your tolerations. Your tolerations zap your energy and keep you from using that energy into producing something more positive in your life.
If you are interested in freeing yourself from your tolerations, you can find our how here.
These 7 steps lay out the foundation from which you can take your dreams and turn them into reality. Work towards your vision by creating your powerful goals and objectives, rid yourself of tolerations and create good habits that will skyrocket your productivity and you’ll be on the road to designing your dream life.
