Setting and Achieving Goals To Balance Your Life

This is part two of a three-part series on balancing your life which includes setting goals, motivation, and willpower and why we sometimes don’t achieve our goals or fulfill our intentions and what to do about it.

You’ve looked at your life, you know what you want to do and you’ve even taken steps to figure out how. But if you haven’t yet, start here and assess yourself in seven key areas of your life and then come back to this post. 

Now, you may be a couple of days into implementation and are likely experiencing varying degrees of “success”. Maybe you’re riding high on a wave of results or you’re asking yourself if you need to adjust your course. Regardless of where you are at right now, you will experience some degree of both of these things throughout this process, I promise.

This is the ultimate challenge when it comes to achieving your goals. What you may not yet know, and what most how-tos never tell you, is that identifying your goals and creating your action plan is the easy part. The hard part is actually sticking to it. 

WHAT?!??!?!?  Well, maybe for others, you might be saying, but not for you!!! I’m here to tell you that you will have days that it will be easy. Embrace those, love those, make the stretch last as long as you can. But please also be prepared for the tough days with the awareness to know when they’ve arrived and some strategies to make sure that you end those days as the winner. After all, you’re actually the one in control.

Specific, quantifiable actions with a timeline.

Before we get into that. Let’s revisit the need to create an action plan that supports your goal. Remember that your goal is your overarching “what you want to accomplish”. And that it must be SMART. 

So if your goal is a simple one-stepper and it’s SMART, then likely no action plan is required. If it’s an intention, all you need is to provide yourself regular reminders of your intention and follow through. But, if your goal requires more than a single step, then and plan is required. So identify the exact action steps required and give them a reasonable timeline for completion and carry on.

Here is an example:

I will learn to conjugate five Spanish verbs by January 15, 2020 as evidenced by scoring 100% on a self-test.

Not creating a specific action plan with a realistic timeline is one of the greatest barriers to achieving your goals. Now that you know, that isn’t going to hold you back!

Having clearly identified what you need to do, how do you make sure you actually do it?

Start with an intention, a promise to yourself that every day you will visit your goal and take the action that you’ve prescribed for yourself. Do that thing! Do you know what happens when you start doing that consistently? You form a habit. If the habit you form is to visit your goal and its related action every day, it won’t matter that your goal and your actions will change over time, you’ll still be doing it every day. 

If you need a little reminder to visit this every day, set one on your phone, ideally for the same, convenient time early in the day, and voila, you’re setting yourself up for success.

Uh huh, you’ve set the reminder, you see it every morning and you’re on it!  Amazing, good for you. Except when you’re not. Now what? 

What about motivation and willpower and those tweaks, small and large, that make the difference between failure and success? That’s a little more complicated. How many among us know what, we know how, we know when and we know where but sometimes, we still fail to act. Mmmmhhhhhmmmm.

Motivation is the factor, perhaps a want, need, desire or drive, that moves you to action.  Willpower is the ability to exercise your will or actually do what you intend. You need both to achieve what you want.

The key to successfully fulfilling your daily intentions or achieving your goals is to ensure that you’re actually motivated to achieve them. That they’re things you really do want to accomplish, that it’s self-motivation not external motivation driving you. If that is indeed the case, finding the willpower will be a much easier endeavour.

What about when you’re motivated but still can’t find the willpower?

Yes, these things can and do happen. You’re motivated, you’re visualizing the end goal. You know it’s what you want and how it will change your life for the better. But on a daily basis, doing what needs to be done just seems so damn hard. So what now? Set yourself up for success by ensuring you have the resources you need to complete the action. Then make sure that you make the time. You can add in some smaller rewards to keep you motivated along the way. A little pep talk and a simple ritual jump start your daily action for those times that you’re just not feeling it.

For example, I mentioned in the last blog post my goal of learning to surrender. I said I wanted “To be more in the moment and more appreciative of every moment rather than always thinking about the next moment and what I could, should, and better do in that damn moment”. One of the actions I’ve decided on is a daily 20 minute meditative walk in the park which I do after lunch each day that I work from home and before I get back into my work. But then sometimes, after lunch comes and I’m torn between getting right back to working on something I’m in the middle of and taking the time to do what I said I would and what I know will benefit me and help me achieve my goal. 

Usually, reminding myself of my why is enough to keep me on track. But not always. What are the little hacks I’ve used to get me going? After the reminder of why I’m doing it and the benefits of doing so, adding a small reward in the form of an afternoon coffee upon my return and getting my butt out the door with Mel Robbin’s 5-4-3-2-1 ritual. If you aren’t familiar with it, you can watch the 6 minute video here.

So What can you do?

A reminder of your why and a visualization of the end result.

A little reward. Nothing too crazy, probably something you’d allow yourself anyway but timing it so it’s after you do that thing you promised yourself you’d do.

A kick-butt, but simple, ritual to hack your resistance and make your brain say “GO”.

Now that we’ve given you some ideas to help you stay the course with your goals and intentions, this would be a great time to review them and make sure that you still want them. Once you’ve decided on the ones you want to keep, use the above hacks as necessary and stay tuned for part three of this series.

In part three of our three-part series, we’ll talk about self-sabotage and self-compassion as they relate to achieving your goals and also why sometimes we have everything aligned but we still don’t do what we said we would.