This is probably not the first time you have read an article about setting goals, but this maybe the most honest one.
If you are not consistently achieving your goals, then you are probably going about goal setting the wrong way.
Don't worry, I have made the same mistake myself.
That is why I put together five simple tips to ensure you will achieve success in all your endeavors starting today and for the rest of your life.
(1) Stop Blaming Others Whether it be a person or circumstance stop blaming others.
It does not matter if you have been wronged by someone or your situation has simply given you a raw deal.
Someone out there is always dealing with more than you could imagine but they are achieving their goals because they know that being a martyr is not going to bring them success.
I can admit I have had those 'woe is me' moments where I felt things were going against me and that there was no way I could get where I wanted to go because a few obstacles had fallen in my path.
What I did not understand is that the journey to success is not like a quick trip to the store to pick up some bread and milk, but much more like playing a game of chess and knowing that some moves are going to go against you.
If you can not handle unanticipated challenges in chess you will never become a king and if you can not do so in life you will never achieve your goals.
(2) Set Goals Incrementally Maybe you have dreams of being a millionaire or losing 25 pounds so that you can look fit when swimsuit season hits, but unless you hit the lottery or undergo liposuction or some other invasive surgery these goals will not happen over night.
So start with small attainable goals.
Let us take the 25 pound weight loss for example.
If you want to lose 25 pounds, start with a goal of just losing two pounds.
By setting an incremental goal of losing two pounds you allow yourself to easily attain a goal and also build your confidence.
With each incremental goal reached, your confidence will grow and you can turn that success into the momentum needed to achieve the final more difficult goal you are trying to reach.
(3) Set Tangible Goals Setting goals for yourself is easy enough, but make sure they are tangible.
One of the biggest reasons people fail to reach their goals is because the goals they set are not tangible.
For instance, setting a goal to be successful sounds good but what does that mean? Success can mean a lot of different things, depending on a particular person, so unless you have explicitly defined success in your terms how do you ever know if you achieved it? Examples of goals that are not tangible are: wanting to find a good job, wanting to be rich, or even wanting to save more money.
However, if you were to say I want to work downtown at one of the top law offices, I want to make twenty five thousand dollars a month, or I want to save ten thousand dollars this year you have just made your goals tangible and therefore much more attainable.
(4) Act Like A Baby Believe it or not, failure is a major key to success.
Without failure, we would have no barometer to measure when we actually succeed.
Failure should be looked at as a measuring stick and a teaching tool and not as something that devalues ones self worth.
Ironically, children deal with failures as just another part of life and not as a referendum on their future success.
Take for example babies learning how to walk.
They fall down many times but they do not let it discourage their desire to learn to walk.
In fact, it almost seems as if each time they fall down they are more determined to get up and walk.
You must use this same kind of determination to be able to achieve your goals.
(5) Write It Down The majority of people who set goals do not write them down.
The flaw in this is that without a written record of your goals you have no way to go back and see if you actually accomplished your goals.
The benefit of writing down your goals is that it allows you to visualize and plan how you achieve them.
Studies show that less than ten percent of people actually write down their goals.
The same study also showed the people who wrote down their goals accomplished over seventy-five percent of them.
So by simply writing down your goals you can substantially increase your chances to achieve success.
If you follow these five simple rules you will be amazed at how many of your goals you will begin to achieve and how success will find its way into your everyday life.