Goal Setting: Strategies to Ensure You Achieve Your Goals

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5 min readSep 6, 2018

Setting goals is essential to living a life full of purpose and meaning. If you can set achievable goals, you will stay motivated and focused over the long-term. Nearly everything in business and life revolves around goal setting. They can be simple like waking up an hour earlier than you normally do. Or they can be further reaching like purchasing your first house. The point is, goal setting happens daily so you need to make sure you’re achieving them.

Here are six strategies to ensure you achieve your goals:

Take action right now

There is really no time like the present. Getting started is often the hardest part because we don’t know how. There’s something you need to remember though. You will never achieve your goals if you fail to take action.

It will seem scary to take the first leap but once you do you’ll figure out the rest. The longer you sit around and plan the longer it’ll take for you to actually achieve what you want to do. Jump in now, figure out the rest later.

Consider your skills and adjust your plan acoordingly

When you set a larger goal, you need to break it down into smaller tasks. Then you need to think about what it’s going to take to accomplish each one of those tasks. This includes looking inwardly and considering your talents and expertise. It also means you need to consider your weaknesses. Ask yourself, do you really have the skills to accomplish all the tasks?

Let’s take a straightforward example. You’re looking to build an iOS application. You have experience with frontend development, however you only know the basics of backend. Sure you can try to tackle it yourself, but maybe you want to identify backend as a weakness and find an alternative solution. Accomplishing goals is about taking on challenges but it’s also about putting your best foot forward. If you’re better off finding another engineer to take on backend so you can focus on frontend, then that’s your best option.

It’s okay to have weaknesses. Those who are able to identify them and fill in the gaps are the one’s who will succeed at the end of the day.

Delegate tasks

This relates directly to the point made above. If you have a far-reaching dream or goal, you’re most likely going to need help getting there. It’s extremely important to assemble a team that will compliment your skillsets and surround yourself with people to give you support when you need it.

Let’s take one of the most common goals for an entrepreneur. Build a company. In order to achieve that goal you’re going to need people to delegate tasks to. Your time is your most valuable asset. If you’re spending time doing trivial tasks that should be delegated elsewhere you need to assemble a team.

Write down your plan of action

An action plan is a basic roadmap that you can follow that will get you to your goal. This is extremely important as it will ensure you won’t miss any major steps along the way. This is basically a way of breaking down bigger objectives into smaller steps. By doing this, your goal will seem much more attainable since it won’t seem so far away. The more specific you are with your action plan the better.

The next and most important piece of all this is the fact that you need to make sure you are writing everything down on paper. If you don’t document your goals, you might as well forget them. You need to be extremely disciplined about recording everything. This will help you stay organized and most of all give you the ability to evaluate your progress.

Make sure everything is measurable

When setting goals you need to make sure there is some way to measure progress. This way you can hold yourself accountable if you miss your mark or reward yourself once you hit them.When putting together your roadmap you need to make sure you set benchmarks for yourself. These milestones or “mini-goals” will allow you to measure your progress and stay focused on the bigger picture.

When setting deadlines and milestones you need to make things reasonable. What’s your timeframe for completing each goal? If it’s going to take you a year to reach 1,000,000 monthly active users for your iOS app, you’ll need to work backward from that and set your “mini-goals”. Maybe you set a target for the end of each month leading up to the end of the year. Let’s say 100,000 users the first month, 200,000 the second month, and so on. This roadmap has a clear objective and a clear timeline. This way you’ll know exactly how close or far you are from hitting your target.

Create accountability and hold yourself to it

This is the part where you need to put your adult pants on. From the very beginning you need to define your responsibilities and make them crystal clear to yourself and anyone else who is working on this venture with you. The same applies to your team members. When you set goals you need to share them with the rest of your team. That way, if you aren’t making steady progress you’ll need to hold yourself accountable for it.

The idea here is that you need to take ownership if what you’re setting out to do. If you are a leader who takes responsibility and holds themselves accountable then you will create a strong and loyal team around you.

Goal setting is the only way to accomplish our dreams life. There’s no single solution to achieving your goals. That said, there are strategies that are proven to help you get to where you want to be. The six listed above are ones you should try out immediately. You won’t be disappointed.