Setting big goals can be exciting, but they can also be daunting when you wonder how in the world are you going to actually achieve them!

Setting big goals though is what helps to make your dreams a reality. We can wish for that $3mill home on the beach and hope that we’ll hit multiple 6-figures in our business, but that will get you nowhere fast if you don’t create some sort of plan to make it happen. 

But those are crazy impossible goals, you might be saying…yes, they could be. But if other people have found a way to make them happen, why can’t you? And I promise you that you can! Keep reading to learn my top tips for how to set goals that you’ll actually achieve.

1. Goals are achieved due to intention, NOT motivation. 

If you are like most people with New Year’s resolutions, you get to February and you are digging at yourself for not being more motivated to stick on the wagon. But research shows that it’s not highly motivated people that actually achieve goals, but it’s the people that are INTENTIONAL about achieving them. What does that mean? You aren’t just wishing + hoping for that dream life, but you create a game plan to make it happen! 

2. Figure out your “Why”.  

So you want that $3mill home on the beach, but why? I know you may be thinking, why wouldn’t I, but I want you to dig deep here. What does owning that spectacular home mean to you? Is it creating a life you never had growing up? Do you want to be an example of what is possible for other female entrepreneurs or for your children? I want you to really dig deep and figure out why your dream is so important to you. When you know that, it will increase your willingness to go after that goal. 

3. Choose only 1 extraordinary goal. 

I know you may be thinking, “Tami…I want it all! I want relationships, wealth, and health! If I focus on one, won’t the rest slide down a steep, slippery slope to none-existence?!” You may think that, and I know I did when I first got going with learning about life coaching. But when you try to focus on achieving all the things, you never really focus on one thing fully and thus it will take you WAY longer to achieve your goals. Whereas if you focus on only one extraordinary goal (one that seems kind of impossible), you will start taking steps towards it, and those habits + actions will carry over into other areas of your life naturally. 

4. Take time to visualize your life as having achieved your goal.

In the book “Think + Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, talks about the power of autosuggestion and how it will help you with achieving wealth. So basically if you frequently allow yourself to visualize your future self that has already achieved your goal, you a creating faith in yourself and the thoughts/beliefs that will get you there because the brain can’t really distinguish between what is real + what is not…only in what you tell it is real. So take time to visualize this higher self. What is she feeling? What is she thinking? What would the future version of yourself tell you to do?

5. Make your extraordinary goal specific + measurable. 

You can’t just say, “I want to be rich + famous + married to the hottest guy on earth someday” because what does that even look like? How would you define “rich” or “fame” or “attractiveness”? You need to make your goal specific + measurable. If it isn’t, how can you truly work towards that when you don’t know what the “finish line” looks like? So say you want to lose weight, you would write your goal out as, “I want to weigh 127 lbs and I will know I’ve achieved this goal when I step on the scale 12 months from now and that is what the scale reads.”

6. Reverse engineer your dreams. 

So now that you’ve spent time visualizing your future self that has achieved your goals + you have gotten specific about what that goal is, it’s time to work backward. Think about what actions she took to get to where she is. You are going to break down your big goal into bite-sized actionable habits/tasks. What this does is it helps your goal from being something that is out of reach to something that is easier to visualize actually happening. So going back to the example of the $4mill beach house, you make think about in what area would you find a house priced to match your needs, how soon do you want to move into that home, then what that’d look like as a down payment + monthly mortgage, where you’d be able to find the best loan, what you’d need to make each month to make your payments, what you’d have to do to make that much, and then creating the products/offers to make it happen. Working backward and focusing on the immediate tasks at hand will help to make your goal far less daunting.

7. Share your extraordinary goal. 

The thing about keeping your big dream a secret is that if you mess up, no one will ever know.  So you don’t have any skin in the game. But when you share your dream with others, it creates an accountability factor. It helps you to speak your goal into existence. It removes the safety net from below you + causes you to push through the friction and the hard tasks that you are going to inevitably experience en route to your dreams. This means you are WAY more likely to keep working toward your goal when you share it with someone (the world). 

8. Schedule your actionable tasks on a calendar. 

Again, this creates accountability. It creates a deadline + a date/time for you to work towards that goal. Otherwise, it’s just “someday” or “tomorrow” and before you know it, time will have gotten away from you and you are nowhere close to achieving your dreams.

9. Focus on progress vs results. 

It can be easy to get mad at yourself if you don’t reach your goal in the timeframe that you set for yourself. I get it…it’s disappointing. But guess what? I best you are so much farther than you were when you started. And you learned so much about yourself. You’ve progressed more than if you hadn’t set that goal for yourself and you should give yourself a pat on the back + a double high-five for that!

10. Consistency Wins. 

This means you keep moving forward even if you messed up. Because if you aren’t failing, you aren’t in the neighborhood of success. Failing forward means you’ve learned what didn’t work so now you can try something new until you figure out what WILL work. If you look at the research, the one thing that successful people all have in common…it’s consistency. 

11. Take time to Reflect. 

When you screw up, the last thing many of us want to do is to reflect on it. We want to move forward and forget that it ever even happened. But that’s one of the worst things you could do. Take a moment to think about what things DID go well. (because I guarantee you still had some sort of growth along the way). What did NOT go well? (Can you pinpoint where you went astray?) and then, What could you have done DIFFERENTLY? You don’t want to keep trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. When you take this time to reflect, it allows you to make tweaks so you get closer to your goals much faster. So don’t skip this important step!

Are you interested in learning more about how you can achieve your specific extraordinary goal?

Sign up for a FREE phone consultation with me, your personal certified life coach, and we will chat more about how 1:1 coaching will help you to learn the steps to making your dreams and big goals a reality.

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