How to Plan and Achieve Your Dreams

In the hustle and bustle of life, to achieve your dream may be a dream itself. Regardless of what your dream is, the goal should be to accomplish it. Today, I am giving you the magical answer to how you can achieve your dreams and make it. 

One word, ORGANIZE! 

Organizing your time and resources is a great way to find a track to your goals. However, planning and organizing is easier said than done. Moreover, you may not know how to plan! 

Here is my guide, run by my research and some personal practices to effectively plan and achieve your dreams through strategic goal setting.

The Importance of Setting Goals

I’m not going to jump in and tell you to set goals. You need to understand why they are important. Imagine me inviting you to my house. That’s it! That’s the information you get. You do not have an address, no time, no date, not even a dress-code. So what do you do? Do you randomly steer around the city with every kind of clothes you have hoping to get on the right time?

Nope!

You should ask me for all the possible details. These details help you set a goal. You will learn when and what you need to do to reach your ultimate destination. 

Goals are what you need to reach. The details are everything you need to know about reaching it. 

Setting goals provides a target to reach so you do not wander aimlessly in the chaos of life. 

The Psychological Benefits of Goal Setting

Goals have a very important connotation for the mind as well. Setting goals makes you ambitious, motivated, confident, and may even reduce anxiety. With each goal comes a small milestone. Every milestone will give you a sense of achievement and motivate you to achieve more of them. 

Having a goal helps keep your mind in structure and clarity. Thus, when you plan to finally achieve your dreams, you will have clarity and will not have wasted time and resources. 

The SMART Goals Framework

To achieve your goals, George T. Doran, president of Management Assistance Programs coined the term in 1981 to help achieve goals. 

I will talk to you about it, but remember, these are a framework. You can call it a skeleton. Just a general idea of focal points to include in your planning. Here is what SMART stands for. 

S – Specific 

When you set out to achieve your dreams, you need to have specificity. Being ambiguous and very wide can lead to confusion, lack of clarity, and lack of focus. Make your goals more specific by first asking what you want to accomplish. Learn from yourself about why it is important to you, what motivates you, and what you need to have. 

Begin by answering questions broadly and then keep getting narrower to find specifications. 

M – Measurable

You may think that your specific goal is not measurable. However, everything can have math if you try hard enough. The idea of success is arbitrary. Ask yourself what success looks like to you. Ask questions like how much, how many, and what will you consider accomplishment?

A – Achievable 

Becoming a billionaire in under six months may happen miraculously. However, being achievable is more important than anything else. Setting unrealistic goals is not the goal! It is good to be ambitious. However, it is also good to have practical steps to reach that ambition. 

Ask yourself if you can accomplish your goal. Consider the challenges you will face and discover the time it takes. Make it achievable. Like I said, anything can have math if you try hard enough. Calculate the time and resources to achieve your goal and you will find achievability. 

R – Relevant

Your goals should matter to you. That is the only relevance you need. Let’s say if you want to achieve a professional goal that does not align with your experience or degree, your steps will be to learn about it. It will NOT be counted as irrelevant. 

T – Time-bound

Setting a target can keep you further pushed and motivated. When it comes to time, it’s friends with no one! Ensure you set a realistic goal so you have a deadline. 

Apart from long-term, think of short-term milestones that you can achieve throughout your journey. Set what you need to do a week from now, or six months, or so. 

What are long terms and short term goals?

Your ultimate goal is going to be one and specific. However, there are long-term and short-term goals. 

Long-term goals require maximum effort and commitment. Long-term goals are visions for the future and help stay motivated. 

Short-term goals on the other hand are smaller. They are like milestones that you achieve on the journey to long term goals. These include learning more about your ultimate dream or goal.

Short-term goals help provide a sense of achievement that increases motivation. Moreover, it helps you build momentum. 

Breaking Down Goals and Dreams into Manageable Steps

Now that you have goals and dreams down with the SMART framework. It is time to break them down and set out to achieve them. Here is how you can achieve your dreams. 

Create an Action Plan

Begin by setting an action plan. Your plan will include making smaller steps and goals to achieve throughout the way. This helps keep you on track without being overwhelmed on a long journey. Yes, I am not going to sugarcoat it. The journey is going to be very long. 

Your action plan should include:

• Tasks you need to complete
• A timeline for each task
• Resources you’ll need

Action plans help in seeing far in the future by focusing on small goals. Think long and hard on how you need to achieve each of your goals and arrange them in a chronological order. Set a time and the required resource for every step of the way. Moreover, set deadlines. Realistic deadlines. Track it to ensure a steady practice. 

Prioritize 

When you segmentize the journey and milestones, you will realize that some steps are difficult, some are easy. Some of them may be a little more important than the others. While setting chronologically, it is important to see the importance of tasks too. Hence, you need to prioritize. 

Use the Eisenhower Matrix to categorize tasks:

• Urgent and important
• Important but not urgent
• Urgent but not important
• Neither urgent nor important

One of the things that prioritizing does for you is avoiding procrastination. It ensures that your time and energy are not wasted throughout the journey. Moreover, important and urgent tasks can get out of the way easily so that the journey starts challengingly and ends on sweeter notes. 

Setting Milestones

Short and long milestones are checkpoints along your journey to achieve your goals. They help segmentize the journey into more manageable parts. These help in getting a clearer picture of your progress and gives you a chance to maximize your potential. 

Be flexible

Having a clear plan is very important. However, there is such a thing as being too rigid. When you set out your plans to achieve your goals and dreams, remember that life is unpredictable. There may be challenges every step of the way. Sometimes it may be so big that you might have to adjust and change your actions entirely. Having an open mind and being flexible will allow you to make quick changes and decisions without being overwhelmed. Flexibility also ensures that setbacks don’t derail your progress and allows you to stay focused on your long-term goals.

Stay Motivated and Overcoming Obstacles

Every step of the way you will need as much motivation as possible. It is important for you to keep yourself surrounded with people that give you positive vibes only. Visualizing your success is one way to remain motivated. You can also choose to give yourself some rewards when you achieve short term goals to keep you motivated. 

When days are tough, remember that time will pass and you are strong enough to rise from the ashes. 

When it comes to obstacles they are inevitable. The key to life is to anticipate them. You cannot anticipate the kind of problems you will see, but you can anticipate that something – anything is coming for you. 

Remember to have an open mind and be willing to adjust. Seek support when you need it. And finally, remember that when you see a problem, break it down to find the solution. 

Building Resilience

Having resilience is very important to achieve anything in your life. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from any situation and keep moving forward. Building resilience requires coping strategies, positive attitudes, and a healthy mental health. 

Assess your past and learn from this. This is the first step to being resilient towards life’s adversities. Your friends and support system can help you keep you on track. Finally, set out to do some yoga and practice mindfulness. 

Tracking Progress and Adjusting Goals

Now that you know your attitude and approaches, it is time to track your progress and see what you have done and what changes you have to make. 

Check in regularly 

Schedule checking in your progress at your own pace. It can be a week, month, or quarterly. It all depends on what your deadlines are. Ask yourself if you are on track, what were the obstacles, and most importantly how you came out of them. 

Checking in regularly helps you be accountable to yourself. Furthermore, you can make adjustments to your action plans by improving or even celebrating. 

Adjusting Goals

Sometimes, goals need to be adjusted. This could be due to changing circumstances or new information. Your best bet is to scale back a little if your goal becomes too unrealistically ambitious. Changing directions and sometimes experimenting is a good way to keep your goals more realistic. 

You cannot run on one mill all the time. Hence, remaining flexible is important and being responsive to changes should be natural. Regularly reassess your goals to ensure they remain relevant and achievable.

Find a Partner you can rely on

Having an accountability partner is not sharing your dream. You need to find someone that can support, encourage, and provide you with honest feedback. 

A reliable partner helps you remaining committed to your goals and provide perspective on your progress. 

The best thing is, you have someone to celebrate your little and big successes alongside. 

Wrapping up

Setting your goals is a powerful way to help achieve your dreams and turn them into reality. Understanding the importance of clear and measurable goals help you create a structured path to success. So, embark on your journey of goal setting today, and watch as your dreams turn into achievable milestones. The future is yours to create!