The Susie Zone - Taking a Step-by-Step Approach to Writing Your Personal Goals (December 2018)

Taking a Step-by-Step Approach to Writing Your Personal Goals
by Susie J. Briscoe 

All of us have goals and ambitions but many of us, unfortunately, find we don't reach them as quickly or as efficiently as we would like. Take New Years for instance as the perfect example: how many times have you heard people tell you their resolutions to lose weight, build muscle, or give up smoking… only to then give up on the idea only a few weeks later after they've started to find the whole thing too tiring.

The problem is that these goals are too large and too abstract and thus too easy to just kind of, well, forget. The solution then is to break those goals down into much smaller things that you actually can accomplish and that will nevertheless add up to provide cumulative benefits over time.

Why Smaller Steps Work Better

This is the idea of 'Kaizen' – taking small steps to achieve big goals. Not only does this make your goal more manageable and less daunting, but it also makes it more concrete and measurable.

So say your goal was to build muscle by working out. If you were to make your body look like a cover model's by the end of the year, you would almost certainly fail; not because the goal is too ambitious (though this may be a factor) but rather because it's so vague and so 'far off'. Your goal can be to look like that in a year but this doesn't prevent you from eating cake and slacking off tomorrow. Why? Because you can simply 'make up for it later'.

Instead, make the goal be simply to 'exercise twice a week'. This is a much smaller goal but it's also a much more concrete goal. In other words, it's something you can either succeed at or fail at within a week. That means you can't talk your way out of doing what you need to do and it means you can't skip workouts.

But while you're busy focusing on this small goal, you'll find that you end up achieving the big one overall.

It's great to have an end destination in mind, but it's even more important to have each step mapped out for you. This is how you can make sure that you're making the right moves and right decisions every single day to move you closer to that goal.

Look at your current goals and ask yourself "How can I break them down into smaller, manageable chunks?"

So do this. Have some fun with it. Think about the kind of person you want to be, write it down, explain it in as much detail as possible and then do it daily and repeat it to yourself and start living this way.

All those material goals and wants are going to come to you and remember to include the intangible goals too!

Don’t forget to share with me what you discovered during this month and let me know if I may share it within this newsletter next month.