15 Tips To Help Simplify Future Goals

2 Short Term Task List

You might find it helpful to create short term lists for completion. One method is to write out a list of tasks you want to get done in two weeks. At the beginning of the two week period, you can assess what gone done and what didn’t.

This helps you to stay on track and can be more effective than daily goals that potentially put too much pressure on you. Too much pressure when it comes to goals can be counter-productive for some, making this method more effective.

On the other end of the spectrum, long term goals may not be motivating enough to keep pushing forward. If you plan to have a certain amount of money in your bank account in one years’ time, you may be subject to instant gratification. It’s not easy to be mindful about money saving goals on such a grand scale. To create a system like this, you can easily break down your monthly and yearly goals in smaller chunks. This allows you to keep your eye on the prize.

3 Check out Your Core Beliefs

Within our goal oriented minds, there are reasons we will succeed and reasons we will fail. By asking ourselves what our values, skills and attitude is, it can help you stay true to what you want. This is why the success we experience when it comes to our goals should be celebrated. You did it from the very core of your being. Which is why you should address the core of yourself to achieve goals more effectively with less effort.

What are your values? For example, if you’re pro-environment, it wouldn’t make much sense to have a goal of owning a sports car. If you own a company, what are you doing daily that will create measurable impact?

Do you have the skills to achieve your goals? If you do have the skills already, that’s great. If you don’t, one of the steps you should take is to get those skills. Or if you have a team of people, find out how to create a cohesive unit within the work environment where everyone utilizes the necessary skills.

Attitude is an important one. What do you see when you think of your goals? How do you feel about the obstacles that are in front of you? To more effectively get past whatever barriers exist, seeing obstacles as opportunities are helpful. Think about what that means to you.

4 Consider the Risk of Not Meeting Your Goals

This technique is something you may have heard Tony Robbins talk about if you happen to follow him. It’s the opposite of imaging that you succeeded. You imagine what your life will look like if you don’t meet your goals. Goals are often something that is very close to our heart. So if you don’t meet them, you’re not as satisfied with life as you could be.

By considering how life would look if you fail to accomplish your goals, it will really light a fire in you to succeed. Honestly, if it doesn’t make you ache somewhere inside to not make this goal when you think about it, maybe you should look for another goal.

When your goals become a ‘must’, you will never quit. Sometimes, it takes thinking about never obtaining the goal to get to that place of ‘must’.

5 Create a Mind Map

Many find it very effective to think about how it will feel when they achieve the goal. They imagine in depth how it would look like when manifested into the physical world. If it’s related to something financial, this could entail something material that really lets you know you made it in the world.

To see what you want to achieve in great detail is step #1. The next step is to create a map that will lead you through the most direct route to achieving your goal. Think of the first step you need to take but the one that feels most direct.

If you’re looking to make a million dollars, it’s not a direct route to cut down on how many fancy coffees you buy in a week. Investing wisely in the stock market is a more direct route to building a bigger bank account. Leveraging your cash flow would be a greater method to getting to the money mark much faster.

6 Know Your Core Values & Vision

Have you ever heard the term, “if you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for everything?” When you know yourself well, you have a greater idea of what you want out of life. So that really is step number one before even making a goal.

To know what goals you’re going after, you have to move forward to get the life you’re after. Knowing what that is will be an important part of the journey. Core values are the internal part of you that makes it a lot easier to navigate through the external world if you’re tapped into your internal desires.

Your core values help you to stay on the right path so that your goals and choices are in alignment with what you really want. When you set goals and make decisions that don’t align with your core values, you’ll feel frustrated and discontented. That’s your internal guidance system trying to get you back on track.

Even if you do meet goals, they may not always feel very fulfilling. When this occurs, it’s probably because they didn’t match your core values. This is why some people are happy with a modest life and some people are miserable when they have all the material things they want.

7 Narrow Your Focus

If you look at a race car driver and consider that their main focus is to win the race. To be in front of everybody else. Sure, there are other things to consider to achieve the goal but it really is just one goal.

There are probably a lot of things you can think of when it comes to goal setting. There are big and small things and they tend to be somewhat scattered. Things like getting more sleeping, taking your dog for longer walks, giving up sugar, and managing tasks more effectively can be in your mix of goals you want to accomplish.

The issue at hand here is that you cause the mind to unnecessarily multi-task. We have learned through scientific studies that mutli-tasking is not a natural way that the mind functions. It causes fogginess and prompts other areas of the body to go into fight/flight response. Also, you don’t effectively manage to accomplish your goals.

This way of goal setting is the more complex way of doing things with very little result. So keep your focus more narrow. Choose a maximum of two goals at one time. Put in all your effort to those things. This will take a shorter time to accomplish them so after a six month period, you’ll have accomplished more if you use this method.

8 Keep Track of Your Progress

It’s important to keep track of how you’re doing when it comes to meeting your goals. What you measure, gets done. First, you challenge certain parts of your life that could be improved and figure out the measurements you care about.

If improving your health is important, measure your waistline. If you want to be a greater leader, you can measure this by how well you’ve planned things in the past. How did you prioritize tasks or how did you deploy your team? If you want to be richer, you’ll have to look through your bank receipts, investments, and how much you’re making.

Knowing where you are right now and why you are there will help you to create a strategy to meeting goals. This takes conscious thinking and looking deep into what you don’t like and what your desires are. Creating a visual of where you want to be is powerful.

9 Seek out Support

A simple way to succeed in getting any goal is to have support from the necessary people. The people that work for you can be instrumental in helping you obtain your goals. First, you have to know exactly what you want and write it all down in chewable, measured steps. If your support system knows how to help you, they are in a better state to execute tasks.

There is something about knowing that people have your back that will also give you the confidence to keep moving forward. This is one of the simplest ways to getting the goals you want to achieve. A tribe who helps you and believes in your work. Also, this means you don’t have to all the work on your own.

10 Mind Your Perceptions

Many times, we try to accomplish too many goals at once because we feel that time is running out. Maybe you’re worried that you’ll forget what you wanted or that your mind will change. Maybe there’s a fear that you’ll run out of motivation or perhaps miss out on a deadline to accomplish the goal.

The thing is, to try to reach goals under stress will not help you achieve anything. You might think that trying to get a whole bunch of items crossed off your goal list is a good idea but you’ll end up stressed. The work you do will be half hearted because you don’t have time to do the deep work that accomplishing goals requires.

Don’t let yourself be rushed to meet your goals. Enjoy the process and know that you have the time. You have lived much of your adult life without these goals being obtained. When you chip away at it daily, you will achieve it. Don’t try to be perfect and not allow yourself the flexibility to take more time than originally expected. This could cause a feeling of defeat which truly is the devil when it comes to getting what you want.

11 Keep Your Goals Clear

Sometimes we tend to be a bit vague about our goals which of course leads to vague results. Maybe you’re planning on eating better in the following year but to be successful, you have to examine what that means. Getting a book that lays out what your meals should look like on a daily basis can be one way of helping you get more specific.

Concrete, actionable words are going to be more effective for any goal you want to achieve. Instead of saying you plan to try new recipes out starting next week, actually find the recipes you plan to try. If that seems too lofty of a goal, start small with just trying new recipes out once or twice a week at first.

12 Set a Schedule, Not a Deadline

Deadlines can tend to cause conflict in the mind which can lead to complicated situations. You will try to bend over backwards to meet unrealistic deadlines which can fully back fire when you don’t meet them. It feels a little like failure when you set out a time scale, procrastinate and then come up empty.

A more simpler approach with less pressure behind it is setting a schedule. When you set a schedule to master something or accomplish something, you’re far more likely to achieve it. You don’t focus on the end goal as scheduling distracts you from that. Instead, you focus on the journey, the day-by-day chipping away at something.

Goal setting takes action which is just as important as intention. Instead of saying you want to lose 20 lbs in six months, schedule those actionable things daily that will allow you to achieve weight loss. When you perform well, this will highly attribute to your success. This quiet, slow, methodical growth isn’t what we naturally want to be doing. The brain looks for the easiest way to get what it wants. That is the resistance to slowly mastering something. Once you do it and you see that it will work every time, you will start using it in other aspects of your life.

13 Figure Out How to Measure Your Success

As we talk about actionable measure, it’s important to stay motivated. A great way to maintain that forward motion is to measure your success. Measuring success also helps you to gauge what is working and what isn’t. This allows you to spend less time wasted on things that are holding you back and not propelling you forward.

What matters most to you? Is it having things or experiencing things? If you’re not motivated by money, maybe it’s the meaning that keeps your soul on fire and pushing for more. Dollar signs are actually a great gauge regardless of how you think of money. After all, if you weren’t making money, you wouldn’t be able to continue pursuing some business ventures.

Listen to your feelings. Are you exhausted? Spinning your tires for very little gain? These are realistic questions you’ll want to ask yourself when trying to accomplish something. Even if you’re making a lot of money, if you’ve lost the meaning for you, that’s another gauge to pay attention to. Some people will spend years working towards goals that no longer matter to them. They didn’t measure their success or take stock.

14 Figure Out How to Minimize the Need to Make Decisions

Decision making is one of those pieces of the puzzle that can leave you frazzled. It can lead you feeling creatively tapped so you never experience those inspired thoughts that you can turn into goals. If you are the person everyone goes to for decision making, you end up wasting valuable energy. Silly things like wearing the same style of suit every day can eliminate a little bit of decision making. When you’re overwhelmed with making decision, every little bit counts.

Look at Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. They pretty much wear the same thing all the time. Think about the kind of things you have to make choices about and figure out how to taper it down. Also, if you are having to make decisions for work, try to delegate the less important decisions to your staff. They get a sense of purpose and your mind is left with more clarity to focus on the future and the goals you want to conquer.

15 Let Go of Emotional Baggage

It may seem like emotional baggage and achieving your goals have nothing in common. There is an indirect link to be sure. The things that have happened in your past can potentially define the decisions you make today. Your confidence may be crushed from something that happened in the past. Letting go of emotional baggage makes you feel happier but it also alters what kind of things you believe you can do and what you deserve.

You become more clear on what you truly want too because you don’t have unfounded fears or anxieties. Emotional baggage takes a toll on your thoughts and creates complex patterns that are nearly impossible to overcome. Your goal setting is much more challenging when you have an emotional baggage monkey on your back.

Less emotional junk weighing you down will simply give you greater freedom to choose what you want and to feel confident that you will achieve it. You are more clear on your purpose and everything falls into place. Otherwise, your goal desires could be based on trying to make yourself feel better.

Hopefully you’ve found these tips to simplifying your goals helpful. First, you need to know what it is you really want. Understand what your values are. Look into how you perceive goals. Are they a challenge or are they an opportunity to push yourself and succeed?

Keep your focus on just a few things at one time. Stay calm and have a good attitude about how much you achieve. Be mindful of how much progress you’re making and keep yourself motivated. Ask for help and moral support when you need it and enjoy the process of achieving your goals.