Achieving Your Goals Part II - Form a Plan

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“To be always intending to make a new and better life but never to find time to set about it is as…to put off eating and drinking and sleeping from one day to the next until you’re dead.” - Og Mandino

Okay, now you have your top three goals. You know where you want to go and what you want to achieve. So how do you get from here to there? If you are in Miami and you want to get to the Met opera in New York, what do you do? You plan a route. You decide on a means of transport (by plane, car, bus, train, foot ) and then map out a route. You do not just jump in the car, start the ignition and start driving without any idea of what road you are going to take. Why? Because you will never get there! You will be wandering around aimlessly for all eternity.

Break out your plan

Once you have your goal, the next step is to map out a plan for achieving it - as detailed a plan as possible. If you want to become VP of Sales, then you need to plan how you are going to get there. Are you going to get promotions up the ladder? Are you going to go back to school and further your education? Are you going to do both? Are you going to network and make contacts with the right people? Are you going to post your resume with job placement agencies? Are you going to do all of these? It is important that you sit down and think about how you are going to go about achieving your goal.

Then with each item, break it out even more. If you are going to seek to get promotions within your company, how are you going to make yourself promotable? Re-education? Make yourself more visible by volunteering for the tough projects and hand them in on, or before time? Do an outstanding job at all your projects? Volunteer for non-work but office related recreational activities like the company baseball team? Go to office parties, picnics and so on? Sit down and brainstorm – come up with as many ideas as possible and pick the ones you think are most viable.

Using our example goal of losing 15 pounds of weight in 3 months, how will we achieve this? Diet pills? Change of diet? Exercise? Stomach surgery? Of these, think about which ones are the most viable. Stomach surgery is expensive and unnatural. Diet pills are also unnatural and may have side effects. So you might settle on changing your diet and exercising. Breaking these out further, we might decide on a particular diet plan of what we are going to eat – vegetables, fish, chicken, fruits, water, fruit juices. You may also want to think about what you are not going to eat. But I would not recommend focusing on what you can’t have but on what you can have, in keeping with the theme of being positive because the mind can better achieve positive objectives.

With regards to the exercise, we should decide on the form of exercise. Sports? Gym? Aerobics tapes? Pilates? Calisthenics? Personal trainer? Say we choose to go to the gym and do aerobics tapes at home. Next we need to plan a schedule for this exercise. I would advise that you put it at the same time each day, such as first thing in the morning as it then becomes a habit and is easier to incorporate into your life. You will be less likely to slip up and miss a day, which is the road to disaster as we will discuss in another article in this series.

Planning for obstacles

Now you have your goals and you have a plan for how you are going to achieve them. Well that took some thought but it was not so difficult. So now it should be easy to achieve them right? Well, if you have any experience at life at all you know that good intentions are the easiest thing to get left by the wayside. What you need now is a plan for making sure you do what you are supposed to do even when you do not feel like doing it. Now this is very very important. Possibly the most important part of this goal achievement process so I will repeat it: You need a plan to ensure that you will do what you are supposed to do even when you don’t feel like doing it. Because there will be many times when you will not feel like doing what you are supposed to do.

I mean really, do you think that you are going to spring out of bed every morning feeling to exercise? Eventually, when it becomes a habit, you will but not in the beginning. In the beginning, you will open your eyes, groan, and ask yourself what you are getting out of your nice warm bed to go and torment your body for? And this is where most people fall down. This is the main reason that most people do not achieve their goals. So you need to do everything possible right now to give yourself the best possible chance of success. The remaining articles in this series will be discussing different ways in which you can achieve this.

Identify Milestones

One of the first methods is to set milestones. So in our example goal of losing 15 lbs in 3 months, one set of milestones will be to lose 5 lbs per month. So you will clearly write out your current weight, and your expected weight as of the date at the end of each month. You will post this up in a position that you cannot help but see it every single day – several places even – on the bathroom mirror, on the fridge door, on the tv, on the computer monitor. This will keep it in your mind. You cannot achieve a goal that is not in your mind at all times. The article on Changing your environment will provide further information on this. For now, think up your milestones, and the different segments of your plan. List the dates by which each segment or milestone must be achieved. And post this up where you are bound to see it every day.

You need to identify what it is you are going to do each day towards achieving your goal. These will be your daily milestones. Be very clear, if you are not doing something to move you towards achieving your goal then you are doing something that will move you further away from it. This is one of the reasons that I suggest that you only work on two or three goals at a time. So for our example goal, clearly identify your meal plan – the clearer and more detailed you are the more likely you will succeed. Clearly identify your exercise plan - what days you will go to the gym, what time you will go, how long you plan to spend there, even what machines you will use at the gym. This in depth formulation of your plan has an additional benefit of increasing your thinking about it, which will set your goal even more firmly in your mind. This will be discussed further under Keeping your goal in mind at all times.

Prepare for success

Planning the details can help reduce the instances when you are tempted to not go according to plan. I suggest that you plan your gym clothes, your sneakers, how you are going to get to the gym and back I suggest that you plan what you are going to eat as snacks, and main meals. This helps prevent temptations to forget about your goal. It also helps prevent the opportunity for excuses to arise. The fact that you don’t have proper gym clothes is a good excuse for not going to the gym. The fact that you have to buy lunch and all the restaurants around your office only serve high fat unhealthy foods is another good excuse for straying from your diet. These excuses are likely to delay or prevent your achievement of your goal.

Being prepared helps to offset these possible problems before they have an opportunity to occur. Pack your lunch from home so you are sure you have healthy food to eat (and just to be clear, chocolate pudding does not classify as a healthy food). Get the necessary gym clothes, sneakers and bag, and pack your gym bag the night before. Preparation is a very important part of success.

How are you going to use this information to form your goal plan now?

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Next article in the Achieving Your Goals Series: Make a Commitment

Related Articles:

• Achieving Your Goals Part I - Goal Identification
• Achieving Your Goals Part III - Make a Commitment
• Achieving Your Goals Part IV - Staying Motivated
• Achieving Your Goals Part V - Change Your Environment
• Achieving Your Goals Part VI - Change Your Thinking
• Achieving Your Goals Part VII - Discipline and Vocabulary

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 1:47 pm and is filed under A New Start, Goals . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.