Teens Meet Outreach

Having clarity about your goals is essential to gain enough motivation to achieve those goals. Although, many other factors apart from clarity are involved in setting goals and achieving them.

{Read: How to Hit Your Goals as a Teenager}

If you’re not clear on what you’re doing, it’s hard to be motivated. This is why seemingly easy tasks, could end up taking months. There’s a lack of clarity on how to do it, so you don’t — until either you have to or it’s too late.

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Goals, at the same time, could be short term or long term. For short term goals, you need time that is as little as required to achieve them. On the other hand, long term goals could take up to four to ten years to achieve. This means our definition of what makes a short term or a long term goal depends on duration.

The belief that it is not only enough to make a goal in your dashboard but to work towards achieving it is what drives this topic – Beyond Goal Setting. In the next few lines, I will discuss basic outlines on how to get your goals to leave the draw sheets and be achieved at the set time.

1. Embrace the Unknown

I started this piece with the need for clarity as regards every set goal. However, there is always a point when the goal seems to confuse you. It is at this point that you need to test the waters and engage the unknown. If, for instance, you have a goal to read 50 books this year, and you get stuck somewhere around your third book, you should be conscious that you have a long way to go. This consciousness alone can help you think of possible ways (that were previously unknown to you) to make sure you read as much as you want. Your choice to embrace the unknown thus births courage to take on strategy.

2. Maintain Balance

If you place two items on a scale to weigh, the balance only comes when there is the equal weight. Now, in this case, know that you have on your scale, a probability that you will be successful with your goal and another, that you may fail at it.

By maintaining balance, you believe that you have equal chances to survive and succeed at your goal, as well as fail at it (I know that we do not want to be negative but then, it is one other side of reality). Here, you can choose to raise your odds and change your probability ratio, consciously improving your chance of success in achieving your goal than the probability of failure. It leads to a greater balance that way.

3. Repeat when you Fail

For me, the toughest times in the achievement of a goal is the point where I fall or fail. If you can relate, there comes weakness and a prompt to drop the goal or shift it forward to the future. On the other hand, if you choose to shift it till the future, you would still meet it waiting ahead and would likely have no solution for it at that time like you currently don’t. Just like in school where you have to repeat a class if you fail, the way out is only when you choose to repeat that stage of your goal’s achievement and forge through till you make headway.

{Read: Overcoming the Fear of Failure}

When you read this, you may decide that the year is still young. You may also conclude that it is far spent already (very relative). Whichever it is for you, I know you have goals set for the year and I do not want you to quit any.

If you keep your hands on the wheel, you would evaluate yourself in the end, thankful that you did not quit.

{Related: Goal Setting Beyond Mere Motivation}

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How do you keep yourself motivated to achieve your goals? I’ll like to hear from you in comments below.