Making goals that are successful

Birthdays or anniversaries can be good times to make plans about changing things in your life, so Edge’s relationships guru gives us the lowdown on how to make it work for us.

Happy anniversary to the Edge magazine! Being the 50th issue of the Edge it made me think about what birthdays mean to us. Often they can be a time to reflect, a time to party, a time to reassess our lives and with this, make new goals. So I decided to write to you about how to make a successful goal. I often talk to young people about why their goals are not working. Often they only have a vision or a thought, but it has not been made into a goal. There are seven steps to follow:

Express you goals in terms of specific events or behaviours. If a vision or dream is to become a goal, it must be expressed in terms of operations, meaning what will be done. It needs to be broken down into steps. This way it becomes manageable.

Express your goal in terms that can be measured. How do you know if you have succeeded if you cannot measure the end result?

Assign a time line to your goal. Once you have determined precisely what it is you want, you must decide on a timeframe for having it. The deadline you've created fosters a sense of urgency or purpose, which in turn will serve as an important motivator, and prevent procrastination.

Choose a goal you can control. So many of us choose goals that we cannot control. If you don’t have complete power over the choice you have made, then it is not a goal.

Plan and program a strategy that will get you to your goal. Don’t rely on willpower. It is about emotion, and emotion will set you up to fail. Assess the obstacles and resources you require to set a course based on reality. Your environment, your schedule and your accountability must be programmed in such a way that all three support you—long after an emotional high is gone.

Define your goal in terms of steps. Major life changes don't just happen; they happen one step at a time. Steady progress, through well-chosen, realistic, small steps, produces results in the end. Know what those steps are before you set out.

Create accountability for your progress toward your goal. We need to have someone to be accountable to. We need real consequences for not achieving our goal. Without this we can easily fool ourselves. You need to find a family member, pastor, teacher or friend to be accountable to and make frequent reports to them.

Reading all this sounds as if it is hard work. However the opposite is true. When our goals are broken down to manageable steps, it doesn’t seem as if we have a mountain to climb. Everyone needs goals in life to give them a purpose, a fulfilling life and results. So if you have been putting a goal off because it seemed too hard, sit down now with pen and paper, follow these steps and get to it. Send me your plan via email and I would love to assist you with it. Don’t forget to celebrate when you achieve your goals.