How to Focus on Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams

Setting goals is easy. Everyone can decide to lose 20 lbs, write a book or run a marathon. Sadly, few people will ever reach their initial goals.

We often settle for lesser versions of our ambitions: we lose 5 lbs, write a few pages or run 4-5 miles. Sure, it’s a big improvement and we can be proud of what we achieve, but why turn a blind eye on the feeling of full accomplishment and settle for less?

I believe the #1 reason for this is that we lose focus on our goals and thus stop working towards them.

Reaching for what we want is a lot of hard work and takes time. While we’re working towards our goals, life is throwing all kinds of challenges and distractions at us: big projects in our careers, new relationships in our lives, new hobbies and passions to explore… It’s easy to lose focus and get sidetracked. After a while, we tend to consciously or unconsciously forget and let go of our goals.

It’s perfectly fine, normal and healthy to re-evaluate our goals as we progress through life – but what is not satisfying is to settle for less when we have the potential to achieve much more.

How to stay focused on your goals

Here are five tips that will help you keep a razor-sharp focus on your goals and help you attain that true feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment when you reach them.

1. Carve your goals into stone!

Take the time to write down your goals to make them official. Immortalize them on paper and you will make your goals much more concrete. You will tend to remember them more easily and you can read them over if you forget about them. Here are a few tricks to formulate your goals that will help you achieve them:

i) State your goals in a positive way

Remove as much negativity as possible from your wording. Negativity will have a tendency to set you down and will diminish the impact of your sentence. Here’s an example:

“Be less shy and not be intimidated when speaking in public”

How does that sentence feel? To me, it sounds very insecure. It is full of shyness and written by someone who’s clearly intimidated about his goal, which is exactly the opposite of what he wants to achieve. What if, instead, he wrote:

“Be confident and at ease when speaking in public”

Already, the sentence radiates confidence and self-belief. It is much more inspiring and easier to focus on.

ii) Make your goals clear and leave no room for interpretation

How else will you really know that you’ve reached your goals? Make them measurable objectively. That way you can be 100% certain when you reach your objectives and get a superior feeling of accomplishment. Let’s look at the following example:

“I want to be rich.”

How do you define such wealth? When you have a 6-figure salary? A Porsche in your driveway? One million in the bank? How will you know when you have reached your goal?

“I want to have a 150k/year salary.”

That goal is precise, objective and you’ll know the minute you achieve it.

Write down your goals in positive and clear sentences and read them daily.

2. Speak up!

While writing down your goals is a good way to make them official, saying them aloud will bring them to life. Repeat a sentence often enough and you will begin to believe it.

Look at yourself in the eyes in the mirror and repeat your goals aloud. If you find it awkward at first, you can try looking at yourself and repeating the sentence in your head. When you are ready, whisper it.  Then speak it. Then repeat it with confidence.

Do you see how it feels? Do you see how you gain assurance in your goals with this simple exercise?

I also encourage you to tell someone else about your goals. Don’t keep them all to yourself. Sharing your goals with the people around you will get you the support you need to achieve them.

Say your goals out loud every day and they will get engraved in your soul and follow you around during the day.

3. Allow yourself to dream!

In order to achieve anything, you need to believe that you can really do it. If you don’t believe in your objectives, you’re not likely to even try at all. Visualization plays an important part in obtaining that belief.

You will get all the motivation and self-belief you need to achieve your dreams by simply imagining yourself, as vividly as possible, achieving them. When visualizing, think about how achieving your goals will feel like. Imagine yourself reaching them. Feel the success, the pride and the fulfillment of your achievements. Live and enjoy your new life in your head for a few minutes.

You can do this not only for your goals as a whole, but for each individual steps needed to reach them as well. If one of your goals is to launch your online business, you’ll have predetermined steps that you need to accomplish before the launch: preparing a concept, finding your domain name, doing market research, etc. Visualize yourself achieving each step individually as well as reaching your goal as a whole and you will find it much easier to accomplish.

Visualize your goals daily to stay motivated and on course.

4. Track your progress!

Tracking your progress is important to help you ensure that you are actually moving towards your goals at a pace that satisfies you.

If your goal is to be able to run 10 miles and you run every day without ever measuring the distance you run, you’ll have no idea if you are actually making progress towards your goal. Maybe you hit a plateau and need to take action to progress further, but you won’t know that unless you start measuring your progress.

Keeping track of your progression is also a big motivator. Your progress towards your goals might not be apparent on a day-to-day basis, but if you look at it on a larger scale, it becomes clear how much progress you’re actually making. You can also draw charts and graphs to visualize your progression.

I like to use a good old-fashioned paper calendar to keep track of my goals. Every day, I simply take the time to review my goals and add annotations and accomplishments in the calendar. I look back at my progress and usually get a motivation boost by doing so.

Keep track of your progress daily to ensure that you are on the right path and to find the motivation you need.

5. Feed the fire!

In order to keep your goals in focus, it is good to remember them during the day in a way that will motivate you. Here are a few tricks you can use to remember your goals throughout the day:

• Change your wallpaper – Set an image as your computer or cell phone wallpaper that represents your future achievements. Every time you see it, you’ll remember them and feel motivated.
• Make a motivational poster – Motivational posters still get the job done. Hang a picture where you can see it often or leave one on your desk.
• Set a new password – Why not change your most commonly used password to a word that will remind you of your aspirations and motivate you? For security reasons, just make sure it is not easily guessable by anyone: make it a passphrase and mix numbers, symbols, lowercases, uppercases, etc.

Keep your goals alive throughout the day to make sure your focus doesn’t shift from your goals and to keep your inner flame burning.

So, to keep your goals in focus…

You can begin to write down, speak up, visualize, track and remember your goals if you aren’t already doing so. Perform these actions daily and I can guarantee you that you will stay focused on your goals. You will find that your dreams are much more within your reach than you thought.

How do you stay focused on your goals? Do you have any tips or experiences you’d like to share?