How to achieve any goal: ways to achieve goals

We all want something - this is an indisputable fact. As well as the fact that we are able to achieve a significant part of what we want if we make it our goal and make enough efforts to achieve it. Of course, not everyone is destined to fly into space or become a billionaire, but buying an apartment, writing a book, losing weight, getting an education, getting an interesting and well-paid job, building strong relationships, and so on are completely achievable tasks.

Where to begin

In order to choose a direction, following which will lead to new achievements , you should understand the following rules:

It is necessary to set only valid goals for yourself. Things that are not achievable in principle will only take up time and energy. Instead, you could spend yourself gaining material possessions. For some ideas, you can stop at conceptualizing or experiencing;
In their own desire to achieve what they want, people do not realize that they are going the wrong way and are wasting their energy on fulfilling other people’s desires. This can happen when a person tries to become a media personality or a famous scientist. In fact, this is an incorrectly set goal, since the result is focused on rising in the eyes of parents, acquaintances or social environment;
Do not forget that happiness is a moment that is not experienced very often in life . In overestimating one's own potential, the end result itself may not bring as much joy and euphoria as it seems at first glance.

Knowing how to quickly achieve his goals, a person begins to think through every step , in search of a reasonable and rational solution. The ability to achieve the desired result often comes with age. In practice, there is a category of people who spend 1-2 months searching for a solution.

Setting SMART goals

It is not always possible to set the right goal. When tasks are vague, it leaves us confused : how to complete them, how to measure progress.

Your goals must be precise and specific . Setting SMART goals involves being specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

By being able to set goals using a smart framework, you immediately get the details and context you need. Setting smart goals is not difficult. You just need to go through each letter of the abbreviation and adjust the wording of the goal.

Specificity means that the goal should not be achieved in general, but only at a specific point.

For example, you want to read a lot of books by 2030.

But setting a goal as “Read 26 books a year” will become specific and ensure that every book read is aimed at achieving that goal.

We get a ready-made action plan to achieve the goal: read two books a month.

Achievability refers to your abilities. To set realistic goals for yourself, you need to study your capabilities well.

Let's return to the example of books.

To read 2 books a month, you need to read about 25 pages a day. It takes 30 minutes.

But in reality, you only have the time and energy to read 15 pages. Question: can you achieve your goal? Not quite, unless you adjust the goal itself or the required resources.

Measurability refers to the quantification of progress. If your goal is to write 1000 posts on Instagram in 5 years to get a huge audience, then you need to calculate how many posts you need to publish per day (every 2 days).

And you definitely need to monitor the progress and the result - new subscribers. The only way you will see results is if you keep up with your plan.

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Barriers to desires

Applying a scientific approach to how to correctly achieve your goals, psychologists have identified a list of factors that prevent a person from achieving their intended results. These are specific types of obstacles that take time to overcome:

Insufficient level of education

Lack of awareness leads to the failure of your own business, since running a business requires special knowledge and skills. To overcome this problem, you can set yourself up for higher education or enroll in specialized courses. If mastering the chosen direction is impossible due to lack of time or finances, they turn to open sources of information published on the Internet.

This problem becomes easily solved with a comprehensive study of the details of the idea and the development of a concept for implementation.

Fear of failure

This purely psychological phenomenon has haunted a person since childhood. The barrier is that a person is not so much worried about the final result as about the degree of seriousness of the actions performed. In practice, the level of involvement in the process increases as the end of the task . For this reason, on the way to their own dreams, people often give up or slow down greatly.

The temptation to give up will be strong shortly before victory...Chinese wisdom.

It has been proven that the presence of such a psychological barrier extends from childhood. Excessive criticism of a child or constant reproaches form in the minds of the future personality a fear of committing serious and sometimes even ordinary actions. It’s not that such people don’t know how to achieve the goals they set for themselves . They lack the desire to act due to the fear of running into criticism. In the future, this phenomenon will undergo serious adjustment with the help of professional psychologists.

Dispersion of attention

Next on the list of barriers that prevent you from climbing the career ladder or making a woman fall in love with you is unfocused attention. By focusing on dozens of things at once, instead of concentrating on just one, the hero does not achieve his goal.

If you chase two hares, you won’t catch either one...Russian wisdom (from the collections of A.P. Chekhov)

In the course of striving, a person simply burns out. Overcoming the barrier is seen in changing the mood, decomposing one task into five or ten independent processes.

A journey of a thousand leagues begins with one step...French wisdom.

Unfair comparison

Comparison remains an acceptable maneuver in self-assessment, analysis of what is happening and subsequent criticism of wrong actions. In the case when a person who knows how to learn how to achieve his goals immediately begins to try on the results of successful individuals, this can cause, at a minimum, dissonance.

Self-development goals for the year

Based on the resulting “Wheel of Life” model, the goals of self-education and self-development can be formulated. Each of them may have different periods of implementation, for example, it will take several months to restore health, and years to be appointed to the position of director. Therefore, it is important to plan your work correctly: set a close goal for self-development in the near future and create a list of goals in the long term, for a year, for 5 years...

To get started, it’s enough to make a list of 5-10 tasks in each area of life, for example:

5 health goals:

Eliminate harmful foods from your diet.
Undergo a full medical examination.
Workout.
Do 10-12 massage sessions.
Get your daily routine and nutrition in order.

5 goals for personal growth:

Read a self-development book.
Learn or improve English.
Learn to draw.
Improve your writing skill: write a few articles.
Get into the habit of organizing things using time management rules.

5 goals in relationships and family:

Get rid of the habit of controlling everything.
Read the book “The Language of Man-Woman Relationships” by Allan and Barabar Pease.
Arrange a surprise for your loved one.
Show concern for your loved one more often.
Study a course on the topic “Psychology of Relationships.”

Goals can be divided into periods, or specific deadlines can be set so that the stage does not turn into infinity. For example, plan to read a book in a week and learn a foreign language in 5 months.

How to achieve your goals - ways

Even performing the tasks of others, for example, your employer, is always fraught with difficulties. The same thing happens when a person begins to achieve his own victories, gradually moving towards the level of his intended capabilities.

It is the goal that remains the main guideline, the starting point, relative to which a certain algorithm of actions is built

Setting goals

Forming a goal for yourself is a difficult process to understand and implement. Among the components of the applied concept, it is necessary to use not only the complete layout of the problem, but also to form a visual representation. Once you have a picture, sketch or template of the expected result in your head, the negative influence will be removed and the goal will become more or less real. This technique shows itself well in practice, when a person can escape from illusions, plunge into harsh everyday life, and get closer to those things that are achievable. In this case, voicing a dream in the form of the phrase “I want to earn a million rubles” is nothing more than a clear goal, task or further development of events that is understandable to the hero and those around him.

When studying the concept of how to achieve your real goal , you can and should pay attention to ready-made techniques. Because most of the techniques are based on the practices of successful people and are actively used all over the world. Of course, in this case, you need to understand that there are no ideal and universal recipes for happiness, so you should look for your own path in life and formulate your own plan of action.

What prevents you from achieving your goal?

Let's start by talking about those bad habits and attitudes due to which you are not approaching your goal as quickly as you would like (or not approaching it at all). This is what you need to get rid of at all costs:

Procrastination. The desire to put everything off for later has buried an innumerable number of wonderful plans and brilliant ideas. And the most dangerous thing about it is that it creeps up unnoticed. At first it seems to you that there will be nothing terrible if you do what you planned not today, but tomorrow: it’s just one day. But then there are more and more such “tomorrows”, and in the end you begin to consider your goal completely unattainable. Therefore, no matter how lazy, difficult and “oh well” it may be, do not put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
Conviction of failure. When the goal is high and the path to it is long, it is very difficult not to succumb to despair and continue to believe in success - this is quite natural for a person who does not consider himself omnipotent. However, you have probably heard more than once that all great people, before making a brilliant discovery, creating a legendary company, inventing a revolutionary device, etc., failed. And, in most cases, repeatedly. But they did not give up and continued to believe in themselves. Therefore, always remember that only you decide at what stage to stop: at the point where you fail, or at the stage where you succeed.

Lack of awareness of one's own feelings and thoughts. To achieve a goal, you need to clearly formulate it and draw up a rough action plan (we'll talk more about this a little later). But it’s extremely difficult to do this correctly if you don’t really understand yourself and can’t consciously decide what and how you really want. Learn to analyze your condition, talk about your attitude towards certain things or events, learn to understand yourself.
Excessive or insufficient number of goals. Another common phrase says that the golden mean is good in everything. On the one hand, you should have as many goals as you can really “pull” at the same time (most likely, they will simply relate to different aspects of life). On the other hand, there shouldn’t be too few of them so that you stay in good shape and constantly work on yourself. Of course, this point is very individual, and this is most clearly explained using the example of losing weight: someone, in order to take care of their figure, needs to focus only on this. But for some, it’s better to have a couple or three other important goals and devote a lot of time to them as well, so as not to get hung up on thoughts about food, not to be lazy about going to the gym, and so on.

Existing techniques, exercises, techniques

To gain confidence as a strong motivational stimulus, you can use established practices.

Today, such techniques are used under the guidance of experienced psychologists, who select techniques based on personality characteristics and the properties of the final goal.

How to eat a whole elephant

Mastering a large amount of information or the desire to embrace the immensity becomes an impossible task even for professionals in their field. But dividing a task into several stages, stages or elements allows you to focus on the final result through sequential execution of actions or an algorithm that has been proven over the years.

In an attempt to jump over one's head, a person often slows down, which is why indecision and uncertainty appear in one's current activities. But when there is an understanding that the hero will have to participate in a chain of events - components of a single thing, then the picture will form by itself. Behind you will be completed stages that bring you closer to the completion of the ideological plan.

Achievement Methodology

Achieving results involves drawing up an action plan and implementing it step by step. For the process to be effective, a number of rules must be followed. The following plan for achieving the goal, divided into steps, according to the methodology, will help you master them.

Target selection

At the first stage, it is necessary to choose a goal, to distinguish a real task from an impossible task to complete. And also evaluate its feasibility. If we are talking only about those actions that a person can call “his own,” an element of chance may be included in the process or excluded from it. The same can be said about outside help: in this case, he wants to be completely independent or act together with others. You can give instructions to people or be part of a common plan, carrying out some stages of achieving a goal, making collective progress.

Setting priority

When considering a person’s own plan, and not a joint plan with someone else, you need to determine the sequence of actions according to priorities. For collective plans, this rule can also be applied. The characteristics that define a stage as paramount are significance and urgency. These two important parameters provide the basis for the following division of concerns.

Steps that have both of these properties have high priority.
The average value is predetermined for urgent (without significance) and significant (without urgency) stages.
We set other actions to low priority.

We pay special attention to the first group. You should move on to the remaining steps only after solving high-priority problems. We carry out the second group of actions, starting with the urgent, leaving significant elements in the background. Moreover, some of the tasks can be entrusted to someone else if they are urgent or can be completed by others.

Choosing a way to achieve

It is necessary to choose ways to implement the plan, aimed at achieving the goal. If there is only one method available, without the possibility of choice, this will turn human activity into a reaction. You need to try to expand your capabilities. Sometimes they resort to experimentation to achieve this, searching for other ways to achieve it. But forced necessity is not the best solution to problems, depriving the process of flexibility.

Goal decomposition

Goal decomposition is the elaboration of the process into smaller steps. These stages can also be divided into difficult, simple, primary and less urgent. Among the intermediate goals there are very easily achievable ones. If you constantly set them before yourself, the process of moving towards completing the main task will be simplified in terms of adjustments. It will also facilitate the creation of the remaining directions and strengthen self-confidence.

With each intermediate achievement, a person receives motivation and a feeling of moving forward. After all, the huge volumes of work are too much to carry out immediately. A step-by-step algorithm for achieving the goal allows you to complete the most difficult tasks. By defining your mental horizons, you can perfectly focus on small problems and overcome them. But some of the low-priority actions can be completely excluded as unnecessary.

Application of experience

It is necessary to examine the actions that lead to the goal and distinguish them from those that interfere with achievement. This also includes interference from outside plans. By analyzing his steps, a person learns to check each step for feasibility before performing it.

The activity itself involves achieving a specific goal. Evaluation of the results and their application are required. Active experience helps you respect your own efforts, set and successfully complete new tasks. Such a schedule for achieving a goal with stages of implementation can change your life for the better.

Movement is life

Stopping on the way to the desired goal is the main enemy of progress. The introduction of regularity in everyday practice ensures the permanent achievement of the main goal. Simply put, small efforts add up to a result that brings you closer to completing the main task. The rule of not making stops is based on the above methods of spontaneous decomposition and eating an elephant. The difference is that the problems are decomposed into minimum, maximum and optimal tasks.

For example, step-by-step instructions for achieving a language learning goal can include the following steps:

Minimum – learn and pronounce 5 phrases;
The best is to master a few rules;
The maximum is to watch the pitch in your chosen language and understand it.

As they say, wishing is not harmful, but not wishing is harmful. Setting clear and achievable goals determines future results. While gradually carrying out the minimum and optimum programs, you should remember about the maximum deal with your conscience. This must be done every day. If for some reason there is a gap, you should plan to increase the load for a future period. If postponing tasks until tomorrow becomes systematic, you should responsibly review your schedule.

Connect your subconscious resources

You can set yourself the goal of earning 500 thousand rubles a month as much as you like. But if you have the belief in your head that “Big money means big problems” or “I don’t deserve big money,” then your efforts will be wasted.

Before you start climbing a mountain, check whether you consider yourself entitled to stand on its top.

It will be awkward if you stop mid-climb and throw your equipment, deciding that this mountain is for climbers from wealthier families.

The likelihood of achieving a goal will increase dramatically if you replace beliefs that contradict it with helping ones. Write a list of all your fears and worries about your current goal, and then write an opposite statement for each of them.

For example: “I have a small salary” - “I am constantly increasing my income.” The formula should only apply to you, not your boss. He may not know that he should promote you. Dictate positive affirmations into the recorder in a cheerful and energetic voice and listen for 20 minutes a day.

Successful aura

Luck and first results always inspire motivated people. This is true, because it is a positive attitude that motivates you to take even greater steps and reach new heights. Particularly successful people always stand out from the gray mass of people who do not have mobility. And they are not able to make key decisions in their lives. The tactic of meeting successful people helps a lot. Which, during discussions, can lead to new desires. But soon they will become like-minded people.

A successful aura is precisely the environment in which new ideas are born and new skills emerge. This is the place and environment in which the hero becomes comfortable, where he can complete tasks on the way to the intended result. To understand how to achieve your main goals, you must first take care of a successful aura.

Map of company and employee goals

First of all, a goal in business is a tool that brings the company closer to success. Success criteria are usually provided in the strategy. Even if the company does not practice strategic management, then at a minimum, each enterprise has certain goals for profit margins, working capital, and production/service volumes. Accordingly, the goals of each employee should be aimed at solving problems to achieve the overall goals of the company. Start with the goals of the key manager, cascading them down the functional branches.

The maximum number of targets is 10, with a weight of at least 10% each. A finer division of the weight of goals reduces their value for the employee, blurs the focus of attention and, accordingly, reduces the effectiveness and likelihood of achieving such goals. Based on the principles of setting goals and assessing their implementation in the companies where I worked (these are leaders in such areas as metallurgy, mechanical engineering and mining), I believe that the best option for mapping employee goals is to combine goals into groups:

1st group - corporate goals, that is, common to all employees and creating a sense of team and involvement of each employee in the overall result. The group can include goals for profit, volume, ebitda, ebit or other key indicators, most often financial.

2nd group - functional (cross-functional) goals. This group includes the goals of a specific department or specific function. Goals that are related to two or three departments work very well - they create joint responsibility among employees and increase the likelihood of successful implementation.

3rd group - personal projects. These are individual goals for each specific employee and their implementation is directly dependent on him. Any ordinary specialist is able to make a personal contribution to the overall result through minor improvements in his work or in the work of the system in which he is included. And having a personal project can create a sense of significance and need for the company, which is a powerful motivation.

When using this approach, it is important to think about the share of each group of goals in the total. In my opinion, this proportion depends on the goals and objectives of the company, as well as on its corporate culture. If it is important to unite the team, then having common goals, when set correctly, can be a good team-building step. But there is also a risk of a backlash - departments may begin to quarrel and shift responsibility to colleagues. At this stage, it is important to involve the heads of all departments in the goal setting process, which will make the process itself transparent and take into account the opinions of all parties.

Acquiring useful skills

Even if something doesn’t work out in life, there is a desire for it, there is a result. On the way to the object of desire, a person invariably acquires new skills. Learns and remembers useful information, masters useful techniques of successful people.

But often such a set begins to supply a person with the most important product - the ability to do something. For example, mastery of negotiation techniques was not useful in finding a job. But it will definitely be needed in sales. Because this is one of the main skills in the field.

You should also remember that any problem can be solved in several ways. But it is quite possible that on the path of trial and error a person will find a shorter path to his own goal. Because you never know where the solution might find you.

What you can learn while achieving your goal:

Fighting uncertainty and fears. Because it is important to achieve any goal;
Overcoming fears of non-existent risks, fear of change. Because internal blocks should not interfere with us;
Rational distribution of time budget, for work and free time. Because our effectiveness depends on it;
Identifying character strengths and applying them in practice. Because without this it is impossible to work one hundred percent;
Determining the benefits gained from mastering new skills and approaches to completing a task.

As soon as the business is considered to have begun, the thinking of the person himself changes. Even if something doesn’t work out the first time, it can work out on the second or third try. You can also apply various methods and techniques to one of the small tasks. But in some situations, you can brainstorm and enter the moderate risk zone. The most important thing is to remain optimistic and believe in achieving results. And be prepared for the changes that will happen in life very soon. Because they will definitely happen.

Use the paperclip trick

History of How to Stick With Good Habits Every Day by Using the “Paper Clip Strategy”. a young broker named Trent Dyrsmid forced the whole world to use this technique.

23-year-old Dirsmid got a job with no work experience at a provincial bank and soon achieved an income of 75 thousand dollars a year. In the morning, he placed two jars on his desk: one empty and one with a set of 120 paper clips. Each time he made a call, he transferred the paperclip from the full jar to the empty one. That's all the technology. 120 calls a day, one paperclip at a time. Visualize your progress!

Want to do 100 push-ups a day? Take 100 paper clips and divide them into 10 sets. Do 10 push-ups 10 times a day and each time transfer paper clips from one jar to another. Need to send 25 emails daily? Throw a paperclip into the target jar every time you press the "Send" button.
James Clear, personal effectiveness and self-improvement expert

How to achieve your goals - Bottom line

The final result will depend on the goal. Increase your income level, become successful, famous or desired. But in conclusion, it should be noted that you should often focus on solving internal problems, which are mostly related to psychological motivation or working on oneself. Because performing external tasks is associated with a routine that is within the control of every person.

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Why you need to set goals

Goals need to be set in order to realize desires and build your life brick by brick. This seems to be clear to everyone. While you are still a nobody and are at the start, the goal allows you not to sour and hold your tail with a pistol. It is easier to overcome the distance when the cherished finish looms on the horizon and you know where you are running.

However, there are several other functions of goal setting that most people are not even aware of. Let's imagine two hypothetical millionaires. One earned his millions by working hard and improving, while the other inherited them from his parents. Which of them do you think will be more satisfied with life?

At first glance, there shouldn’t be much difference, because both can afford the same high standard of living. But still this is not so. The subjective level of happiness is determined not by external conditions, but by the amount of energy and vitality. And their level depends on special hormones that the brain secretes - serotonin, dopamine and endorphin. You can swim in money and at the same time vegetate in apathy, having no desires, no joy, no taste for life.

External well-being does not equal happiness.

Every person has access to the treasured hormones. The brain generously rewards successful and fruitful activity. This is exactly how the evolutionary mechanism responsible for the development of humanity works.

Roughly speaking, when you do something and receive positive feedback, your energy potential accumulates. You feel a surge of strength, inspiration and desire to conquer the next milestone, which increases with each new victory. Goals help your brain evaluate your progress and reward you for every achievement.

Plan and work

Knowing WHAT you want to achieve, it is easier to determine HOW to achieve it. If the goal is complex or long-term (create your own business in the IT industry, buy an apartment without taking out a mortgage), then your action plan will be more extensive. Don't be alarmed. We will tell you about 2 ways to go towards your huge goal in our video

By time. Set yourself milestones. What should I achieve in a year? What should I be like in 2 years? What should I know, be able to do?
Make a list of everything you need to do to achieve your goal. Get an education, study the market sector, analyze the achievements of competitors, reach first the local, then the regional level - the more detailed the actions are, the more effective the work will be.

Popular SMART goal setting technology

Achieving a goal begins with planning. First of all, you need a high-quality, good aspiration that meets the SMART criteria.

Specific. First of all, specificity is important. You need to clearly understand why this particular dream is important to you. When the true reasons for desires are identified, you can move on to planning.
Measurable. The end result of efforts must have a specific criterion by which it can be determined that the desired has been achieved.
Agreed. It is necessary to understand that to achieve this goal you will need to involve other people. To simplify the task, it is necessary to improve the strategy in such a way as to eliminate or minimize the participation of outsiders.
Realistic. Undoubtedly, ambitions must be great, but at the same time it is important to balance them and correlate them with one’s own capabilities.
Timed (time limit). Set a clear deadline for the implementation of your plan. This will mobilize efforts and allow for the most efficient use of resources and energy.

How I set goals and achieved results - sharing my experience

At the age of 24, I set several goals using the technology described above.

The document with written goals was called “PLAN 30” , implying that they should be fulfilled by my 30th birthday.

Alexander Berezhnov (pictured) is the founder of the “PAPA HELPED” project. Yes it's me

At that time, I had no idea how I could achieve them, and only faith in success helped me move forward.

I won’t go into detail about my goals from 6 years ago, I’ll just say that the result even exceeded my expectations. During this period, I managed to get married, have children, buy several apartments in a prestigious residential complex in my city and a foreign car, and help my relatives financially.

I realized that nothing is impossible. And even if you now have no idea how you can get what you want, just act, and you will eventually be able to “eat the elephant piece by piece.”

From my own experience, I know that big goals scare people, and they continue to be content with little, instead of pulling themselves together and making their dreams come true.

Now I’m already working on my goals, which I called “ PLAN 40” . In 10 years (I'm 30 now), I'm going to build a number of large sources of passive income, strengthen family relationships, give my children a better education and raise them properly.

I will also definitely continue to engage in charity work, social activities and education. I plan to write several books and make my own film, visit 10 countries of the world and meet a number of outstanding people of our time.

We'll see which of these goals I can achieve in 10 years, but intuitively I feel that this plan is being implemented 100%!

Conclusions and experience

For the technique to be as effective as possible, it is necessary to use the principle of feedback. In practice it looks like this:

upon achieving a certain result, evaluate how the technique contributed or hindered the achievement of the result;
draw appropriate conclusions;
next time you can make a plan based on your experience.

Now you know how to achieve your goal in life, the next step is to try the technique in practice and make sure of its effectiveness. Do you want to live in such a way “that you won’t experience excruciating pain later on for the years spent aimlessly”?

KPI

A system of key performance indicators (KPI) for company employees, which helps measure the performance of their activities in numerical terms.

This is not exactly a method for defining goals, but supplementing a set of goals with a list of measurable indicators for their achievement. But since the acronym is popular and there is a lot of confusion about it, we will add it here for consideration.

For example, you have a goal “Increase user satisfaction of the service by 20%.” A logical question arises: “How will we measure this satisfaction?” This could be a change in the average service quality score obtained in surveys. Or maybe a decrease in the rate of lost customers. Or an increase in the frequency of service consumption. All three can be indicators for a goal. And the choice must be made in the context of each company's or employee's business situation.

KPIs can be formulated and measured at any level of the organizational hierarchy - from the company as a whole (and then these will be the KPIs of the CEO) to the ordinary employee. Organizations distinguish different types of indicators:

financial and non-financial;
quantitative and qualitative;
functional and design;
personal and group.

The KPI system has quite a lot of advantages. It allows you to measure results at all levels of the organization - from people to business processes. At the same time, the numerical expressions of efficiency are as transparent and specific as possible. KPIs serve as a high motivational factor for employees.

Among the disadvantages, they note the correlation of the results of each employee with all his colleagues: if one person does not achieve his indicators, then, for example, the entire department may suffer. In addition, KPI often becomes a filter through which an employee views reality. And if the indicators are poorly balanced with each other, then this one-sided prism will lead to conflicts and inconsistency in the work of different employees or departments. Employees are also noted to be cautious when formulating planned KPI indicators, which most often directly affect the employee’s bonus.

Despite this, the KPI system is one of the most popular and widely used in the world.