Writing down what you want to achieve is easy, the difficult and challenging part comes after that.
Let’s face it, goal setting is not as complicated as we all think. It is what we do after we have set our goals that are the most challenging.
Most people have a rough idea of what they want to achieve in their lives. Whether they want to achieve financial success or to build a successful internet business, these goals are good goals.
The problem most people face is what to do after they know what they want. Are they taking the necessary action? Do they track their progress? And how can they maintain their motivation each day?
These are the key questions that we all must answer if we want to make our goals a reality.
And if you are serious about achieving your goals, you need to go through some form of behavioral change.
Think about it, if you are not willing to make a change, you will never achieve your goals. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you will get back the same result all the time.
It is when you change your habit and do something else, eventually, your result and your life will change.
So, what are the behavioral changes or habits you need to adopt to help you achieve your goals?
Well, here are 7 good habits you should consider developing to help you transform what you want in your mind into your life in reality.
1. Write down your goals every day
I know you have heard this a gazillion times, but writing down your goals is a habit that has been proven to be extremely effective in making your goals a reality.
According to research conducted by Dr. Gail Matthews, people who write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them.
So, what is holding you back from writing down your goals?
When you put your goals into writing, you tend to remember them better. Not only that, it shows that your goals are important to you, and that is why you care about writing them down.
People who don’t bother writing down their goals are subconsciously telling themselves that their goals don’t matter. And this is why they don’t care if they do it.
One more thing, writing down your goals on a daily basis helps too.
Scott Adam, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon, said in his blog post that he used to write down his goals as much as 15 times a day.
So, every day, he would write down something like, “I, Scott Adams will become a syndicated cartoonist.”
After more than 6 months later, circumstances somehow arranged themselves in such a way that Scott got his first break as a cartoonist. He went on to publish his first Dilbert cartoon in 1989 and the rest became history.
Hence, make it your habit to write down your goals every day. If you want to learn more about daily goal setting, read this article below:
==> The Importance of Daily Goal Setting And How To Do It
2. Create positive affirmations to support your goals
Another good goal-setting habit you should develop is to create your own positive affirmations to support your goals.
Affirmations are positive self-talk that you can repeat on a regular basis to boost your motivation and help you re-focus throughout the day.
They are like mantras to help you stay focused and go through the hard times.
Whenever you are feeling lost or find yourself having no motivation to work on your goals, repeat your affirmations.
Many people know that affirmation is powerful, but most of them don’t practice it because they think that it is not effective.
I’m here to tell you that affirmations work.
The reason most people find it not working is that they practice it in the wrong way. I have shared 5 critical rules you must follow to make your affirmations work for you. You can read the article here:
==> How To Make Your Affirmations Work – The 5 Simple Rules To Follow
In short, you have to make your affirmations as emotional as possible and repeat them until they work for you.
Plus, affirmations are a good method to remind you of what you want to achieve in life.
They can work as a lighthouse, showing you where to go when you are feeling lost.
3. Track, update and measure your progress
When was the last time you measure your progress? Do you even have a tracking system to know your performance?
A lot of people set goals, but many of them don’t measure or track their progress. And this is why most people fail to achieve what they want in life.
If you want to lose weight, the first thing you need to do is to measure your weight.
The same goes for business. If you want to know how much you are earning or the performance of your business, what do you do? You measure and track your business.
You find out how many leads you acquire each day, week, and month. You track your profit and cost. You measure your business performance, etc.
But when it comes to setting and achieving goals, most people don’t do this.
And this is why you need to make it a habit to track and measure your progress.
At least do it on a weekly basis. You want to know if whether you are making progress and are moving forward, or if you are moving away from your goals.
Here’s a good book I recommend you read when it comes to setting your goals and tracking them: The 12 Week Year.
4. Review your strategy
Besides tracking your progress, you must also review your strategy.
How can you know if you are moving forward? The only way is to find out what is working and what is not working for you.
You want to do more of what is working and improve what is not working.
For instance, I used to publish a blog post every Tuesday and Thursday, but after going through my experiment of publishing every day for about 2 months, I found that my traffic increased by about 15%.
But writing and publishing every day take a lot of my time. I have to write daily even during the weekend.
Hence, I came to the conclusion that if I want to grow my blog, I have to write and publish more often. I made the decision to publish every weekday, from Monday to Friday.
And that’s what I have done for a month now. And things were going well for this blog.
If I don’t try things out and if I don’t review my strategy, I will never know what will work out for me and my blog. And I will continue to publish twice a week, and things will stay the same, nothing is going to change until I first change my strategy.
This is why reviewing your work is important.
You want to know what is working and then do more of it. And of course, you also want to find out what is not working and improve your strategy.
Therefore, schedule at least a session each month or bi-weekly to review your strategy. Try out new things and see what works.
5. Plan and schedule your day in advance
If you are committed to your goals, you must make it your habit to play and schedule your day in advance.
Goal setting is a form of future-planning where it is not complete if you don’t turn it into a daily and workable plan.
You can’t just write down what you want to achieve and then do nothing every day. You need to exert some forms of action in order to produce the results you want.
And to make the process flow are, you must plan your day.
You want to give simple and specific instructions to your mind so that it knows what to do, every day.
Think about it, your goal of building a successful blog isn’t actionable.
But when you plan your day, you write down action steps such as to write 1,000 words article and publish on your blog, you are turning your goals into a smaller and actionable step.
This will directly give your mind specific instructions on what to do. You are setting yourself up to win.
A lot of people set goals, but they don’t do the planning. They lack the “connecting” steps that get them to their goals.
Here’s a good saying from Larry Winget that I like a lot:
“Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be broke, fat, lazy, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don’t have a plan.”
6. Practice daily visualization
Another powerful and productive habit you can develop that can help you reach your goals is visualization.
Plenty of research have proved that visualization works and it is a powerful tool to help us get what we want in life.
Extraordinary people like Oprah Winfrey, Jim Carrey, Tiger Woods, and many more have openly dedicated part of their success to visualization.
“I would visualize things coming to me. It would just make me feel better. Visualization works if you work hard. That’s the thing. You can’t just visualize and go eat a sandwich.”
– Jim Carrey
When you visualize the things that you want, you are telling your reticular activating system (RAS) located in your brain what to focus on.
The RAS acts as a filter in our brain to filter away all unnecessary details so that we can focus on what is important to us.
And when you visualize yourself working hard and eventually achieve your goals, you are giving instructions to your RAS what to do and focus on.
In short, treat your RAS like a GPS. And the best way to program your destination to your inner GPS is to visualize your goals.
If you want to learn more about visualization, the best person to learn from is none other than John Assaraf. He is the person who makes the concept of vision boards popular. Read this article below:
==> How John Assaraf Used Vision Boards and Changed His Life
7. Upgrade your skills and improve your knowledge
Finally, you must also make it a habit to upgrade your skills and improve your knowledge on a consistent basis.
If you want to achieve your goals, you must level up yourself and raise your standards.
You can only achieve success as per your skills level and what you know.
It works like a water bottle. If you can only hold up to 500ml of water, there is no way you can get more out of it. Even if you keep pouring the water, 500ml is all you can hold.
The only way to get more is to increase your volume. When you read, learn, and improve, your volume will increase.
In short, to hold more content, you need to improve your context.
When your water bottle has a bigger volume, you can hold more water.
And this is exactly the habit you need to develop to make sure you are capable and worthy of your goals.
Many people want to get rich and become a millionaire, but sadly, they don’t work on developing their millionaire mindset and money management skills.
As a result, no matter how much they make, they will use it all. And this explains why most people are not financially successful.
You must work on yourself, upgrade your skills, and raise your standards to be able to produce the extraordinary results you desire.
Always remember this quote from Harv Eker, and work on improving the size of you:
“The size of the problem is never the issue, what matters is the size of you.”
What Should You Do Now?
Goal setting is not a one-time work and its not something that you can just set-and-forget.
You must develop the right habits and make the necessary behavioral change in order to turn your goals into reality.
This is why I strongly recommend you take my course, Goal Setting Formula and equip yourself with the right skills and tools to help you achieve the success you really want in life.
You don’t have to go through everything by yourself. I can show you the way, but are you willing to make the commitment and take necessary action?