15 Easy Steps for How to Reach Your Goals and Dreams in Life
How to achieve your dreams and goals in life.
From a young age, we start to have dreams and goals in life. If only there was a school textbook entitled, “15 Easy steps for how to reach your goals and dreams in life”, we would probably be far more together and organised by the time we left school and started on our adult journey. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case and so many of us are left to wander through our lives without a clear direction or plan. Unless of course, we have some intervention often in the shape of a Life Coach.
Life Coaching sessions are often about goal setting, helping the client achieve something that they want or need, whether that may be a new career, weight loss, improving their relationships, dealing with anxiety, or creating a better work/life balance.
Goal setting is often something that people can be quite nervous about because they often approach it from a place of lack or negative space ie; they want a new career because they aren't happy with their current situation or they want to lose weight because they aren't happy physically with themselves.
These goals can often make people feel that they have failed in some way or that they have not achieved enough in life which in turn leads them to develop negative thoughts regarding themselves and their goals.
There are many ways that you can approach goal setting and long-held dreams in your life and make them a reality. Following the tips below will give you a great start.
Have clear written goals.
One of the first steps is to make sure that you have clear, written goals and know exactly what it is that you want from your life.
This can save you much, time, stress and uncertainty later on.
Develop a detailed step-by-step plan
Whatever dreams or goals you have, you need to have a clear and detailed step-by-step plan of how you are going to achieve them.
It’s pointless having a desire if you have no idea of how it is going to be realised.
Divide larger steps into smaller steps
The term for this in coaching is chunking, Here it is chunking down, taking a larger goal and breaking it down into more manageable compartments. This stops you from becoming too overwhelmed and makes sure that you don’t miss anything vital and makes it an easier process to follow.
Keep track of your progress
Make sure that you keep track of your progress as you are going along. It's all too easy to get sidetracked, miss a step, or for your plans and goals to start to change if you don’t keep an eye on them. Check in constantly with your goals to see if they need tweaking and to make sure that you are staying true to your plan.
5. Recognize hurdles and figure out how to overcome them
Often something truly worth having can be a long battle to get it. The things that we want most from life can often cause us issues and there can often be hurdles to get over. Knowing this in advance can prepare us for any issues down the line and we can have plans to stop us from derailing.
6. Have confidence in yourself and your ability
To achieve any dream or goal that you set for yourself you have to have confidence in yourself and in your ability to get it.
There is no point in starting down a path towards a goal if you don’t believe that you are going to reach it.
You will be destined to fail from the start. Have confidence and belief in yourself, set reaffirming mantras that you are going to succeed and never let doubt or disbelief creep in.
7. Use visualization techniques to envision your goals
One of the best tools at your disposal when you are dream-setting is to use visualisation to envision your goal. A visual image that you keep in your mind will make your brain believe that the goal you are aiming for is real. It keeps your belief and good vibrations up making sure that your goal becomes your reality.
8. Develop the mindset and habit of working hard
If you really want something then you have to be prepared to work for it. Nothing will just come for you unless you develop the right work mindset, and more importantly, things that come too easily in life are often taken for granted and not appreciated. Make sure that you have a winning mindset and are prepared to work for the goals and dreams that you have.
9. Be consistent In your actions
Consistency is one of the keys to success. Developing a plan and then sticking to it will mean that you are more likely to reach your destination than constantly chopping and changing and trying different techniques.
10. Surround Yourself With Positive People
Who you choose to surround yourself with will play a big part in reaching your goals. If you are surrounded by negative people who constantly talk you down and have negative opinions, then pretty soon you could end up thinking like them and sabotaging your plans.
Pick positive, life-affirming people to be surrounded by, people who are going to lift you up and encourage you along the way.
11. Learn the skill of prioritizing your tasks
You need to know what to prioritize, what to do first and what can be put off when you are goal setting. You can’t do everything at once, so make sure you plan out what needs to be done first. This will save much stress and overwhelm as you go along and will also make sure that nothing is left behind.
12. Cut negative people out of your life and thoughts
This is a tough one, especially if the negative characters are family members. The fact is, when you are goal-setting, you need to have people who are going to be on your side, working with you and supporting you. Negative characters will only ever see the problems in life.
If you can’t cut them out completely, make sure that they don’t have any influence over you and try to filter their chatter out as much as possible.
13. Be prepared to take some risks in life
Sometimes in life, you need to take some risks. Always following the safe option, is a surefire way of never really achieving the big things in life. Risks can elevate life from mediocre to fabulous if you have the tenacity to take some risks
14. Be accountable for your actions
If you make mistakes, own them. Sometimes the best life lessons are learned by making mistakes. Always blaming others and never being accountable to yourself will mean that you miss out on some very valuable life lessons. Be accountable to grow.
15. Keep a sense of fun throughout the journey
A crucial point is don’t take everything too seriously all of the time. Of course, there are going to be times when you need to be serious but you have to make sure that you are having fun along the way as well.
How to achieve your dreams in life
Adopt an attitude of gratitude
If you want to achieve your dreams in life then you should adopt an attitude of gratitude. Many people lack gratitude in life, which means that they never fully realise all of their dreams and ambitions.
They constantly revert back to bad times that have happened in the past and apply these failures to their future lives and never fully appreciate all of the amazing things that they have in their lives NOW.
They also have the idea that it is in the future when everything will be good, where they will be happy and successful and live the life that they want. Gratitude is not expressed for everything that they have now and so therefore they miss out on such much that life has already given them.
This constant habit of looking into the future and thinking that life will be better is what leads to goals not being achieved and is what keeps people in their negative mindset.
Therefore changing the way that you think and approach goal setting from a place of gratitude and of being in the moment will make the success of your goals far more achievable.
Having dreams and goal setting may feel unattainable at first, usually because of self-limiting beliefs. Your mind will often get in the way of dreams and ambitions and will prevent you from seeing all that you can do and achieve.
It will often refer back to times when you missed the mark and didn't manage to do something and will convince you that that is how it will always be in the future. Your mind will set you obstacles that you will believe you will not be able to overcome. This though is a normal experience that most people will suffer from in life, it is not unique to just you and it is something that you can overcome.
Realizing that it is your mind that has presented these obstacles just as abstract thoughts and not as solid facts is the first step to achieving your goals.
These limiting thoughts that the mind throws up as absolute facts that convince us of our limitations can be very convincing. For example “ I can't lose weight” is not a fact at all, it is just a limiting belief thought that your mind throws up when you want to lose weight based on thoughts that you have had in the past, which have resulted in certain actions.
By establishing that this is a thought and not a fact, you can then see that by applying a new set of thoughts such as “ I can lose weight” or “ I will lose weight”, you can achieve your desired goals.
Point your brain in the right direction.
A goal that you have set yourself will give your brain a direction to travel in and the brain likes to be given direct action to take and will follow commands very efficiently.
The Universal idea of thoughts producing feelings that bring about actions and then subsequently result in runs throughout the coaching practice. By having the thought that you can achieve your goals you will create positive’ affirmative feelings which will drive your results of achieving your goals. It’s a common idea that if you can think it then you can do it.
With the right mindset, everything in life is possible. It isn't a question of some people being luckier than others or some people getting more breaks out of life, although sometimes it may seem this way. It is a consequence of people having a thought of what they want to achieve and then believing that they can reach it and have true conviction in their thoughts and beliefs about themselves that they reach their result successfully.
We are normally always the ones to destroy our goals by what we think. Even if it is because we think somebody else has achieved things because of what they have, we cannot know for sure what another person has gone through to attain all that they have in their lives. We are projecting our thoughts onto other people and coming up with facts based on nothing more than our assumptions.
To fully achieve the goals that you want from life, therefore, you have to change the way that you think and reprogramme your brain to visualize success.
Once your brain has images of success in place, it will automatically start adopting these as facts that have occurred, and then it will start to act in the desired way.
This trick of convincing the brain is easy to do once you start to practice it and you will then begin to realize that the only thing that is holding you back from achieving the goals that you set for yourself is your own limitations.
Final Thoughts
Following the above 15 easy steps for how to reach your goals and dreams in life, should give you a great starting point for your future.
If you would like to see how Life Coaching can aid you in reaching your dreams and achieving your goals then click on the link on how coaching can help you reach your goals.
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If you have any tips on goals please comment and share
