Goal-Setting 101: Be Stronger Than Your Excuses in 2023

Goal Setting 101

You can be a ‘work in progress’ and still be stronger than your excuses.

Do you struggle with setting and achieving your goals? Do you often find yourself feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, or stuck?

Excuses are one reason people don’t achieve their goals.

If you’re like most people, you probably have some goals that you’ve been meaning to achieve but haven’t quite gotten around to.

There’s always an excuse, right?

Excuses are defenses and weak justifications for not holding yourself accountable to complete what you said you would do.

Excuses are thieves and, given the opportunity, will rob you of your motivation, and ambition, and sidetrack you from the goals you determine for yourself.

But the truth is, the number one reason people don’t achieve their goals is that they are too vague.

When you’re trying to accomplish something, it’s important to be as specific as possible.

Define what you want to achieve and then create a plan of action to make it happen.

Without that level of detail, it’s easy to get sidetracked or simply give up.

There’s one way to know that you are ready and serious about achieving your goals:

you get very specific and get to work!

You’ll be glad you did because setting goals and achieving them leads to a vibrant life.

When you feel yourself experiencing ‘progress,’ you will then feel strengthened by your ability to control your outcomes.

That’s the feeling of riding high on the wings of self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is the reflection of the confidence within yourself to manage your motivations, behaviors, and better control of the environment that you’re in.

Furthermore, when you actively decide whether you go to the gym, eat a king-size candy bar, spend your money wisely, or choose to be happy, you are regulating yourself.

Goal setting is an essential component of self-regulation.

Goal Setting & Decision Making

So, now that you’ve decided to control the outcome, it’s important to know that setting a goal equals having a bigger picture.

Having a clear, bigger picture means having a vision in mind of what you want to get to.

The vision is your blueprint; it’s your road map. You are the leader of your life and there’s no better day than today to make a command decision about where you’re headed.

Goals should be realistic yet challenging. The challenge demands satisfaction.

This gives you a feeling of pride and victory when you attain them. That satisfaction then helps you position yourself for attaining your next goal.

The more challenging the goal, the greater the reward generally is. All the while,  you’ll find that more passion fuels your pursuit of achieving new goals.

Be SMART About Setting Goals

If you’re still asking yourself, “Does goal-setting work?” or “Is goal-setting effective?”, the answer is yes and yes.

Please understand that managing yourself through goal-setting and goal-smashing is one thing.

It’s a very different thing to strategically manage the goal itself.

However, now that you know setting vague goals is a terrible decision, let’s work toward establishing SMART goals.

When you know better, you do better. That is to say that setting goals should trigger new behaviors and actions that improve your focus and help you keep pace with the ambitious goals you’ve set for yourself.

Your words and actions should begin to align with the goal you’ve set and you should feel a little better about the reality of reaching your goals day by day.

What being a business owner has taught me is that you can neither manage nor improve what you do not measure.

If you want to optimize your life, your business, your body, or your bank account, for example, setting SMART goals will help you perform well.

More specifically, if you want to experience a sense of control in the new positive self-direction that your life is taking, set goals that are Specific,

Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

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