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How to Achieve Your Goals—8 Ways to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals - Parade

“This is it. I’m really going to do it this time,” we all say as we set another goal that we completely forget about three days later. It never fails. At the start of every new year, everyone’s all, “New year, new me.” If I were being more honest with myself, though, it’d be, “New year, same me but 10 pounds heavier.” But I digress. Are you ready to set a goal and, you know, actually stick to it? Same. Fortunately, there are some science-backed ways of conquering your goals. Let’s dive into them, with a little help from the experts along the way.

How to Achieve Your Goals, According to Science

1. Write. It. Down!

Mary Allen, CPCC, MCC, author of The Power of Inner Choice and life coach of more than 21 years, tells Parade.com, “You’ve heard it before, but by writing down your goals, you’re 42 percent more likely to achieve them, according to a study at Dominican University in California. It’ll force you to get clear, and take a stand for what you want.”

According to Forbes, there are two main reasons why writing down your goals works: external storage and encoding. External storage simply means that we’re taking a thought and putting it on a physical location, like a piece of paper. Plain and simple, we make things more of a priority when we’re reminded of them every single day.

Encoding helps by sending messages to our brain and helping to decide what gets put in our long-term memory and what gets tossed away. When you write things down, your ability to encode them improves.

Related: Get Organized in the New Year with These 50+ Best Planners for 2020 

Allen also encourages us to think long-term: “Take it one step further by creating a year-long vision. To do this, imagine it’s exactly one year from today, then write a letter to yourself in the past tense, as though you are reflecting on your accomplishments achieved in 2020. This simple strategy allows you to connect mentally and emotionally with your goals. Clients find themselves almost automatically taking inspired actions to fulfill goals.”

Moral of the story? Have a journal, whiteboard, or even a scrap piece of paper where you write down your goals and really let them sink in—every single day.

2. Make Your Goals SMART

“If your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and within a set time-frame, the odds of you actually accomplishing them go up,” says Sami Main, a certified life coach and published author. “Setting goals works best when people can be as specific, and realistic, as possible. A lot of times, folks set too high of a standard for themselves and they get set up for failure instead of success.”

You won’t often hear people tell you to set the bar low, but when it comes to goals, smaller, more manageable ones might be the ticket. Hitting these mini-goals keeps you motivated and gives you an incentive to continue. And incentives can be everything. In fact, research has found that workplace incentive programs can boost performance by anywhere from 25 to 44 percent. Create a sort of incentive program for yourself, and you’re on your way to success.

Being able to measure your goal is a biggie, too. It’s not enough to say you want to lose weight (if that’s your goal). You can’t measure “lose weight.” How many pounds do you want to lose? That’s something that you can measure.

3. Determine Where You Are Stuck

“Find the hole in your tire,” says Erica Diamond, certified life coach, weekly TV correspondent, author, speaker, and founder of the award-winning women’s empowerment brand WomenOnTheFence.com. “First, think about your current state: Always looking forward to Friday? Can’t seem to find your mojo? Free time still feel unmotivating? Even though you know you should make a change, it feels more comforting to stay where you are? ANSWER YES? That’s ok. Self-awareness is first.”

Let’s say you have a goal to consistently get eight hours of sleep a night. But every time you get in bed, your mind is wired. Why? Where are you getting stuck?

Related: See You Later, 2019! Ring in 2020 with 100 of the Best New Year’s Quotes 

You then realize that you stop working immediately before going to bed, and that’s the problem. Thus, your new goal might become to stop working at least one hour before bedtime.

4. Free Yourself to Focus

“In today’s world, distraction is the enemy of success,” adds Allen. “Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that the typical office worker is interrupted or switches tasks, on average, every three minutes and five seconds. We have email, text, social media, pop-up alerts, phone calls, employees, co-workers, and bosses who are interrupting our workflow. Roughly half of these are self-interruptions. So, if you’re a stay-at-home mom or you work at home, these statistics apply to you too. It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back where they left off. If you want to achieve your goals in 2020, concentrated focus is key.

Easier said than done? Probably. Thankfully, Allen also offers some actionable tips. “Challenge yourself to carve out at least two hours of distraction-free time a day. That means turning off your smartphone, closing email, and shutting off the TV. If at work, buy a pair of noise-canceling headphones to signal to others you’re concentrating. Resist the urge to multi-task. Two hours a day equals 104 hours a year. That’s enough time to write an entire book, work out to support weight loss, create a new product or business, or more.”

5. Break Your Goal Up Into Bite-Sized, Doable Steps

Main reminds us to tackle baby steps instead of one overwhelming goal. “For example, you don’t set a goal to run a marathon and then run one the very next day. You need to research, develop, and implement a training routine that works for you … Action steps help people make their big goals feel more doable because the steps are small and methodical.”

Look at it as creating mini-goals that will help you reach your main goal. If you want to write a book, you might break this up into mini-goals like:

  • Draft three pages a day.
  • Write 500 words a day.
  • Write for 45 minutes uninterrupted each day.

These are much easier to digest and manage than “write a book.”

6. Step Out of Your Comfort Zone More Often

“Getting off the fence and getting unstuck is about self-esteem,” explains Diamond. “The more you go outside your comfort zone, the more you challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, the more you build your self-esteem and resilience muscle. The more resilient you are, the more confident you become in your decision-making and moving forward.”

Related: Motivational and Inspirational Quotes

7. Hire a Coach

Allen reminds us that it’s perfectly acceptable to ask for help. “Athletes have coaches to bring out their best. Nowadays, so do executives, business owners, professionals, and even stay-at-home moms. Approximately 500,000 people rely on coaches to help them set and achieve their goals faster by taking strategic action, holding them accountable, addressing obstacles, and creating a powerful mindset. To put it simply, a coach helps you maximize your professional and personal potential.”

Really and truly, it’s no different than having a personal trainer for the gym. A word of warning, though: “The coaching field is unregulated. No license is required. Consequently, anyone can call themselves a coach. Look for an ICF credentialed coach, ACC, PCC, or MCC. The highest level of accreditation is the Master Certified Coach (MCC) with the ICF. That means they’ve coached at minimum 2,500 hours. For you, it means accelerating your results in less time.”

Main echos a similar sentiment, saying, “People can also set up an accountability system. This is usually why folks seek out life coaches, to have a person who isn’t their significant other or a close family member help hold them accountable for the goals and action steps they’ve set out to do. It helps to have someone to check in with about your progress. For example, if you tell someone you’re going to read three books this month, they’re now expecting to hear about those books in a few weeks. You can even ask them to set a reminder to check in with you about that goal.”

8. Replace Old Habits With Better Ones

“If your goal is to change a habit, you’re not alone. But it can be really difficult to change a habit ‘overnight’ or ‘cold turkey.’ Real, lasting change takes time and repetition to really sink in,” explains Main.

Let’s look at smoking, for instance. Research says that out of 100 people who try to quit cold turkey, at least 95 percent of them fail. Why? Simple. They’re trying to completely remove something from their life, and it’s abrupt and overwhelming.

Here’s what Main suggests we do instead:

“One way to make it easier is to replace the habit you want to stop doing with something else. Instead of feeling like there’s a void or something missing, you’ll have a different action ready to go instead. For example, let’s say you want to stop biting your nails. If you can dig a little deeper and figure out why you’re biting your nails (i.e. are you anxious? are you bored? are you thinking through a problem?), you can figure out a replacement habit instead (i.e. reach out to a friend to talk about how you’re feeling; use those minutes to catch up on emails or another task; grab a notebook to write out the problem you’re trying to find a solution to). Everyone has different reasons for their habits, so figuring out what’s behind your own can help you replace it with one that makes you feel better.”

Have a goal you want to conquer? Get more help making your New Year’s resolutions stick.

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How to Achieve Your Goals—8 Ways to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals - Parade
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