Mental Fitness Mondays: Goals Galore!
Ready to join the 8% club?
Today I want to share with you my thoughts about the mental fitness component of ‘goal achievement’. As a coach this is my bread and butter; I love helping people achieve what matters to them.
“We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”
I love this quote from Gandhi.
The best goals are the ones that have real meaning to you and also make a small step towards changing the world. People who hire Real Clear tend to care about social causes and making the world fairer and kinder. Their goals reflect their values, and they achieve amazing things.
It’s all about the plan
What this component is about is ‘achievement’. How many of us have set out with big intentions, and then given up? Maybe this was the year you were going to run that marathon or finally write that book… but somehow the training didn’t work out, or the writing didn’t happen. Life can get in the way, but great goal achievers prioritise their goals. Why? Because they’ve set goals that matter.
Achieving goals takes effort, time, and skill, but luckily you’ve got me to help you! I’m going to be your coach in this post.
Tell me what you want…
Before you read on, pick one goal that you want to achieve. Make it something that means something to you, and, for this post, something that has a finish point. (I’ll write more posts in future about achieving more abstract goals, like ‘being more confident’.)
To illustrate this, I’m going to share a real goal of mine…which is to redecorate my home office.
When do you want to achieve your goal by? Pick a realistic date.
Next, imagine what it will be like to have achieved it. I’m picturing a bright and cheery home office that I enjoy working in… but what about you? What can you see, or feel or notice as you contemplate the end result of your goal?
Working backwards
Author of ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’, Stephen Covey, says that we should “begin with the end in mind.” To help, I recommend that you take your finish point and work backwards by considering action steps in reverse order. For me, painting my office working backwards goes something like this:
Room painted, clean and tidy. All tools away. Cleaned. Skirting board painted. 2nd coat of paint, 1st coat of paint, prep work for walls, office equipment cleared, paint purchased, design decided on.
To make this more ‘real’ I can then put dates and times to every action step. Of course, you might want to plan in a different way, but this can be one of the easiest.
Road blocks
It all sounds easy so far, and planning helps. But even with good plans, goals still don’t get achieved. So an extra step is to work out what the barriers might be to progress, and how to overcome them.
For my office re-paint, a big barrier is my need to work in my office! That may sound silly, but we often overlook issues and can be overly optimistic about what is possible to achieve. Another barrier for me is a lack of enthusiasm for doing the painting. I want the repainted office, I just don’t want to have to do the work. To achieve my goal I will need to work out how I will manage these two barriers. Before you get started on your goal, work out what your barriers are and how you will manage them.
Who cares?
Finally, I recommend getting someone/something to help you hold yourself to account. That could be a friend, a coach, a colleague or even something like social media or Siri or Alexa. We all achieve more when others are depending on us to get that thing done.
So, over to you!
What one thing could you do in the next 24 hours to take you one step closer to achieving a goal?
