You Can Make it Happen

How to Stop Making Excuses and Achieve Your Goals

Anthony Ekanem

• Publisher: Anthony Ekanem
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783966618489
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Time Management

How many incomplete goals do you currently have on your agenda? If youre anything like the vast majority of us, chances are that you have hundreds of projects that you started and never completed, countless goals that you told your friends but never saw through and all kinds of dreams that seem to be getting less and less likely to come to fruition. And it is for this reason that you may find people roll their eyes when you tell them your next big project. When you start a new training programme to lose weight, and everyone including you knows that youre likely to have lost interest by month two. Or when you talk about the application you intend to make, the website, or the business project. Or when you talk about that dream trip to another country. This is the way of things for many of us. We work incredibly hard at things we dont feel passionate about just to put food on the table but when it comes to fulfilling our dreams, we are remarkably ineffective. Its time to change all that and start making those goals happen. But how can you turn it all around? Accomplishing goals is about strategy; it is about making a cognitive shift to change the way youre thinking and its about being smart about how you approach each goal. It is also about knowing how to choose your goals and even how to phrase them. This book is going to show you how to make those changes. Youll learn how to choose and write goals effectively, how to write effective action plans and how to make sure you stick with your goals and never give up. This book is a little different from most goal-setting books. After we have given you the broad tools you need to start setting and accomplishing your goals, we are going to take a look at how you can begin to put them into practice. While a goal can be anything, for many of us they are going to fall into one of a few different categories. Most of us have goals for our relationships, goals for our fitness, goals for our careers and goals for travel. Were going to provide not only the abstract strategies you need to start making effective goals, but also the step-to-step processes that will let you apply these strategies in each of these areas. By the end of this book, youll be proficient at setting and accomplishing any goal. And at the same time, youll have powerful strategies for improving your relationships, your fitness, your career and more.

Chapter 1

Goal Setting: The Most Powerful Skill You Can Learn

 

Learning how to set goals properly is arguably the most powerful skill that you can possibly learn. Why? Because it will allow you to accomplish a huge range of other goals. When you know how to set goals, it allows you to effectively work toward anything. This is the key to unlocking everything you could want from life.

 

So ironically, the first goal you should focus on is the goal of setting goals! And until now, you’ve probably been doing it all wrong.

 

How can a goal be wrong?

Sure, any objective is a worthwhile one, but the way that you phrase your goals and structure them, is going to massively change your likelihood of finding success.

 

Let’s take weight loss as an example because it’s one of the more straightforward goals that is easiest to implement. When you set out to lose weight, you should start with a concrete goal. And for most people, this will look something like this: “Lose 2 stone by next year”. This is a terrible goal. Why? First of all, it is far too vague. How are you losing weight? Weight from where? Why do you want to lose the weight? What do you actually want to look like?

 

At the same time, it’s out of your control. Even if you are completely committed to your goal, you may find that outside forces prevent you from being successful. Maybe you get ill, maybe you accidentally follow the wrong programme, maybe it turns out you have a bad metabolism!

 

Finally, the goal is too far in the future. If your goal is to lose weight by next year, that essentially gives you a license to procrastinate. The target is so far away, that you indulge yourself in a little overeating or put off exercise for a while and not worry about it until next month. Six months pass and you realize you’re actually further from your goal. And because it’s too late, you’re likely to just give up at this point. Not a good goal!

 

What Good Goals Look Like

So, what does a good goal look like? How might you phrase this same objective in a manner that will increase your chances of success?

 

The first thing to do is to focus on things that are immediately within your control and that are not influenced by outside factors at all. These goals should be things that you can accomplish in a guaranteed manner and that you will be immediately graded on a pass-fail basis.

 

So for instance, instead of aiming to lose 2 stone by next year, you would use this goal: “I will work out three times a week, every week, for at least 15 minutes”.

 

Now that is a goal that you can aim for. Regardless of your metabolism, or of injury, or of any other outside factor, this is a goal that you can accomplish. It also means you can’t ‘put off’ the goal and it means you’ll never reach that disappointing point where you can no longer stand any chance of completing it. At any point in your life, there is no reason that you can’t set out to accomplish this goal and expect to be successful.

 

By focusing on this small short- term goal, you will find that the long-term goal of losing the weight takes care of itself.

 

How to Formulate Your Goals

It doesn’t mean that any short-term goal that is binary in nature is going to cut it. First of all, you need to know what you want and make sure that the goal you are setting for yourself is going to help you get there. You need your goals to be intrinsically motivating and that means that you have to feel truly passionate about them. It is only by following a goal you really feel excited about, that you will find you have the energy and motivation to keep going.

 

Working out for 15 minutes a day is an effective goal because it is sure to take you closer to your broader goal of losing weight. By keeping that end goal in mind, you should stand a better chance of staying motivated to work out even when you’re feeling tired, or when you’re feeling low on willpower.

 

And you shouldn’t just be aiming to ‘lose weight’ either. Instead, you should have a more concrete vision of what this entails. Do you want to be thinner? Do you want to be more muscular? Why do you want that thing? Is it so that you will be more attractive to the opposite sex? Or because you want more energy? Be honest with yourself and listen to that drive inside that is pushing you toward the goal you want to accomplish.

 

If your goal is to make money, try to focus on what the emotional hook is that is making you want that money. It likely boils down to more than cash – maybe its status you really want? Power? Confidence? Freedom? Only by really understanding the true nature of your own dreams can you (a) take the fastest route to accomplishing them and (b) maintain the drive and motivation you’re going to need to get there. This is going to require some soul-searching!

 

Moreover, you need to ensure that the goals are achievable and realistic and that you have broken them down into small enough steps. Case in point: our goal for weight loss is to work out 15 minutes per day. That’s a tiny amount but it works because it’s achievable and realistic. If you make your goal harder – such as working out for an hour a day – then you’re going to find you’re quickly disappointed when you can’t find the time or the energy. You’ll put off the exercise and make excuses. The best part about training for just 15 minutes is that once you start, you’ll often find you go for longer.

 

Put it this way: it’s much better to have a small, easy-to-accomplish goal and stick with it, than it is to have a massive, life-changing goal that you can’t manage!

 

But of course, if you’re making your goal smaller, that means that it will take you longer to reach the eventual destination you’re gunning for. This is not a problem: this is just another thing you need to accept if you want to accomplish anything. Things worth having, take time. Take small steady steps and enjoy the journey.

 

Chapter 2

How to Structure Goals and Make Your Plan

Now you know the basis of what makes a great goal; it’s time to actually start building these kinds of goals for yourself. In this chapter, we’ll lay out some simple instructions that you can follow to begin putting these ideas into practice.

Later we’ll be applying this same formula to different areas of your life, so that you can start going after a better body, better salary and better love life. But in each instance, we’ll be reapplying this same strategy.

Step 1: Visualization

The first and most important step is to visualize what you want and to really understand what you want. We already discussed this a little in respect to becoming richer. Often you’ll find it’s not really the money that you want but rather what that money represents in terms of your lifestyle or your status.

The same goes for being fit. It’s not enough to want to be thinner or healthier, you need to understand your own motivations for wanting that. Do you want to feel more physically capable, perhaps become a professional athlete? Do you want to prevent the deterioration that many experience as they age? Or do you want to look amazing so that you can be more successful with the opposite sex?

The best way to get an idea of what you want from life in any given area is often to just visualize your future. That means closing your eyes and just calling to mind your ideal future. Where are you? What do you look like? What do you do for a living? Who are you with?

By picturing your future in this abstract way, you’ll be able to start analysing what it is that you’re actually trying to accomplish and from there you can begin to look at the more concrete steps you’d need to take in order to get there.

Some other strategies that can help with this are:

• Looking at your role models and seeing what they have in common
• Thinking about the things that excite you, your hobbies, the things you’re a fan of, etc.
• Thinking about the last time you felt truly happy, or truly alive

From there, it’s also a good idea to think about the actual reality and to visualize what it would be like to get there and to live that life. Do you still want it?

For example, it’s very easy to want to be a rock star in theory but you might not like the actual lifestyle: it would mean spending a lot of your life touring, being in the public eye and probably struggling to raise a family.

This is why we’re thinking in abstractions at this point. Because you may find that the reality of being a rock star is not something you really want – in which case you’re going to start again and tap into what it was about that lifestyle that appealed to you. Are there other ways you can satisfy the same emotional goals? If you want to be recognized for your music, then you could try playing an instrument on YouTube or Band Camp! If you just want to be a professional musician, you could compose music for computer games or videos.

But it doesn’t all have to be about your career either: you could just as easily find that you’re happy just busking, or making music in your spare time.

Getting to the core of what you want like this can also help you to overcome impossible odds. If you want to be an astronaut for example, you might have to come to terms with the fact that you are too old and it’s now unlikely to ever happen. But ask yourself why that appeals to you on an emotional level. Maybe it comes down to your love of space, in which case you might be equally satisfied by being an astronomer? Maybe it comes down to your love of exploration and discovery, in which case you could be an explorer, or maybe just a researcher.

Step 2: Assess Your Situation Honestly and Thoroughly

The next crucial step is to assess your current position versus the ideal one that you have visualized. This is where you’re going to analyse the gulf between real life and y...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Goal Setting: The Most Powerful Skill You Can Learn
• Chapter 2
• How to Structure Goals and Make Your Plan
• Chapter 3
• Letting Go of Fear
• Chapter 4
• How to Make Your Fitness Goals Happen
• Chapter 5
• How to Make Your Career Goals Happen
• Chapter 6
• How to Make Your Relationship Goals Happen
• Chapter 7
• How to Make Your Travel Goals Happen
• Conclusions