The Secret to Achieving ALL Your Goals in 2018

Its that time of the year, and we have all goals to follow through on.

But what happens when the gym seems empty towards the end of January, and we’ve stress-shopped for a week straight.

We get overwhelmed and forget about focusing on these goals.

Everybody creates goals for the year, but because they’re so long-term and reflective of our future-self that we forget to achieve them in a haze of procrastination.

What we really need to do is to set shorter goals that we can accomplish daily. That’s a much better approach for us, than thinking about our future self, five years from today.

In fact, we’ve known this for more than 40 years, with research from professors Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham combing though almost half a century’s worth of information.

According to the research, the answers are clear.

You need to set a clear and difficult goal for yourself. When you tell yourself, or your employees to do their best – often, they don’t outperform their expectations.

Also, if you have tighter deadlines about the work that you do, you tend to do them with higher quality and wasting lesser time. Shorter and clearer goals are the right way to going with achieving all your goals.

However, there are many secrets apart from goal-setting that will help guide the way in 2018 –

#1 Grit, Growth and Mindset –

Our mindset is key, and we have been practising mindset ever since we were young.

When we’d play on the swings or climb a tall fence, we were listening to our inner monologue that guided the way. But, as adults we take lesser risks and face the consequences of being stuck in the loop of procrastination and delays.

When our mindset governs most of how we feel through the day, we want to make it one that’s helpful and positive.

Angela Lee Duckworth, PhD (University of Pennsylvania), published a seminal piece of work in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, where she conducted research on students over a long period of time.

Those that displayed attributes of grit early on had better jobs as adults.

They ended up making more money, were happier and displayed signs of stability and security.

The research is clear – we need grit in our life to persevere through problems.

When it comes to research about mindset, one idea resonates above all others. “The Growth Mindset” is a topic coined by Prof Carol Dweck of Stanford University.

Her research of top CEOs, managers and athletes have proven that when people are in a growth-mindset mentality, they’re more likely to perform better in life.

Growth-mindset is all about being positive about your future and taking proactive actions towards your goals in a structured manner.

It’s not about positive thinking, but rather making GROWTH your default mental framework.

#2 Be Grateful –

There comes a time, when you have everything you need but aren’t grateful about them.

You take them for granted and don’t find satisfaction and meaning from the things that you’ve accumulated. It sounds like a cliché, but being grateful for what you have makes you feel more secure about yourself.

Become more confident and ready to face the world with a secure feeling inside. Look at opportunities more positively and focus on the things that you have and now want from life.

Research from psychologists Dr. Robert A. Emmons of the University of California, Davis, and Dr. Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami, asked participants to either

A) write down things that they were grateful for.

B) write down things that they were irritated about.

After 10 weeks, they realized that the first group was happier, more satisfied about life and didn’t visit the doctor as much as group B did. Gratitude heals your inner being.

Another core advantage of being grateful is a feeling of being satisfied with what you have.

Often, we go from go-getters to control freaks, and we don’t focus on our goals anymore. We start to focus on what we don’t have and get stressed. Turn things around and focus on being grateful with what you have, so that in the future you can be happy with what you need.

#3 Set a meaningful goal –

Don’t set a goal of reaching a certain number on your bank account. Instead, focus on setting meaningful goals that you can accomplish with a sense of meaning behind it.

If you want to settle down and have kids by the next 3 years, you need to focus on creating goals that are multi-dimensional. These would not only include working harder, but also spending more time with your partner and her friends.

This multi-dimensional goal setting adds more meaning to our lives and gives deep satisfaction.

If we only set a certain numeric value to our goal and don’t have anyone to share it with – then we won’t enjoy it as much. Our natural sense of happiness will start to fade, and we’ll only think about life in terms of money in and money out.

What’s important is that we set meaningful goals that we can truly accomplish.

E.g. if you want to be CEO of a large corporation, but deep down inside you only want to do that for the money. You don’t want to have “CEO” as a goal.

You want to have “financial security” as a goal.

Since the latter goal is more meaningful to your life, it’s a more achievable goal that you can target. This helps you reach your targets, and allow you to crush your 2018 goals!

Conclusion

Setting goals is hard enough, and achieving them seems next to impossible.

Add to that, our natural tendency to delay things and focus on having a good time instead. What we need is to set meaningful, short term goals and pursue them with grit and passion.

What we can’t accomplish is what we have yet to see.

That’s the right approach to crushing 2018.