How to Set Great Goals and Actually Achieve Them

Dear Friends,

The beginning of a new year is such a wonderful time for setting goals! Today I want to talk about how to set great goals and actually achieve them! I know everyone enjoys making New Year’s resolutions, but I prefer to set goals. There is just something about New Year’s resolutions that makes them seem like more of an idea, or something you think you might want to accomplish during that year, rather than something you are going to actively work toward achieving. A goal though, seems more tangible, it is something you set out to accomplish, it is not just an idea. I do not think that New Year’s resolutions are a bad idea in fact they can be used as tools to set New Year’s goals.

I think we start desiring to achieve goals observably between 10-14 years old. The goals at that age are mostly trying to get onto a sports team or some other similar goal. It seems that as we get older we tend to try to be more goal oriented in our lives because we want to be more efficient and achieve more. I think that as adults we are also much busier and therefore set our goals differently than we might have when we were younger. Perhaps in high school when we first started trying to set goals on paper they were based on getting assignments finished on time. As college students we set our goals based on class schedules, jobs or internships, and social activities. As newly weds we set our goals differently than when we had young children. And as they grew so our goals changed and as our children become adults our goals change to reflect that as well. While our goals have evolved over our lives we have likely gained some clarity on how to effectively set goals so they are achievable and how to prioritize them. As our goals changed with every season of life that we were in, there is a good chance that our method of achieving those goals changed as well. Let’s talk about a general format that I have found to be useful for all the types of goals listed above. It is easiest to break it into two parts, first for setting goals and second how to actually achieve them.

Young baseball player getting ready to bat, captured in black and white on the field.

Spiral notebook with New Year's resolutions in a cozy still life setting, perfect for planning.

First lets talk about how to make great goals. Start with your New Year’s resolutions they are great ideas that you are probably passionate about so they would be great goals. Goals are often set in key areas of your life you want to focus on such as family, relationships, friendships, financial, spiritual, physical, and psychological. I really like the way Sally Clarkson said she bases goals on in her and her daughter Sarah’s book The Life Giving Home; she has an anagram for it which is FIRST which stands for family, information, rest, stuff, and time. I had never heard of this way of organizing goals to set and I like how simplified it makes them. It seems easy to remember the anagram which in my opinion would make the goals easier to remember because they are associated with a word from the anagram. Ease of remembrance would probably contribute to achievability. To be honest while I really like the idea of utilizing the anagram spoken about in Sally and Sarah’s book, I am not sure how I personally would use those categories the best so I will be going over how to make goals based on the 7 categories I listed before that, but if you choose to use the FIRST anagram, the steps will still work wonderfully.

So the first thing you would want to do to make great goals is to make one goal for each category. For example;

1. Family: Spend more time with my mom

2. Relationships: Stop taking the time I have with my husband for granted

3. Friendships: Call my friend that does not live locally more often

4. Financial: Have an emergency fund

5. Spiritual: Read my Bible more often

6. Physical: Get back into shape after having a baby

7. Psychological: Keep a gratitude journal

These are all really good starts to making a list of goals to achieve. It is great because they are broken down by category. They are also really good goals because we can assume that because we are working off of New Year’s resolutions they are all time sensitive because we want to achieve them this year. That is an important part of making a great goal, making it time sensitive which is essentially giving it a deadline. So everything on this list has a timeline of needing to be accomplished in 12 months the deadline for them presumably being December 31st.

The last thing you really need to make these goals great is to make them more specific. It is the specificity that will make the goals tangible. Being too vague will result in you not knowing how close you are to achieving your goal or even whether or not you have achieved it. So now, I’m going to take the example I made of categorized and time sensitive goals and make them even better, by making each goal more specific.

1. Family: Call my mom and talk to her about anything for at least 10 minutes a week.

2. Relationships: Be intentional about spending quality time with my husband by having a date at least twice a month.

3. Friendships: Call my friend that does not live locally once a month to catch up on life, maybe do something together like a book club or recipe club so you feel more connected.

4. Financial: Have $5000 cash easily accessible as an emergency fund.

5. Spiritual: Read a section of my Bible everyday, it can be a whole chapter or a subsection.

6. Physical: Lose all the weight I gained during pregnancy, get moving for 30 minutes everyday, do pilates for strength training to regain strength in my legs and core 3 days a week.

7. Psychological: Write down three positive events that I am grateful for everyday in a gratitude journal.

Now those are great goals! They span across several categories that encompass large parts of our lives. They have a clear deadline. They are very specific allowing it to be easily determined how close you are to achieving them and provide a clear finish line. Having specific goals and a deadline are the keys allowing us to actually achieve them!

A hand holds a stack of US dollar bills, symbolizing wealth and finance.

Tranquil beach scene at sunset with footprints leading to the horizon.

Now to achieve your newly formed great goals you need to make a plan to achieve them. The process of actually achieving your goals becomes much easier when you break your goals down into actionable baby steps. This is simple to do because you have a deadline which allows you to make a timeline. Because you made your goals specific enough to break down into small increments they are actionable and easy to schedule. Now we can make those example goals into actionable baby steps.

1. Family: Call mom every Friday on her way home from work because her commute is 25 minutes and I would like to talk for at least 10.

2. Relationships: On the first and third Saturday of every month plan to have a date night. Make a plan for both at home or out whichever is most feasible at the time.

3. Friendships: Call my friend the last Wednesday of every month so that we can catch up. Make up a list of 12 books that can be listened to, you can ask your friend if she wants to listen to any of them and discuss them when you have both finished listening to them or at some point while listening to them.

4. Financial: Set aside $97 in cash every week. Make sure to work this into your monthly budget so that it does not negatively affect your family expenses.

5. Spiritual: Read or listen to a chapter of the Bible every morning while making breakfast instead of listening to music or a podcast. The first book that will be listened to, will be the book of Proverbs starting January 1st. When there is only one chapter left to listen to of a book a new one should be chosen.

6. Physical: Plan for about 1 pound of weight loss per week until all of the weight I gained has come off. Go for a half hour walk with the children daily 15 minutes away and then turn around for 15 minutes back. Do pilates strength training workouts on youtube 3 days a week.

7. Psychological: Get a notebook or journal and put it on your night stand with a pen in the drawer. Every night when you sit down in bed pick up your gratitude journal and write down three positive things that happened that day that you are grateful for.

Those are now great goals that can actually be achieved! I think the best goals on the list are the family goal, the financial goal, and the physical goal because they are quantifiable. Those three goals have numbers associated with them making it easy to break down into baby steps and put into our schedule. The financial goal and part of the physical goal also have a definitive end point that will be achieved marking the completion of the goal. See the beauty of these goals is that by breaking them down into baby steps and knowing our deadline, we are able to put the baby step into our daily or weekly schedule. This takes the goal from being daunting and overwhelming to just another task on our to do list that is very manageable. If you complete the baby steps in the timeline you set for them then by the end of the year you will have achieved your goal without really having to think about it.

Something that is important to think about though is that sometimes even the most attainable goals cannot be achieved in the timeframe we hope to for any number of reasons. Perhaps you gained 30 pounds during your pregnancy and you want to lose all of that weight by next year which is definitely achievable, but your baby is sensitive to something in your diet and you are exclusively breastfeeding forcing you to focus on adjusting your diet for your baby rather than for weight loss. This can cause a large chunk of your timeframe to be taken up by something else which my require that you adjust your goal. Perhaps in that scenario you reassess your goal and to make sure you don’t just give up you change your weight loss goal to losing only 15 pounds by the end of the year rather than 30. This is why I suggest you checking in with the progress of your goals quarterly and reassess and make changes as necessary.

I hope you liked these tips I have for how to make great goals and actually achieve them. In the next blog I’ll be talking about a healthy habit for the body. I really enjoy diving deeper into these healthy habits and sharing what I have learned and experienced with you.

Your Friend,

Amanda