Top 10 Goal Setting Tips
Tip 7 - Chunk it Down

The 7th of my goal setting tips is all about making your journey towards your goal more manageable.

Sometimes our biggest goals can seem so overwhelming that we don't know where to start, or even if it's possible to start!Imagine in the following tasks:

You are morbidly obese and you want to lose 100 lbs!

You get out of breath running up a flight of stairs and you want to run a marathon!

Obviously these goals cannot be achieved overnight, but they are absolutely possible to achieve if you have a plan which breaks the big goal down into smaller tasks and action steps. All you have to do then is to achieve each smaller task, one at a time, and you will achieve your goal. First though, you need to figure out what are the smaller steps you need to take.

How Can You Do This?

There are several ways you can figure out what action steps you need to take in order to achieve your goal. One is to model someone else who has already done what you want to do successfully. They can give you the benefit of their experience and tell you not only what was successful, but also what pitfalls to avoid. This is pretty useful and means you don't have to make the same mistakes they made.

Another way is to purchase a book, audio CD or DVD which outlines the process. You could even find the information for free on a good quality website!!! Alternatively you could start from the end point and look back. Just close your eyes and imagine yourself in your future having already achieved your goal. Look back and see what you had to do to get there. What was the last thing you did? And the thing before that? And before that, until you arrive at the first action you had to start with.

Tips for Planning

A valuable tool for putting an action plan together is a technique called mind mapping, developed by Tony Burzan. Click here to find more information about mind mapping.

Make a daily 'To Do' list. Be realistic about what you can achieve in a day and commit to taking at least ONE action every day that will take you that little bit closer to your Big Goal. If you were to do just one thing, what should that thing be? You might like to take Brian Tracy's advise from his excellent book, 'Eat that Frog!'. He advises you identify 1 - 5 things you must accomplish on any given day, and then pick the one you must absolutely do first. This becomes your biggest and ugliest frog. These are often the things that we end up putting off and then not having the time to achieve. However, if you do it first thing in the morning, you will feel great and it will make the rest of you day go so much easier! Try it and see!

Plan your day the night before. By making a to do list for the following day and visualizing how you want the day to go, your subconscious mind will take on board what you want to achieve and start working on these tasks during the night while you are asleep. It will think of creative ways to solve problems and achieve outcomes, and present these to you as ideas the following day.

I hope you've found the 7th of my goal setting tips valuable. To explore the others, please click on the links below:

Goal Setting Tips (8) - Take action
Goal Setting Tips (9) - Prepare for obstacles
Goal Setting Tips (10)- Be flexible

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