Get Smart: 7 Steps to Hack Your Life Goals
This article is part 5 of a 5-part series. You can start the series with the article Things I Learned from 100 Planners here.
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It’s the first day of the year and you’ve decided to finally lose that growing belly. You started the day right with nutritious food, ran the track, and crunching the muscles towards a ripped body. But after 1 week, you are one of the too many guilty New Year resolutionists who’ve gone back to their old ways.
Sounds like you? Fret not. You can smash any goal you want by recruiting the most powerful organ in your body: your brain. If you know how your mind works, the better your goal setting will be. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to getting you through your goals:
1. Begin with a positive mindset
By default, humans think of negative thoughts as that is how our ancestors have lived and survived. Is that a bear, a lion, or a crazy monkey? We’ve always identified surrounding threats so we can quickly move away from it.
If you start doubting yourself before you start working on your goals, chances are that the negativity will push you to failure. But once we start positive preoccupation, we unlock a roster of mental capabilities that will help us in achieving our goals. Positive people will be more optimistic and self-confident. This influences the level of concentration and thinking speed that improves performance. Simply by thinking positive before doing something raises the likelihood of accomplishing the task.
2. Set yourself up for success
Forget about the Einstein’s messy table or a Yahoo! Executive saying she only needs 4 hours of sleep to be successful. What you’ll need is to set a conducive environment to help you towards your success. There is no standard formula for this but our brain structure did leave clues on how to get our surrounding ready.
First, eliminate the threat by anchoring a positive environment. Is it a motivational poster, a fight song, or an inspirational book? Put it where you can first see it. Second, tidy up the desk as you don’t want any distractions while you are working on your goals. If you see another project folder on your desk while working on another one, you’ll lose on the time worrying in between these projects. Out of sight, out of mind so you can better focus on the task at hand. Third, be in the pink of health. What we eat, how we sleep, and how we keep fit affects our brain tomorrow. By eating well, sleeping well, and keeping fit, we are assured that our mind is ready for goal crunching.
3. Visualize your goal by thinking of your big picture
If you can hold a picture on your mind on what you want to achieve, the better that you can visualize on how to achieve it. It also literally gets the other parts of your body ready for action as visual thinking activates 23 areas of your brain while imagining. When your brain is active, it expands the connections of the different areas of your brain that increases cognitive capacity. The higher your mental thinking is, the better you can be ready to achieve your goals.
Not agreeing so? Yes, there are physical activities that might not require thinking. But consider this happening in reality shows such as cooking contestants nailing the brief because of clear thinking or mind-cohesive race partners outwitting other contestants who played the blame game on each other.
4. List down what you’ll need to do and categorize it
Create a long random list of things to do and make sure to aim higher. If you do, your mind is stretched out and motivation increases. Remember that you need to list down things that are hard enough to be interesting yet possible to reach with hard work.
Now when you make a long list of things to do, your mind starts to get tired even before you start. The trick here is to make a sensible categorization of your lists to make it more organized in your mind.
5. Create short term goals
While we think of our big picture, the biggest battleground is the day to day mundane. There seems to have a lack of excitement on a daily and weekly basis compared to the ultimate goal. So while beginning with an end in mind is important, the now is even more as it impacts if we stay on the game or just forget our goals.
The technique here is to create short term goals that can be daily or weekly depending on how periodic you plan your life. On a daily basis you can plan for a daily focus which is quite easy to achieve and on a weekly basis, you can set 3–5 priorities to work towards your goal. But do make sure that your short term goals are working towards your long term goals so you stay focused.
6. Make the goals more challenging than the last
You can make short term goals work for you better if it becomes more challenging than the last. Think of it as like a Super Mario game where each level is more difficult than the previous one. The reason why you’ve stayed on the game is because you liked the challenge and winning it each time.
Basically, that’s how your mind works as well. You’ll need to challenge yourself more each time. Your short term goal last week should be easy to make you start and encourage you to get going. But as you progress, you’ll need to add more weight and risk on it to make your mind interested on the work to be done.
7. Reward yourself
Achieving goals is related to how our motivational circuit works. Just as you’d like to be rewarded in the workplace with money, prestige, or promotion, you can also maximize your personal goal setting by adding internal rewards to it.
First think of the usual things you do that you enjoy. Is it the Netflix marathon or a pizza night? Instead of going for this right away, make this as a reward for easy goals. Now for heavier goals, you can tag rewards that you’ve always want to do. Is it a beer festival over the weekend or finally getting a jacuzzi set-up for the winter?
Remember, achieving goals is quite easy as you’ll only need to recruit your mind to work towards it. The more we understand our brain, the better we live our life fulfilled.
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