How do you feel now that you have started setting goals? To give yourself the best chance to achieve goals and move on beyond them you will need to figure out a way to track your progress and remain motivated day after day.

There is big difference between setting goals and achieving goals. Just thinking through your goals and writing them down was your first step in the right direction, but in order to achieve goals and feel completely successful in your life you will need to continually keep your eye on what you are trying to achieve. Setting goals should slowly transform your life!

Tracking Your Goals

We mentioned in the last lesson that your goals needed to be measured and used the example of weighing yourself on the same scale on a particular day of the week as an example. Adding to this idea, it is very important that you track your goals every step of the way if you are going to carry through to the very end and see what you can really accomplish.

If you are mathematically inclined you can use Excel or a similar program to set up spreadsheets or graphs. You can also create logs with word processing software if it helps you to write things down or check off lists of things to do on a daily basis.

Journaling can be a simpler way of tracking your goals and will benefit you in other ways as well. When you write about how things are going, what you have done each day to stay on track with your goals and identify problems that you are experiencing, you will have an outlet for frustration and other emotions. You will also tap into thoughts and feelings that you didn’t realize you were even having.

You may also seek out online message board communities that may help you achieve goals. Many offer ways of tracking progress, such as weight loss communities which feature tickers that count down your progress to a goal.

Soon after setting goals you should devote serious thought as to how you will track your progress. After that, you must start taking action to actually achieve goals and fulfill your life’s biggest ambitions.

So, setting goals leads to setting up a tracking system which leads to action.

Staying Motivated

Once the action gets started you will need to find ways to keep up your motivation. You may find yourself fired up and ready to go at the start, but somewhere along the path you may start to struggle to achieve goals and keep moving forward. You may know what you need to be doing, but what is going to actually make you do it?

When you first started setting goals you wrote down your reasons for wanting to achieve your top five goals and the benefits that you would enjoy from achieving those goals. You can reread that to gain some motivation, but you may still need to rely upon pure determination and serious commitment to push through when motivation escapes you.

Try to think of goal-specific things that can pump up your motivation when it is lacking, but also be prepared to do things even though you really don’t want to. Every so often you will also need to re-evaluate your goals as your ambitions and desires may change some. You can do this every time you reach a small goal or once a month, whatever time period works for you.

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Category: Self Help
Keywords: goals,goal setting,setting goal,set goals,setting goals,smart goals,achieve goals,how to set goals