How to Actually Follow Through With Goals

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I’ve written about setting goals before on this blog. It’s safe to say that goals are the #1 thing that helps me change my life when it comes to self-improvement.

We all know that we should set goals and try to improve our futures. Goals help motivate us to reach our dreams, they help us get closer to the future that we want, get closer to who want to be, and just create a life for ourselves that will make us happy.

Making ourselves happy is key! It’s important to set goals based on the lives WE want to live, not the lives society or other people deem to be the “right way” to live.

But what about how to stick to your goals and how to follow through with them? It’s wonderful to have a goal but it’s kind of pointless when you aren’t actually trying to achieve it, right? How do we stay committed to the wonderful goals that we set for ourselves?

That’s what I want to talk about today!

Here are my 8 tips for actually following through with goals that you set for yourself:

1- Decide if each goal is actually important to you.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that the goals that you set for yourself are actually what you want. For example, let’s say your goal is to lose 10 pounds – but you never take any of the steps you need to take to lose weight. Do you really want to lose 10 pounds because it’s important to YOU to weigh that magic number, or do you want to lose 10 pounds because you read somewhere that you’re supposed to weigh X amount of pounds? If the goal isn’t important to you, there’s no reason you have to do it. You’re just wasting time and energy.

2- Determine what you need to do to reach your goals.

It’s hard to achieve something when you don’t really know what you need to do to achieve it. So it’s important to come up with an action plan for reaching your goals. This not only helps you know what to do to reach them, but it also helps make them seem much more doable. So do some research if you have to, and write down each step you’ll need to take to reach your goal(s). Then try to do something every day that will help you get closer to reaching them, and cross off the steps as you go.

3- Make time for your goals.

How can you expect to make your goals a reality if you’re always “too busy” to take steps to reach them? Instead of making excuses, ask yourself what you can take off of your schedule or what commitments you can say no to in order to give yourself time to work on your goals. If you want to lose 10 pounds, you’re going to have to make time for exercises that help you lose weight, and you’re going to have to make time to find (and/or make) some healthy meals. Take your goals seriously and do what you can to make time for them. If that means you have to say no to some things that aren’t as important to you, that’s okay.

4- Keep track of your progress.

Doing regular check-ins on your goals can drastically increase your chances of reaching them. So write down your goals and do a weekly or monthly check-in to track your progress with them. Using the example of wanting to lose 10 pounds again, write down that goal and then write your current weight next to it. Then do a weekly weigh-in and write down how much weight you’re losing. It can be easy to lose your motivation and even give up when you’re not seeing results, so tracking your progress is a great way to stay motivated and excited about your goals. One of my favorite ways to track my goals is to use my bullet journal. This can help you be creative and make goal-tracking more fun and easy!

7- Step up and overcome your fears.

Sometimes fear may be in the way of you reaching your goals. Our fears may never go away completely, but it’s still important to be able to step out of your comfort zone and overcome them, at least once in a while. Do you want to start going to the gym, but you’re scared people will be staring at you or judging you? Give yourself a pep talk and prepare yourself for facing those big scary fears. Take your goal seriously and don’t let anything get in your way. Remember that you’ve got this and reaching that goal is worth the effort. Trust me when I say that fear is easier to get over than regret.

6- Give yourself rewards.

I would hope that you already know by now just how much I believe in the power of rewards. I’ve pointed out all of the wonderful reasons why before, and even the studies that show it, but basically people are way more likely to reach their goals if they have some sort of incentive. Like, if you’re being rewarded for doing something, you’d definitely want to get it done, right? So come up with a list of rewards for each milestone you achieve on the way to reaching your goal – or each step you cross off of your action plan.

7- Figure out some sort of support system.

Some goals are hard (or even impossible) for us to achieve all by ourselves. Sometimes it’s helpful to enlist the help of someone for support in the way we need it. This could be finding a mentor to give you advice. Or it could be finding someone to cheer us on and motivate us. It could also be someone to check in with us and hold us accountable for our goals. If you need someone to support you, ask a family member, friend, or even co-worker, or boss. You could also look into finding a health coach, business coach, life coach, etc. You could even find an online forum or group of people with similar goals and team up with them for support. If you want to, you can even email me because I love helping people reach their goals!

8- Remember why you’re doing it.

If you know that you should be doing something to work toward your goal, but you’re not doing it, remember your “why.” Remember why this goal is important to you, think about how great you’ll feel once you’ve finally reached it, and remember that you CAN do it. Would you really rather reach that goal or procrastinate? Think about how much happier you’ll be when you finally get where you want to be. Remember why you want that goal so bad and start doing something about it. You’ll thank yourself later!