Do you struggle to reach your goals? Write the same New Years’ Resolution, year after year after sweet, oblivious year? Do you wish you had a surefire way for reaching any goal?
Are you one of those that does well for the first few weeks, maybe the first few months, but then you fall right back in to your same old habits, moving farther and farther from where you want to be?
Does motivation elude you? Doubt constantly whispers in your ear? Do you ever wonder why you even try at all?
I know how you feel. I’ve been there. Mostly every day, but sometimes only weekly or monthly. And it sucks. You start out strong. You have your goal. It’s realistic. You create an awesome action plan. It’s SMART.
You know you can do it! You know why you want it. And you know what steps you need to take to get there.
It’ll work. It’ll happen!
This year is the year! Today is the day!
You are so pumped! So anxious to get started.
And maybe you do well for the first day, maybe the first week.
But then, if you are anything like me, you start to fade.
Doubt creeps in. You wonder if you are making the right decision, heading down the right path. Is it too late to change your mind and bow out? Should you be doing something different? Do you even have what it takes to make this work?
And you lose your confidence. So your motivation decides to skip town too. And before you know it, you totally lost sight of your why – the reason for setting the goal in the first place.
Maybe your family doesn’t support you or outside circumstances makes it incredibly hard to stay on target. Maybe it’s finances, or your daily responsibilities.
Whatever the reason, you begin to waiver.
You find yourself heading towards the end of the year at full throttle, with no goal in sight.
You gave up. Why try?
Not only do I know how you feel, but I know how to help you out of it.
I make the same goals over and over again. Sure, the goal might change every couple of years, but the pattern is still there. I set the goal at the beginning of the month, I fail miserably, and then I set the exact same goal at the beginning of the next month, and do the exact same thing as the month before.
I’m incredibly consistent.
The Secret to Reaching Any Goal
I’ve discovered a fabulous little secret though. And it is so simple. Seriously.
Do you wanna stay on track this time? Actually do it?!?
The secret to reaching any goal is to continuously re-evaluate your progress.
That’s it. Review your progress on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
Reviewing your progress helps you to stay on track and to stay motivated. When you review your progress, you are continuously reaffirming – to yourself – why this goal is so important to you. You are constantly reminded of your why.
Reviewing your progress helps you to stay on track, stay motivated, and to keep your intention in mind.
And when you review your progress on a regular basis, you see what you are doing wrong every day. You see what your obstacles are. And when the same obstacles pop up, week after week, month after month, you start to see them as problems.
And problems can be solved.
Problems are something outside of ourselves that we can tackle and change.
They are in no way a reflection of who we are. Problems are not our inner qualities. Problems just are. And as such, they can be fixed.
Reviewing your progress helps you to identify your obstacles and to reframe them as problems that need to be solved.
Something magical happens when you repeatedly review your goal: your goal becomes a task, separate from yourself, that you are working towards.
The problem is, we internalize way too much.
“I didn’t reach my goal; I must be stupid.”
“Maybe I don’t have what it takes – I can’t even get my butt out of bed to put the time in! How am I ever going to manage this?”
“No one else thinks I should do this. Maybe they are right.”
“I can’t afford to do this. I better quit before I get in too deep.”
Know how to stop these thoughts?
By reviewing your goals. Identify the obstacles and reframe them as a problem to be solved.
Like this:
Really, are you really stupid? If you really are, then your problem is your knowledge base or skill set – something easily correctible! Learn what you need to learn and then try again.
Can’t get your butt out of bed? Yep, that’s a problem. How are you going to work around it? Stay up later and work in to the night? Give up a few hours during the day and replace those activities with work time? Work on the weekends? Find a way to solve that problem and then press on.
A lack of support – that is a real problem. If your current family or friends do not support you in what you are doing, then you need to find a way around that. Find people who do support you, who build you up. And spend as much time with them as possible.
I love spending time with my dad, because I always walk away with a new way of looking at things. I feel refreshed, inspired and motivated when I’ve spent some time with him. He always reminds me that there are a million different ways to live our lives.
I don’t have to be defined by how everyone else thinks I should live my life.
You need to find someone like that. If there is no one in your physical life, find someone virtually. Join some FaceBook groups and make connections. Solve that problem.
Can’t afford to work towards your goal? There is no doubt that that is a serious problem. So solve it! Don’t quit. Find a way to supplement your income for a while. Cut back on expenses. It may require some sacrifices or a change of lifestyle for a while. You might have to work extra hard for what you want. But it is only temporary.
The key is, if you can review your goals, you will see a pattern of behaviors developing over time. These behaviors are keeping you from reaching your goal. They are your obstacles and they are in no way an outward symbol or sign of your inner abilities or capabilities. They are simply a problem to overcome.
Your behaviors are not who you are. You can change them.
And you know how to do that. You’ve been overcoming problems your whole entire life.
Great, you say. Sounds good. How do I actually go about reviewing my goals though?
Well, I can tell you how I do it. And maybe it will be a system that works for you as well.
How to review your goals
[This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission if you use them. I only recommend tools that I use and trust. For more information see my disclosure statement.]
1. Write it down
You need to write everything down; your goal, your action plan, and your intention. And then you need to write down, every day, how you did.
It’s not exactly easy, writing down what you did. What do you say? What words do you use that are going to help you to identify those patterns of behavior that are sabotaging your efforts?
I use the Slay Your Goals Planner for this.
There is a nice section at the beginning of the month that helps you to outline your goal and it helps you to create your weekly/daily action plan to reach that goal. Then at the end of the month, there is an awesome section that walks you through the review process.
The questions are thoughtful and probing. These questions have helped me to identify my strengths (so that I may lean on them more) and my weaknesses (so that I can improve those areas). I can see patterns in my behavior and obstacles I need to overcome.
Reviewing my goals every month with this planner has taught me how to reframe my failures – I can now look at where I went wrong more objectively – without internalizing any failures – and instead look at my obstacles as a problem to solve.
It will do the same for you! To get your planner, click here.
You need to consistently review your progress.
Stay on top of it. Do it every week, at the end of every month, and at the end of each quarter. This will keep you motivated to actually make it happen this time!
2. Take a good, hard look at what obstacles you encountered
What kept you from reaching your goal?
Did you need to get up and work at 5:00 every morning to squeeze in that extra time, and instead you slept until seven? Did you fill your calendar with fun, frivolous activities that created no real progress towards your ultimate goal? What changes do you need to make in your daily routine to overcome these obstacles?
“I’ll just try harder” does not count as making a change. If you have been documenting your progress for a couple of months, and you see that you repeatedly fail to get up at 5:00 in the morning, “I’ll just try harder” ain’t gonna cut it for you. Obviously, you suck at getting up. So quit trying!
Find another way to squeeze in that extra two hours of work time. Stay up later. Work during lunch. Give up your Netflix show at night. Do whatever it takes, but eliminate that barrier.
Reframe that obstacle as a problem that you need to solve, and then be as creative as possible when solving it.
3. Review your action plan
My goal is to make $1,000 a month writing and blogging. I spent the majority of this year pitching nonprofit agencies, asking them if they needed a writer. Guess what? They don’t.
It took me months to come to terms with that. I am a social worker. I know how to help others, and so that is what I wanted to write about. It doesn’t mean that they want me though. And after months of pitching, it finally dawned on me – I need a new plan of action.
I continuously reviewed my progress and found a problem – nonprofits do not hire writers. That was my problem. It wasn’t that I sucked, that my pitches were horrible or that I wasn’t a good writer.
How did I know this? By reviewing my daily documentation.
I recorded every pitch I sent out and the reply. I could easily get replies to my emails – the nonprofits wanted to work with me. So my pitches didn’t suck. They just wanted me to volunteer my time – that’s all.
And I know I’m a good writer because, after reviewing my daily documentation, I discovered that I actually do well when pitching parenting articles to publications and other blogs. They wanted my writing and they wanted to pay me for it.
Keep daily documentation and review it at the end of each week.
So by the process of elimination, I determined that nonprofits simply don’t hire writers.
Time to change my action plan.
Do you have a barrier that keeps popping up, over and over again? And there is nothing you can do about it? If you have problem-solved the heck out of it, and it is still a problem, then maybe it is time to change your plan of action.
Find a different approach to take, to meet your goal.
4. Repeatedly review your intention.
Do not let your motivation escape you. You need to review your progress constantly, and in doing so, you also need to review your why.
If you haven’t made a vision board yet, do it now. If you haven’t mapped out the reason for your goal, write it down. Journal it! Write a letter to yourself. Draw a picture of where you want to be in five, or ten years.
Do something to make your intention clear and real.
Why is this goal so important to you? How is it going to change your life? Find a way to show yourself that picture in your head every.single.day. Keep it near and dear to your heart. It will be the motivation that pulls you through when you want to give up.
The daily ins and outs of reaching our goals suck. But that intention – that why – that is where the magic lies.
5. Review your strengths
Don’t just focus on your failures. Sure, we need to know where we went wrong, so that we can correct it. But we also need to know what we did well. These are things we are good at. These are things that come naturally to us. And sometimes, all it takes is to build upon our strengths to meet our goals.
I’m a good mom. I have a lot of experience parenting boys. And I have a lot of acquired knowledge and skills from my line of work. These are my strengths. I can write about parenting techniques with little to no research. I have personal stories to back up my knowledge base.
And I had an action plan that didn’t rely on these strengths at all. They weren’t involved in my plan to reach $1,000 a month! Crazy, right? Shouldn’t my strengths be heavily littered throughout my action plan?
What are your strengths? You’ll find them when you review your goal each week and month. The Slay Your Goals Planner has a fantastic way of drawing out your strengths! It’s fun to read the prompts, answer the questions and think, “Man, I do rock! Sure, those nonprofits wanted nothing to do with me. But I landed a gig with a major parenting publication this month! Whoo-hoo!”
Use your strengths to build your action plan and to overcome your obstacles.
6. And finally, review your support circle
Who has your back? You can’t do this alone. Well, you maybe can, if you have an amazing ability to do things just to spite those who tell you that you can’t.
But it is sooo much easier to do it with someone who will cheer you on when you are doing well and who will keep you going when you want to quit.
Okay, so that is the secret to reaching any goal! You have to review your progress. Religiously. Use what works for you and ditch what doesn’t. Reframe your failures as problems to figure out and work around and build upon your strengths. Don’t internalize ANYTHING!! Unless it’s success!! And reach out to other people for support along the way.
You’ve got this! I promise! Now get back out there and kick this year’s butt!!
Need more support? Go ahead and reach out to me! You can email me at shannon@makingmommas.com or leave a comment below and I will get back to you! You do not have to do this alone momma!!
More on creating goals
Three Secrets to Figuring Out Your Goals
This is a really great post! I’m especially glad that you mentioned the importance of our self talk. So often I bash myself when I miss the mark, but then I just feel worse and don’t get any closer to reaching my goal! I like the idea of detailed documentation too. Thanks!
Self Talk is my greatest enemy!! If I manage to move past all of the negative self talk and do it anyway, then the self bashing for not doing it well is soon to follow!! I’ve been working hard on it though. Sounds like you are too. 🙂