It’s often said that just 8% of people achieve their goals — a figure credited to research by the University of Scranton. It’s a figure that demonstrates something we all know deep down: Most of us never reach the goals we set ourselves. But that’s not because they aren’t achievable, it’s because we approach them in a way that sets us up for failure from day one. But if you’re ready to finally achieve your biggest goal in life, try the following four steps. They outline how to achieve any goal — no matter how impossible it seems.
How to achieve any goal
Step 1: Get clear about your goal – what do you want?
Just as you’d never set out on a journey with no clear destination in mind, it’s vital to know exactly what you want to achieve before going after it. Without this clarity, you’re likely to go round in circles until you either have a lucky break, or, more likely, give up.
But getting clear about your goal involves much more than picking an end goal. No, you need to be specific about:
- what you want
- why you want it
- when you want it to happen by
Knowing what you want will provide the focus you need, but be sure to spell it out. Don’t just say “I want to find work I love”, go deeper. What is this work? What does it look like for you? If you’re reading this and thinking “I have no idea what I want,” start with this article on the best way to find your passion in life.
Once you know what you want, ask yourself why you want it so much. This answer is the thing that will keep you motivated when things get tough (and they will).
Finally, keep yourself accountable by setting a deadline for when you want to achieve your goal. The ideal deadline should be realistic (to ensure you don’t lose hope) but challenging (to motivate you). Without a deadline, you may find yourself procrastinating endlessly — a sure-fire way of never achieving what you want.
Once you have gathered these three elements together, write down a statement of intent that clearly explains your goal e.g. I want to write a book on my travels around the world by 30th November 2021 because I want to share the life-changing lessons I have learned with others.
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Step 2: Believe it will happen for you
Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” He was absolutely right. This isn’t motivational psychobabble, it’s how life works — your thoughts create your reality.
Here’s an example: You see your dream job advertised. If you think you have a chance — no matter how slight — of being shortlisted for the job, you’re more likely to apply. If you apply for a job, you’re more likely to get an interview. If you believe you can impress the recruiters enough at an interview, you’re more likely to attend the interview, and if you attend an interview, you’re more likely to get the job. In short, your initial belief prompted you to apply, which set a chain of events in motion.
You didn’t wish the job into existence with your thoughts, but your thoughts motivated you to take the actions that naturally opened the right doors to that dream job.
This all boils down to the saying “You miss 100% of all the shots you don’t take.” If you want to achieve a big goal, the first thing you must do (after defining what the goal is) is to believe that it can be yours. Without this belief, you will never take the action you need to make it a reality.
If you struggle with self-belief, here’s how to cultivate a mindset for achieving anything you want.
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Step 3: Detach from the goal
Have you ever noticed that when you want something too much, you push it away? It’s one of life’s ironies, but if you become too obsessed and focused on a goal, it’s common to start taking counterproductive actions out of desperation to force the goal to happen ASAP. This is where the art of detachment comes into play.
So, what is detachment?
The Collins English Dictionary defines it as: A feeling of not being personally involved in something or of having no emotional interest in it.
Where goal-setting is involved, this definition is a little extreme, but it captures the sentiment. To detach from a goal, you need to believe it will happen and let go of a need to control it obsessively. This doesn’t mean you don’t care about it (as the literal definition of detachment indicates), it means you realise that it will happen, so you don’t need to preoccupy yourself with it.
A useful analogy is to going to bed at night. The majority of us go to sleep at night assuming we will wake up the next morning. There is little doubt in our mind that it will happen, therefore we plan for the next day and we take steps to go to sleep in preparation for tomorrow. What we don’t do is worry endlessly about if we will wake up or not, and we don’t take action to make sure we don’t die in our sleep (e.g. we don’t check our vital signs, check the air in our room for carbon monoxide etc before going to bed).
Similarly, if you have a goal you’d love to achieve, it’s important to define it, believe it will happen and take steps to make it happen, but you should avoid making it an obsession. Life has a way of unfolding as it should and if you meddle too much, you will usually ruin a good thing.
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Step 4: Take action
The final step in achieving any goal is to act! Ideas and dreams are great, but results only come from taking action.
However, avoid the temptation to launch head first into making your dream a reality. If your dream goal currently feels impossible, that’s often because it is far removed from where you are. If you attempt to go directly from where you are now to where you want to be, you will quickly hit roadblocks, feel overwhelmed, berate yourself for being foolish enough to think you could achieve your goal and then give up.
The best way to avoid this scenario is to break your ultimate goal down into bite-sized ones. Don’t focus on having a million-pound business by the end of the year if you currently don’t even have a business idea. The leap is too big to pull off in one go.
Instead, always identify the next step you need to take to get to your ultimate goal and then make that step your goal for the next few weeks or month.
Once you’ve completed this step, identify the next one and take that.
The beauty of taking things one step at a time is that new doors always open with every step. You gain new knowledge and meet new people that allow you to move more easily to the next stage of your plan.
Trust us, we know.
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