Announce your goals.

With the winter season rapidly approaching, what better thing to do than set out your goals. It can feel scary to open up about your goals, mostly because you are afraid of failing, but by concealing them, you are already accepting that they won’t happen. Being brave and opening up about your goals makes you more accountable to achieving them and allows your mind to recognise they are realistic achievements. When it comes to setting goals, here is what I do:

Write them down.

• Be clear with your goals and write them down. When we keep them in our head, they can change slightly without us realising, we can end up not taking them seriously and we can also lose direction. However, by writing them down you can see them clearly each and everyday. They can ensure you maintain direction each day and continually work towards your goals. It also means that you are less likely to shy away from them and change them, because there is something slightly difficult about crossing out your goals and changing them. 

Don’t be afraid to talk about them.

• One of the best ways to take your goals seriously, is to talk about them. Sometimes a goal can seem scary and out of reach, but by throwing them into conversation and opening up about them, we normalise them and make them seem a lot more achievable. It also changes the way you look at your goal. Instead of it being something to be embarrassed of, you start to believe it more. It also makes you more accountable in your quest to achieve them. If you have told other people about them, they are likely to ask how you are getting on, or if you’ve achieved them, and you want to be able to tell them you have. This will keep you on course to achieve your goals. 

​Approach them positively.

• If you approach your goals with the mindset that you are not going to achieve them, you have already partly accepted defeat. You have filled your mind with the expectation that they won’t happen, so you are ore likely to have a negative mindset on the journey to achieving them. However, by simply changing the way you think about them and talk about them, you can give yourself a more positive mindset towards achieving them. For example, instead of saying, ‘if I achieve my goal’, say, ‘when I achieve my goal’, they both say a similar sort of one, but the second tells your mind that you will achieve your goals, it is just a case of when. 

Set stepping stones. 

• Whilst it is important to set goals that scare you, it can be quite overwhelming if the next goal in sight is a long way away. Therefore, in order to make it less daunting and more achievable, set smaller goals that are currently more achievable. This will help keep you more motivated as achieving the smaller goals on route to your main goals will give you that positive reinforcement to keep going. If you only set that one main goal, but not the small ones along the way, it can cause you to feel slightly helpless as you don’t know how you’re ever going to be able to achieve that goal. The little goals, act as the stepping stones that will guide you in the right direction of your goal. 

Be brave but realistic. 

• Of course you want to be ambitious with the goals you set yourself, as you want it to feel extremely rewarding when you achieve them. That being said, you also need to be realistic to start with. For example, if you are afraid of swimming in water, it may not be realistic to set your first goal as ‘I want to swim the Atlantic’. It is only going to overwhelm you and may be pretty unrealistic. Therefore, a brave but realistic goal to start with would be, ‘I want to swim 10 lengths of the swimming pool’. If you are scared of water, being able to swim 10 lengths of a pool is already a very brave goal, but it will allow you to see if the big goal of swimming the Atlantic would be possible. Challenge yourself, but don’t go crazy, you’ll only psyche yourself out. 

​Remember, when you set yourself a goal, it is important to accept that the journey towards achieving it will not be linear. Things will not always go as you hope, you may take a few steps backwards at times, but don’t lose hope, as this all happens for a reason, and will only make achieving your goals more rewarding.