Live Your Life to the Max

5 steps to improve life balance and satisfaction

How are things going for you? As we wrap up 2017, and look back at the year, it is important for us to be able to give ourselves credit for what went well and to be able to investigate the setbacks to create a better outcome in the future.

For those of you who feel like you are in a rut, or simply could do better, here are 5 tips for goal setting that will help you achieve success:

1. Have a clear picture of what you want. Many of us haven’t given much thought to exactly what we want. Sometimes it comes from a place of self-doubt and other times from a negative attitude about how goals get accomplished. Be specific. If you don’t have a clear picture of what you want to do then how will you know when you have accomplished your goal?

For example, if you were to say to me “I want to lose weight”, that would be a great goal but it doesn’t tell me what the deadline is and how much weight you want to lose.Also, if you were to ask me to hold you accountable for losing the weight then I’ll need a benchmark.

How about if you were to say, “I want to lose 15 pounds by April 1st”?Doesn’t that sound like someone with a plan?Someone who knows what they want to happen?We must be mindful of what our thoughts and ideas are so that our brain can be properly oriented to what we want to happen.

2. Write down your goals in your own handwriting. Seeing what you want to happen written down in your own handwriting can be very powerful in creating the success that you want. Your mind will identify with your handwriting and begin to move your life in the direction that you want. Most people don’t write their goals down because it seems silly or maybe they’re embarrassed to admit (even to themselves) that they have dreams or aspirations. You’ll be amazed when you look back at what you wrote down and how much of it became reality.

3. Come up with a plan and break your goals into smaller steps. If your goal doesn’t seem daunting on some level, then perhaps it’s not big enough. If your goal does seem daunting, that’s ok too; it just means that you need to break your goal up into smaller benchmarks that you can accomplish toward the greater objective.

This is where my clients tend to get stuck; they’ll come up with some amazing ideas on what they want to accomplish and then they can’t get any momentum moving forward toward what they want to do. My advice to them is to lean into the smaller tasks with the larger objective in mind. You don’t have to know every detail of how you are going to get to success, but you must know that success is going to require effort and dedication on your part.

Ask yourself this question every night as you plan the activities for the next day: What can I do tomorrow to move closer to my goal?

4. Review your goals regularly. You must review your goals at least once a day to keep them fresh in your mind and maintain the momentum towards what you want to accomplish. This review will remind you of what the big picture holds for your future.

I recently read about a study that was done by a Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech in which he found out that only 1% of the population writes down their goals and reviews them regularly. He also found that people who do this make 9 times more income over the course of the lifetime than people who don’t have goals. Nine times more income!!!

Once you begin to review your goals regularly it will become a habit that you can develop into a daily ritual: meaning that you find yourself feeling like it must get done every day (like brushing your teeth).

5. Picture a successful outcome and create a mindset for success. This involves creating a vision of what you want to happen and picturing what success will look like. We should live a good life and expect that we will create the wealth necessary to maintain it through our goal setting process.

I have a client who is a government executive that was struggling with creating the vision of what he wanted to happen in his relationship with his spouse. Once we were able to tap into what was bothering him and create a vision for the alternate outcome he was able to see what his role was in making things better and the decisions that were within his reach for accomplishing the happiness that he was looking for.

These 5 steps for achieving success are easy to implement and very inexpensive. The hard part is committing to your personal development and being open to making positive changes in your life.