How To Achieve Your Goals This Year: Ultimate Goal Setting Guide!

Are you ready to learn how to achieve all your wildest goals and dreams this year!? Today, I am sharing major goal-setting secrets on how I set and achieve all my goals. I am a HUGE goal-setter, if you can’t already tell! Might be a little too obsessed, but that’s okay!

Setting goals helps me stay focused and gives me motivation to work towards what I want in life. I’ve got a lot on my plate these days, just with my full time job, the blog and another side hustle, so I have to make sure I’ve got an organized goal-setting system in place.

In this post, I’m sharing all the best goal-setting strategies that will allow you to achieve all of your goals too! Oh, and I’ve got an awesome, totally Free Goal-Setting Worksheet you can grab here to plan out your quarterly and monthly goals!

Why Should You Set Goals?

Setting goals for yourself is so important. Goals give you something to work towards, they help you prioritize what’s important and they help you achieve your dream life (whatever that means for you)!

Setting clear, measurable goals allows you to focus in on your most important priorities and achieve them in a specific time frame. Lastly, setting goals motivates you! When you physically write down what you want to achieve in life and frame it as a goal, you’re so much more likely to achieve it. When I write a goal down on paper, it’s official. Nothing is going to stop me from achieving it.

How to Set Goals

Now, let’s get into how to set goals! This is the easy part, so grab a pen and a cute notebook so you can take some notes! I’m sharing all my best secrets to setting and achieving your goals!

1. Organize Your Goals into Categories

I like to organize mine into four separate categories: Finance, Work, Blogging and Personal. Like I said before, I’ve got a lot going on, so breaking my goals up makes it easier for me to track my progress and keep everything organized. If you don’t have as many categories as I do, that’s totally fine! Maybe you just want to have Finance and Personal goals.

2. Think of the Big Picture

Before you set any concrete goals, think about the bigger picture.

What do you want your life to look like in 5 years? How about 10 years?
How do you want to feel every day?
What career do you want to have?
When you wake up in the morning what does your routine look like?

These are all questions you want to ask yourself to determine what goals you need to set to achieve your dream life.

I’ll give you an example. For me, my dream life includes waking up with the sunrise, getting an energizing workout in before my family wakes up, then sitting on the patio journaling and reading a chapter of the latest book I’m reading. I make breakfast for everyone, shower and get ready for the day. From there, I drive our kids to school, come back and answer emails, shoot blog content and write blog posts for Sunday Mimosas Blog. I am my own boss. I feel happy, confident and thankful that this is the life I have built.

Easy! Now your turn.

What does your dream life look like? Grab a piece of paper, answer the above questions and write your answers as if this is already your life. Use statements such as “I am” or “I feel” or “I make” instead of “I will”.

3. Set Smaller Goals That Will Help You Achieve Your Larger Goals

Review your statements that you just wrote above. Now ask yourself, “What goals do I need to set to achieve my dream life?”

Now, those goals are probably going to be pretty big and ambitious. At least mine are!

So, once you have an idea of your larger, big picture goals. Break them up into smaller ones! Think about what smaller goals you can set for yourself each month or each quarter that will help you get there.

If you want to be someone that wakes up with the sunrise every morning, start with a goal of waking up 20 minutes earlier than usual.

4. Set Monthly Goals

I find that setting monthly goals works the best for me! I still set annual and quarterly goals, but I prefer monthly goals because they’re more short term, they’re simple to track and you can easily adjust your strategy to make sure you hit them.

Monthly goals are where I see results. They keep you in line and motivated to achieve your larger annual goals that you set. At the beginning of every new month, sit down and plan out your monthly goals!

5. Make Sure Your Goals Are Measurable

This is important. If your goals aren’t measurable, it’ll be hard for you to track your progress. You’ll have no way to tell how you’re doing or how close you are to achieving your goal. Here are some examples of clear, measurable goals.

Reach 3,000 Page views on my blog this month
Lose 5 pounds in 30 days
Wake up at 6am Monday through Friday
Go to the gym three times a week

These are all very easy to measure. Now, let me share an example of how not to structure your goals.

Stop procrastinating
Eat healthier
Workout more
Spend less time on my phone

These goals aren’t easily measurable. If you structure your goals this way, you are less likely to achieve them because you can’t track your progress. Instead, try framing your goals like this:

I will work on the project for 30 minutes every night
I will only eat out once a week
Workout 30 minutes, four days a week
Only spend 2 hours on my phone each day

If you’re looking for additional goal-setting tips, my friend Jessica over at Joyful with Purpose goes in depth about how to effectively set goals that will move you closer toward achieving your dream life here. Are you excited!?

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How To Achieve Your Goals

Once you’ve set goals for yourself, the next steps are actually achieving them. This is definitely the hardest part and where a lot of people don’t follow through. But, I’m going to share my top tips on how to accomplish your goals.

1. Track Your Goal Progress

You can do this electronically or on paper. I do both! I use a google sheet to track my annual, quarterly and monthly goals. Then, I write out my goals on this printable monthly goal-setting sheet to keep at my desk as well! I find it easier to track my monthly goals on paper and then enter my results at the end of the month into my google sheet.

2. Revisit Your Goals Daily

This is why I like to use a printable goal-setting sheet too! When you can visibly see your goals in front of you every single day, you’re more likely to achieve them. It also allows you to see if you need to adjust your current strategy to hit your goals!

3. Set Deadlines

You need to set strict deadlines with yourself when it comes to your goals! If you don’t, you’re more likely to procrastinate and put off achieving them. Be realistic with yourself too. You want to make sure your goals are reasonable and can be accomplished in the time frame you set.

Here’s an example of one of my goals: I will reach 3,000 Page views on my blog by August 31, 2020.

4. Complete Monthly Goal Reviews

On the first of every month you should sit down and analyze all the goals you set for last month. This helps you understand how you can move forward and adjust your goals for next month.

Here are some questions I ask myself during my monthly goal review:

Did I accomplish the goals I set?
What allowed me to accomplish this goal?
Why didn’t I reach my goal?
How can I ensure that I reach next month’s goals?

5. Share your Goals with Others

Telling other people about your goals and what you want to achieve will help you hold yourself accountable. Your friends or family should hold you accountable too! This way, you won’t give up and you’ll keep pushing forward even when it gets hard.

6. Write your goals on paper and put them where you can see them

Write your goals on paper and hang them up where you will see them all the time! Put them on your desk, on the kitchen fridge, your nightstand, on the bathroom mirror, etc. Anywhere that you will see them!

Whenever you walk by that room you’ll see your goals and be reminded of them. If you keep your goals and priorities top of mind you will be even more motivated to achieve them and follow through.

7. Develop habits that will make it easy for you to achieve your goals!

Success is most definitely found in your everyday habits! I’ve found that changing the little things can have a huge impact. So, make sure your daily habits are allowing you to successfully reach your goals.

If one of your goals is to lose 5 pounds in the next month and you’re currently eating out every day, you need to change your habits!

Resources to Help You Achieve Your Goals

To make sure you are SUPER SUCCESSFUL in achieving all your goals, I wanted to provide you with some awesome resources you can use!

My Quarterly & Monthly Goal-Setting Worksheet

You can print this worksheet out, answer the questions and write down all your goals you want to achieve! Click here to download your free Goal-Setting Worksheet!

Click here to download your free Goal-Setting Worksheet!

The KIT Life Planner

This is by far the best planner I’ve found! It has a section for gratitude, your top three priorities, meal planning, self care, activities, AND obviously your to-do list! Personally, I use the Daily KIT Planner (in marble) and it helps me stay extremely organized and productive all day long. There’s also weekly and undated planners as well if that’s more your vibe!

Highly, highly recommend buying a planner and creating a plan for how you’re going to achieve your goals!

Podcasts

Design Your Dream Life with Natalie Bacon – Learn how to accomplish all your goals, live life more fulfilled, make more money and conquer your mindset

Style Your Mind with Cara Alwill – This is a good one and the episodes are short and to the point which I love! All Cara’s episodes are insanely motivating and empowering. I guarantee after you listen, you’ll feel inspired to go after all your goals!

Often Ambitious – Lindsey and Erica are both entrepreneurs who keep it real and are extremely relatable! They give tangible tips and advice on how to achieve your dream life and be super successful (whatever that means for you)!

Ultimate Guide to Goal-Setting: How to Achieve Your Goals This Year!

Why Should You Set Goals?