Live your dream life - progress faster with small goals
By setting small goals you help yourself faster towards your dream life. Discover the power of small goals, and get started with it yourself
One big goal is not enough
Big goals are inspiring and exciting, but they are also shocking. Do not get me wrong: you need big goals to shape your dream life. However, it is the small goals that provide the magic.
You need a big goal to determine the direction in which you want to develop. You need small goals to develop your life step by step in that direction.
You want to roughly shape what kind of life you want to lead. What your dream life looks like.
This is the direction in which you want to develop. It may take years before you have reached this situation.
You set small goals in the light of your dream life, and thus come step by step closer to your dream life. Suppose you want to lose 20 kg. That is a good goal. A smaller target is 5 kg lost before you go on vacation. Did you achieve this? Then the next step is to lose 5 kg for the holidays. Step by step, until you have shaken those 20 kg off you.
The benefits of small goals
Small goals have many advantages:
They are not scared off. They are manageable, you do not get overwhelmed when you think about these goals.
They are quickly completed. In contrast to a major life-changing goal, small goals can be completed in a shorter time frame. And the completion of achieved goals keeps you nicely motivated.
They help you just as well. It is the small goals that ultimately bring you to your destination. The big goal is Paris, your little goals are the rails to it.
They keep you focused. Because you set your small goals in the light of your dream life, your small goals keep you on track for the right destination.
Small goals are inspiring. They give you a strong sense of progress and build your confidence.
Small changes often have a lot of effect. Doing something great once is special, doing something small every day soon becomes much more impressive. Small changes quickly accumulate to something impressive, without much effort.
Suppose that, in the light of your future dream life, you stop watching television and instead work one and a half hours every night on that blog you want to start up. After a month you have spent 45 hours on your blog. That is more than a full-time working week! It seems like a small change, but it can have significant consequences in your life. Perhaps this change is the trigger for your dream life in which you work for yourself on something that you enjoy. Set small goals towards your dream life. It is important that you paint a picture of what your dream life looks like. Do that first. And then write down what has to be done to realize that dream life. What small goals do you see lying on your way to your dream life?
Write down these goals.
Choose the goal that gives you the most energy.
Clear the goal so that it does not become overwhelming. You want to be able to finish it in a few weeks, a maximum of one month.
Set a deadline, preferably one that feels very 'real'. For example, I always try to complete projects before I travel. The end of the month is also fine.
Choose a reward that you grant yourself if you have completed this goal. A dinner, an evening of cinema, a weekend away. Note that you keep the reward in proportion to your goal. Do not book a holiday because you have removed your mail today. Or of course, what you want.
Forget your 'big goal' now. You have opted for this smaller goal, now give your full attention. You return to the drawing board once you have completed this goal. That way you make your life simpler, and it becomes easier to hold your focus.
Break the goal into pieces. In practical tasks that you can check off. Use these practical tasks to plan your days. For example, write tonight on what you want to achieve tomorrow.
Get started. Do your research, set the steps that are needed. Make sure you regularly do something to get closer to this goal. Maybe you can not work on it every day, but make sure that it keeps moving, that you stay busy with it.
Do you feel overwhelmed or do you get stuck? Then take a moment to plan. Thinking ahead saves a lot of time in the implementation. Even planning sometimes feels useless (you may prefer to spend your time on working), but it saves you a lot of time and it can get you back on track so you can continue with fewer obstacles.
Take a sprint to complete your goal.
Reward yourself, and enjoy the wonderful feeling that you have come closer to your dream life.
If Paris is your goal, you can get there simply by continuing to walk. It is a long distance, but as long as you keep putting your feet together in the right direction, you will eventually come.
Small goals are those footsteps. However large and how far your dream life may seem, by completing small goals towards your dream life, you will eventually come naturally.
