How to Stay Focused on Your Goals: 4 Practical Tips
Do you feel that you are struggling and finding it hard to reach your goals? You are not alone, most people do struggle in the similar way, and that is a fact. No doubt that when you set goals for yourself, you have the very best intentions to achieve your goals. You have a feeling in your heart that you will succeed to reap the benefits what comes when you achieve your goals, probably it would change your life.
But, when we are planning for our goal, we forget to take something very important in count and that is life itself. Life is very uncertain, and just when we are ready to take the actions to make those vital changes, life gets in the way and we are unable to stay focused on our goals. But, the truth here is that if we cannot stay focused on our goals, we lose momentum and fail to make the progress we seek, and this leads to a loss of confidence and motivation.
We may blame on a lot of things like work, family or technology or anything for the distraction, but all of these are part of your life. It’s not a good escape if you are blaming the external factors as the hindrance to achieving your goals and objectives. If you do so you simply give away your personal power and deny that the success lies within your hands. All you need to do is to find a way to manage your external factors which distracts you from being focused on your goals, also don’t forget to maintain a healthy and balanced lifestyle.
It is also true that even after putting in our best efforts and best of our intentions, it is not easy to stay on track to our goal achievement. A study done by the University of Hertfordshire revealed that about 50% of people make a New Year’s resolution that includes a meaningful goal, but more than 78% of people fail to maintain their focus and achieve their desired goals. So, when you are deciding about any goal to achieve you must also keep in mind that keeping your focus about your goal could be an issue, so make your plans in such a manner that you dedicate most of your time towards achieving your goals.
Now the question is how to do that. Well, that takes a little planning, and some simple tricks which you need to do and they will help you stay focused on your goals. Once you have done that you will find that staying focused on your goals is really simple, and you motivated and determined. So here are few tricks listed below which are going to be your best bet on achieving your goals while staying focused.
- Narrow Your List
You may have hundreds of goals like buying a house, buying a car, wedding, honeymoon in Switzerland, World tour, expensive gift to your spouse, kid’s education in best college, kid’s marriages, relaxing retirement, starting a company, doubling your profits, doing a volunteer work or anything else for that matter. But, the simple fact is that you cannot focus on too many goals at a time. So, narrow down your list. Instead of working on too many goals at a time, make your priority list and focus on 1–3 at a time.
All of us want to do a lot of things and set up a lot of goals for our lives, but as we know all of those can’t be done at a time, so just prioritize your goals, identify the most important goals that you need to work on and put them on a separate list. Take out first three goals out of them as per your priority, place other goals on a separate list for another time. Regularly review your list and strike off items which have already been elevated to “goal accomplished” status. Then start working on your next goal. This way you will find that it takes less effort for you to accomplish your future goals.
- Break Down Each of Your Major Goals
How do remove a mountain? The answer — one stone at a time. The same strategy is applied for achieving your goals. Big goals might seem daunting and may cause you to lose confidence and motivation.
So, break it down in smaller tasks, or into a series of smaller steps. Then, instead of focusing on the large goal at once, you focus on the smaller tasks which you need to complete to achieve your big goal. It will be less daunting and, with each small task completed, you will gain confidence boost as you realise that you are now one step closer to your big goal. This makes reaching your ultimate goal a lot easier.
As you accomplish each step taking you closer to achieving your big goal, maintain your momentum and enthusiasm for achieving your goal by celebrating your success.
- Have Accountability Partners
We as human don’t want to turn ourselves down in front of others. So, if your goal is not too personal or confidential in nature, tell your friends or family about your goals, and once you have told them about your goal it will make you more accountable. Ideally, these people are your well-wishers and they will encourage you when obstacles arise and celebrate your successes with you along the way. This support will help you to stay focused on your goals.
- Record, Measure and Document Your Process
Measuring your progress towards achievement of your gaols is very important, so you need to set a timeline for your goals, you should record your progress weekly, monthly, half yearly or yearly depending on the nature of your goal. For example, if you set up a goal to reduce 20 KG weight in 8 months, then you should keep a regular watch and note it down in every month. In this case you should at least lose 2.5 KG weight every month. As you take action, you can measure your progress and see whether you are making the desired progress or, whether you need to take corrective action. May be you need to give up your sugar, may be you need to take a two more kilometres of jogging every day.
- Create A Goal Board
You should create a visual reminder physically or digitally, however, physical reminder is preferable. Or if you want to make a digital visual reminder make your goal your screen saver of your cell phone, and your desktop screen. This will keep you reminding of your goal and will help you maintain your enthusiasm and focus. Your brain thinks in terms of images so, if you choose the right pictures, it will serve as both an enjoyable and effective method to stay focused on your goals. In effect, it gets your subconscious mind “in sync” with your plan to achieve your goal.
It obviously takes hard work and consistent effort to achieve big goals. The ugly truth is that most people fail to achieve their goals because of lacking focus, which is very natural in the hectic world out there. But, if you do not want to be one of those people, you must find a way to stay focused on your goals. Our focus fades away with time, and sometimes we are completely out of focus towards our goals, but, we can maintain our passion and motivation to make our dreams come true with these simple, focus-maintaining strategies. If we implement these strategies from the very get go, we are surely going to be stay focused on our goals and increase the likelihood of successfully achieving those goals.
Originally published at The Inspired Talks.
