How To Set Realistic Goals And Achieve Them

Setting realistic goals are important for many reasons. To see the importance of setting realistic goals, check out this blog post we wrote about that specific topic. However, knowing how to set realistic goals and going out and achieving them are two different things. In this blog post we will go over how to set realistic goals and how you could go about achieving them. Whether you’re looking to set goals for work, personal life, etc, this blog post will be applicable!

The Difference Between Goals, Objectives, and Action Plans

The first thing you need to know when it comes down to setting realistic goals to be successful is understanding the difference between goals, objectives, and action plans.

What Goals Are

Goals are the long term visions of your project or the desired outcomes you want to achieve. Whether the goal is increasing your vertical leap, income, strength, grades, or any other measureable outcome, it needs to be measurable and attainable.

What Exactly Are Objectives

Objectives break down the larger goal into smaller/manageable steps. An example of an objective would be to increase your income by 10% in the next year. Or increase your bench press by 5 pounds per week.

What Is An Action Plan

An action plan is the specific steps you need to take in order to achieve your objectives and reach your goals. For example when it comes to the bench press example, the action plan would be something like going to the gym four times per week, doing a 5 sets of 8 reps with increasing weights each time you go.

Knowing the difference between these three give you the ability to execute on your plan and reach your desired outcome.

Setting Realistic Goals Or In Other Words Smart Goals

Now that we’ve went over the difference between goals, objectives and action plans, it’s time to dive into what a realistic or smart goal is. A smart goal stands for Specific Measurable Actionable Realistic Timetabled.

Specific: A specific goal is clear and concise. You aren’t just going with the flow. Every single action you do is to help achieve the goal. We’re going to use blogging as an example. Let’s say your goal is to hit $10 per day with your blog within the next year. This gives you the specific bench mark to reverse engineer and figure things out.

Measurable: You need to be able to measure the success of your goal in order to know if you are on track with it or not. For example, this goal can be easily measured by tracking your income from blogging every month and checking to see if you are closer or farther away from achieving your goal.

Achievable: You want to make sure the goal is achievable. Setting the goal to make $1 million per year from the blog you just started wouldn’t be a great idea. It would be better to start with a more achievable goal like $10 per day in the next year and work your way up from there.

Relevant Goal: The goal should be relevant to your life and current goals. If you’re a student, setting a goal to make $10 per day from blogging probably isn’t the best use of your time since school is more important. However, if you’re at the point in your life where you’re working a 9-5 and need some additional income, starting a blog may be relevant to your life and the goal of making $10 per day may be smart.

Time-Based: Lastly, you want to set a time frame for your goal. This will allow you to hold yourself accountable and reach your goals in an efficient manner. Going back to the example of blogging, setting a goal to make $10 per day within the next year is a good example of a time-based goal.

The Concept Of Taking Small Steps To Achieve a Larger Goal

As someone who earns additional money online. I realized that if I was able to learn how to make just $1 per day online, that I would be able to then scale it and make $10, and so on.

Let’s take a look at a very successful blogging business, Mashable.com. The blog started out as a place where people read about advice on how specific technology works. However, today it has multiple categories including tech, science, life, entertainment and more.

Not only have they expanded on their categories, but they also have 992,000 followers and counting on Instagram.

The expansion of Mashable didn’t start all at once though. They started writing on one particular category, they probably didn’t post too much on Instagram either. They slowly took small steps to achieve their larger goal, and today they are a multi-million dollar business.

Here’s How You Could Do The Same With Smaller Achievable Goals

Start by doing the main thing. If you start a blog, focus on writing 100 blog posts and perfecting your craft. This is the main thing that will help you reach your goal.

Once you achieve those 100 blog posts, measure your success, income, traffic, or whatever goal you set for yourself. This will give you a baseline to work from.

From there, start taking small steps towards your larger goals. If this was Mashable, that could mean expanding into different categories and then slowly building out their presence on Instagram.

This example is just an example from a blogging standpoint. However, you could apply this to anything.

If you started this goal by writing blog posts, creating instagram posts, twitter posts TikTok posts, and other things all at once, there’s a good chance you will have a problem with being overwhelmed and give up all together.

The Need To Believe In Your Goal And Visualize It To Achieve It

Many people talk about visualisation and how powerful it is, but is it that powerful? The answer is yes. When you have a clear mental image of your goal, you are more motivated and inspired to work towards it.

Visualisation helps you to focus on your thoughts and energy towards your goal. The best way I like to visualize my goals is by writing them down. Every single morning, I set goals for the day in my journal (see above) which allows me to see it and focus on it. If I don’t do this, I’m usually scatterbrained and I don’t get a lot done. Other ways you could visualize your goals is by:

1. Creating a vision board
2. Close your eyes and see it happening

Tracking And Adjusting Your Goals To Stay On Track

Setting a goal and blindly following it without assessing its effectiveness can lead to frustration. It very important to constantly evaluate your progress and see what’s working and what’s not.

For example, let’s say you want to lose weight and you started out by doing a certain macro style of eating and 30 minutes of cardio a day. However after tracking your progress for 3 weeks, you see that you’re not losing weight. Instead of blindly continuing with the diet, you need to figure out another game plan to make sure you hit your goal by the end of the time-table that you set.

Let’s say you start a boutique business and sell clothing. And your process is to go to fairs and sell your items along with selling online. After a few weeks, you notice that only the fairs are bringing in a decent amount of sales while your online shop is not doing so well. You need to assess why and make adjustments regarding your marketing strategy. During that process it may make sense to take part in more events.

Conclusion

If you follow these steps, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have a much larger chance to hit your goals in the long run. Just be sure to be organized and consistent. I hope these things will help you as much as they have helped me.