How To Achieve Your Goals | 10 Things To Do After Setting Goals15 min read
How effectively do you set your goals up for success after you’ve set them? Here are 10 powerful steps you can take after setting goals so that you know exactly how to achieve your goals in 2023 in life and business.
As an entrepreneur, I love nothing more than to set goals for my life and business each year.
Goal setting keeps me focused on intentionally creating the life and business of my dreams and challenges me to step outside of my comfort zone and into my full potential.
I come very close to achieving most, if not all, of my goals each year. But my success rate wasn’t always so high. Over the years of my own personal and business growth journey, and as an entrepreneur coach supporting dozens of clients to achieve their life and business goals, I’ve developed 10 powerful principles that have changed the game for me when it comes to setting and achieving your goals.
If you’re wondering how to achieve your goals, and are ready to make 2023 your best year yet, these 10 steps will help you achieve your goals successfully so that you can finally create the life and business you desire.
(If you haven’t set your goals for the year yet, head back over to my in depth guide on how to set goals & create fulfilling success in life & business!)
Build out the roadmap to achieve your goals
Action is the key to achieving your goals, but if you don’t have clarity on what actions to take to get where you want to go, you’re going to slow yourself down mightily.
For each of the goals you’ve set this year, create a path forward. You don’t have to know exactly how your success will play out (it rarely happens the way we expect), but you do have to know what actions you can take to move you closer to achieving your goal.
Taking that first step is often the hardest part, so even if you don’t have clarity on the entire process, make sure you figure out what you need to do first to move toward achieving your goal, and then set aside time to go do it as soon as humanly possible. This is what really catapults your momentum.
Creating clarity on how to achieve your goals is critical, and it’s something I support all of my entrepreneur coaching clients with. Entrepreneurs are exceptional at creating a vision for what they want to achieve, but it can be really easy to get stuck not knowing what steps will actually make that vision a reality.
I help my clients build a sustainable strategy that leverages their unique abilities and allows them to achieve their goals with ease. If this is something you feel you’d like support with in your life or business, let’s have a chat.
Identify the habits that will help you achieve your goals
There are one time actions you can take to make progress on your goal, but most of your success will come from consistency. After identifying the one time actions that will get the ball rolling, look at the most important habits and behaviors that you could implement consistently in order to achieve your goals.
Every goal has a few key drivers that lead to success: simple things you can do on a recurring basis that have a big impact over time.
For example, if you want to increase the number of clients you’re working with, maybe you build the habit of building relationships on LinkedIn for 30 minutes each day, or pitching yourself to organizers of conferences and events for 1 hour each week.
If you want to feel less anxious on a day to day basis, maybe you build 15 minutes of meditation into your morning routine, or start going outside for a walk every day at lunch time.
Success is less about taking “monumental massive actions” and so much more about sustaining small strategic steps over time.
Ana McRae
Identifying the 2-3 things that, when done consistently, make it almost impossible for you to fail. (And then time block them into your calendar so that you actually execute on them consistently!)
Build out your calendar to reflect your goals
If where you spend your time each week isn’t reflective of where you want to be 12 months from now, you’re going to end up off track. This is where time blocking comes in.
Once you’ve set your goals, and defined the actions and habits that will move you closer, time block these actions in your calendar each week. Take some time at the end of each week or before it begins and carve out time to complete the actions you’ve identified as important.
If you resist structure, really examine what you’re afraid time blocking will take from you (ie. freedom, spontaneity, creativity, etc.?) With my entrepreneur coaching clients, even the strongest resistors of calendar management eventually realized time blocking serves them in pursuit of their goals and experienced not only higher levels of productivity, but big shifts in freedom and creativity when they were intentional with where they spent their time.
The faster you get proactive with your time, the faster you create the results you want.
Your calendar should reflect your goals — if you aren’t consistently leveraging your unique abilities to do the things only you can do to achieve your goals and delegating out the rest, your success is going to take much longer.
Align your team to achieve your goals
Once you’ve decided what needs to be done to help you achieve your goals, make sure there’s a clear owner and deadline assigned to it – whether that’s you, or someone on your team.
One of the biggest things I see holding entrepreneurs back from growing their business is misalignment within their teams – everyone is doing their jobs, but no one is quite responsible for moving forward the key priorities of the business.
Make sure you are fully leveraging the unique strengths of you and your team to achieve your goals, and make sure they know what’s expected and when. This goes a really long way in creating and sustaining momentum.
Align your mindset with your goals
A strategy for achieving your goals is important, but 80% of your success lies in your mindset. Your brain’s entire job is to maintain the status quo, that’s why the thing that’s going to get in your way the most often, is YOU.
If your mindset isn’t aligned with your vision and goals, you’re going to sabotage your success before you even get started.
You have to fully believe that your goals (and the way you want to achieve them) are possible, and then you have to take action from that place. Just knowing what to do isn’t enough — if your beliefs aren’t aligned, you’ll procrastinate, overcomplicate, and push the brakes just as things start working.
Related post: Overcome Fear of Success: 5 Powerful Strategies for Entrepreneurs
My favorite tool for identifying your biggest limiting beliefs is the Saboteur Assessment. It’s a free 10 min quiz that highlights exactly how you self sabotage your success – once you gain this awareness, you’re able to start catching yourself sabotaging and decide to do things differently.
For a full article on how to identify and overcome your limiting beliefs so you can align your mindset with your vision, click here.
Related post: Mid Year Goals Review | 5 Key Questions for Business Owners
Working with a coach is one of the best ways to shift your thinking: A coach can help point out where you’re working on a skewed perception of reality and help you shift your thinking so that you’re not holding yourself back. Mindset is a big part of the work I do with my clients in my Entrepreneur Coaching Program.
Accountability helps you achieve your goals
It’s too easy to break promises to yourself (especially if what you’re promising yourself is uncomfortable and stretchy!) The best way to achieve your goals is to have a coach, or someone in your life, hold you accountable to taking action in alignment with your vision.
When you work with a coach that’s asking about your progress each and every week and helping you overcome the challenges that are getting in your way, you’re able to achieve your goals so much faster.
If you’re not able to work with a coach, ask a friend, colleague, or spouse to intentionally play that role for you and lay out exactly what you need them to do / how they can best support you. However, having professional accountability and the dedication of someone whose entire job is to help you succeed in your goals makes a huge difference in how quickly and easily you achieve your goals. If you’d like to explore what a coaching partnership could do for you, let’s book a time to chat.
Celebrate your progress every step of the way
In order to sustain the motivation and energy required to achieve your goals, you have to celebrate your progress along the way. Most of us are horrendous at celebrating ourselves, especially if you’re a type-A, driven entrepreneur: you’re always looking for what could be better and where you need to improve. Although that type of thinking has its advantages, there must be a time and place for celebrating your progress and not just the end result.
Here’s what neuroscientists have discovered: our brains rely heavily on “reinforcement learning” – which means they are highly sensitive to learning where we receive rewards, and then they work hard to recreate those situations so that they can receive more rewards. Attempting to change your behavior means going against this ancient operating system (and that’s why it’s so freaking hard!).
If you’re not reinforcing your behaviors with positive rewards consistently, you’re not going to sustain the motivation to keep moving forward.
So, celebrate those small wins!
Intentionally train your brain to acknowledge all of the little victories along the way so that you can sustain the energy and motivation you need to achieve your big goals.
I love to do this by reflecting on what went well each day and writing it down in a dedicated journal titled “WINS!” Not only does writing it down help me bask in the positive feelings of having done something important, but it also gives me a place to come back to when my mindset is sh*t and I need a reminder of everything that IS working.
You can start this immediately by getting out a sticky note and writing down 3 things that you’re celebrating about your progress. Stop scrolling and do it right now.
Write down your goals as if they’ve already happened
Researchers found that when you write down your goals as if they’ve already happened, you are significantly more likely to achieve them. It’s a psychological trick you can play on your brain which can’t differentiate between reality and what you envision (ie why dreams feel so real!).
When you write down your goals as if they’ve already happened, not only do you stay more focused on what you actually want to achieve, but you train your brain to look for opportunities to achieve your goals because it’s already seeing that vision as a possible reality.
When you do this, don’t just do it to get it done! Give yourself time and space to tap into the feelings associated with achieving or receiving whatever it is that you desire. When you picture it already here & now, notice how good it feels and make a conscious effort to tap into that feeling as often as possible throughout the day.
When positive feelings and aligned energy fuel your action, not only do you get more done faster, but it feels better and leads to better results. Plus, its way more fun than frantically trying to achieve goals from a place of stress and fear of failure!
Address your fears instead of avoiding them
If you’re challenging yourself to step outside your comfort zone in order to achieve your goals, as all my high achieving entrepreneur friends usually are, your brain is certain to freak the F out… especially if this dream or goal is really important to you.
Related post: Overcoming Fear To Achieve Success
The way our silly brains get out of failing is by thinking “if I don’t try my hardest, and I fail, I won’t be as upset because I didn’t try my best therefore I’m not technically out of options yet.” But, logically you know that if you don’t try your hardest, you’re almost guaranteeing failure and that’s definitely not going to motivate you to try again.
So, don’t let your brain trick you into not giving it your all. Instead, actually look at your fears!! I created a FREE resource for entrepreneurs like you who need to realign their goals with their vision, download it below!
Don’t worry, we only send you good things and you can always unsubscribe at any time!
When you give yourself space to think through the ‘worst case scenario’ and decide what you would do in that situation (instead of trying to avoid thinking about it, which never works), you’re able to provide your brain with some certainty to fill in the gaps of all those unknowns, which is what your brain ultimately wants.
And, you usually realize that the worst case scenario isn’t actually that bad and also highly unlikely to happen, which empowers you to keep moving forward without fear holding you back!
Create A Plan To Mitigate Failure And Achieve Your Goals
The other thing you can do to increase your likelihood of actually achieving your goals after setting them is to think about what’s going to get in your way (ahead of time) and pre-decide what you would do in each situation.
By thinking through what’s going to get in your way (lack of motivation, not enough time, other people’s opinions, perfectionism, self doubt, etc.) and proactively deciding how you will act when that obstacle comes up, you become more likely to take the right kind of action that moves you forward, instead of letting yourself get stuck.
(Let’s be honest, it’s a lot harder to figure out how to get out of a funk when you’re in one, but if you already have a plan in place for what you know your biggest weaknesses are, then you’re setting yourself up to succeed.)
Identify the 3 things that are most likely to get in your way, and then decide “IF [x thing happens], THEN [I will take x action to get back on track.]”
For example, IF I feel unmotivated to work on my business, THEN I will read my favorite entrepreneurship book for inspiration for 30 minutes and then block out 15 minutes to just do something business related to get me going.
“How to achieve your goals?” doesn’t have to be a question mark for you anymore — you can create a powerful process to set yourself up for success after setting goals so that you KNOW you’re going to win.
When you apply these 10 powerful steps to help you achieve your goals, you’re able to get better and better at creating the results you truly desire in your life and business.
This is my entire mission as an entrepreneur coach: To empower entrepreneurs to achieve fulfilling success in life and business. I’m here to help you with the vision, mindset, strategy, and action you need to achieve the level of greatness, wealth, and impact you know you’re meant for.
If you’d like to explore the possibility of partnering together to achieve more happiness and success in life and business, book a time to chat about my 1:1 Entrepreneur Coaching Program.
I’d love to hear which of these 10 steps for achieving your goals you plan to implement this year — let me know in the comments below! If you found this article helpful, please share it on your social media so that we can help more people achieve their life and business goals this year!
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