How To Achieve Your Biggest Goals

Goals and goal-setting.

I know it’s a buzz word that everybody’s getting tired of, especially this time of year, the top of the year.

Everybody’s setting goals.

The reason we set goals is because we’re not satisfied with something in our life.

Some part of our life.

We all have at least one area where we’re not totally satisfied.

Setting goals and having motivation to reach those goals is the only way that you ever change your life in any way.

The problem is a lot of people set goals that are way too small and way too safe.

They make these micro-progressions of progress, but there’s nothing really to celebrate.

It doesn’t really change their own lives.

It’s lackluster and it’s stale.

It’s toxic to the brain to be unstimulated and to not continue to grow. 

The other thing is that people don’t get their mind right.

They don’t get their nervous system grounded.

They’re missing a lot of the motivational pieces that are gonna help you persevere through struggle.

Your goal might look perfect, but your life is not perfect.

You’re going to have obstacles that you’re gonna need to overcome.

If you don’t have the right mindset and you don’t really love that thing that you want, you’re not going persevere through it.

You’re going to give up.

The brain’s going to get distracted and go onto something else.

You’ll end up putting a lot of energy that’s wasted, like a hamster in one of those wheels, not really getting further ahead, but working really hard, so it’s exhausting.

Here’s three things that you can do to get your head straight first, before you go and get a package or a book to get your goal strategy in place.

1. Visualize your end game.

The first thing you want to do is really visualize what your end game is.

I don’t mean just writing out some bullet points or some things that you want different in your life, or having a brief thought about what you want things to look like.

I mean really getting detailed and creative about what you want every part of your life to look like.

As far as we know, you’ve got one life here and one legacy to leave.

We waste a lot of time thinking that we have a lot of time and we don’t.

Your life and everybody in it, everything can change in a breath.

You want to make the most of the time you have and you want to make the most of this life by creating the biggest version of yourself that you.

You can do that only by having a biggest vision of yourself, which is look at every area of your life.

Look at your job, your career, your family, your friendships, your primary relationships, your relationship with yourself, and your lifestyle choices.

Take every one of those and look at them and decide what exactly, in detail, do you want in every part of your life.

It’s not just about, “oh, I’m going to have a different job”.

What kind of a job do you want? What would it feel like for you to go to work and work with people that you like or to be an entrepreneur in a product that you are passionate about in a business that you care about?

What would it be like to go to work and have fulfillment and passion in what you do every day?

Think about it for a minute.

Notice what happens in your body when you think about the kind of job and career that you want to be proud of. The legacy that you want to leave.

You don’t need to know all the details.

Do that in your family life.

You want to do that in your friendships.

What kind of people are you hanging around with?

Do you want to carry those people, the same ones you have today, five years, ten years down into your end game, for the rest of your life?

Start looking at things that you have in your life right now, in terms of, “Do I want this in my life for the rest of my life?”

If you do, you get to keep it. If you don’t, make some changes because what do you want your friendships to look like, in terms of adventures and activities that you do together.

Conversations that you have. Connections that you create. Experiences you’re going to have.

You have that spill out into your partnership. 

What kind of a relationship do you want?

Not just today, but five, ten, for the rest of your life down the road.

What kind of things do you want to do with your significant other?

Add senses to this. What do you want their skin to feel like? What do you want them to smell like?

What do you want it to feel like when you’re with them?

What kind of a partner do you want in every detail that you can think of?

Picture it.

What kind of a partner do you want to be in every detail and picture it.

Notice what happens in your body every time you do each area of your life.

Think about physical health and well-being. Emotional health and well-being. What’s it like? What would it be like to be in the perfect physical condition that you want? What would it feel like to move in your body in a way that feels good for you?

What would it feel like to be in control of your emotions and your mind? To be confident. To be engaging.

To be whatever level of health that you determine.

You have to be able to visualize it first. Really let it imprint.

The brain will get distracted and lose all of this stuff. It will fizzle out. You’ll lose the enthusiasm and all of the excitement that goes with it if you don’t really allow it to make an imprint.

You have to do that by getting very detailed and soaking in it.

Then, you’re going to take this end game vision of your perfect life by thinking about it every hour of every day.

Until it becomes this driving force of really believing, with confidence, that this is what you’re going to create in your life, no matter how long it takes.

2. Take action.

Goals are nothing without action.

They’re just daydreams. They’re very pretty pictures.

This end game we’ve created is lovely.

It’s not going to happen for you just because you thought it.

You have to be strategic in the sense that every day, look at, again, that sense of who’s a resource in your life? What things are resources in your life?

What’s good? What’s good in your life right now that you want to carry with you through to the end?

That you want to put in a bubble and protect it.

Nurture it every day.

Keep that separate and protected.

Make it bigger by focusing on it and giving it what it needs.

Then, look at everything else.

The people, the jobs, the habits, the emotions, the things that are holding you back that you don’t want a part of your life anymore.

Get rid of them.

They’re taking up space that the new things that you need to bring into your life require and the long you leave them there the more you block new, fresh  life to come in.

Watch your thoughts… and watch your vocabulary.

Choose your actions strategically.

Every day, are you choosing conversations, people, events, activities and habits that are getting you closer to your end game?

Are you indulging in gossip and hate, complaining or negativity?

Start making changes right there every day. 

Your thoughts, emotions, and behavior need to be aligned with your end game and the decisions you make and the actions you choose daily – not because it’s comfortable and always “feels right” but because it is right and you’re moving through it regardless.

3. Avoid the time warp.

This is where you’re gonna find sabotage.

You can do all these other things but then you’re going to sabotage yourself or let something else come in and sabotage you.

Life is unexpected and stuff like that’s going to happen. You want to protect against it.

How you prevent sabotage — you don’t let your past from coming into your present.

Use your past only to bring wisdom in so that you don’t make the same mistakes twice.

Otherwise, all of those fears of all the things that you didn’t accomplish, all the failures that you’ve had in your past, they’re going to come in to try and sabotage your present and your future.

Any time those creep in, you stop it and you focus on your end game and the things in your life that are good right now.

You also don’t want to let the a fast forward rob from your future.  

You want to use the future and the fantasy that we’ve created of your end game for visualization purposes and for positive optimal endings only.

Otherwise, what the future’s going to do is creep back.

It’ll say, “This isn’t going to work. That’s not going to work. I don’t know how this fits into the picture. This is too hard. This isn’t perfect. I don’t understand this. I’ll never be able to and what if and what if and what if.”

So what?

Everything is a what if.

You’re going to sabotage everything that matters to you in your life if you “what if” yourself to death.

It will kill every dream that you have.

The reality is, if you’ve created an end game that matters to you, that is something that brings passion and energy into your body, you will find ways that you never thought possible to overcome obstacles, including all of the what ifs.

Even if the “what ifs” are logical. 

You’re going to be able to problem solve in ways that you didn’t think of before. You’ll be more creative than you imagined, and you’ll persevere when everyone else quits. 

Hold onto the things that matter to you until you get them. Keep them in your mind until you get them in your life.

Your relationships, your family, your friendships, your lifestyle. You need all of these to be in place to have a life of purpose that you are proud of.

You need to protect it from sabotage from the past or from the future.

You want to stay very present in what you’re focused on, on a day to day basis. Really absorb what you’re grateful for. Really be intentional about what you do on a day to day basis so that you have a better chance of getting closer to the success that you’re creating in your mind.

If you don’t create it there first, it’s never going to happen. If you don’t balance your nervous system and control your mind, it’s going to sabotage you like a runaway train.

You get to control this.

After setting this foundation, then you can go get the other tools to strategically set in place the kind of goals that you want. You can change your life at any point in any way.

You have an entire globe at your disposal. Seven billion people in the world.

There’s no excuse for being unhappy and miserable and stuck in your life with the resources that are available to all of us right now.

3 thoughts on “How To Achieve Your Biggest Goals”

  1. Avatar

    Excellent article, Tara!

    Focusing on past successes and drawing strength from them is so incredibly important when using future-paced visualizations to set goals.

    So many times, I’ve seen clients who feel “nothing ever goes right,” so they feel that they can’t achieve, or don’t deserve to achieve, their new goals.

    But once they are helped to realize that they have been successful in their past, then they begin to feel that they can achieve their new, bigger goals.

    Great piece – Thank you!

  2. Avatar

    For far too long we get wrapped up thinking our life has to be the way it is, rather than what we could make it! Great advice Tara

    “There’s no excuse for being unhappy and miserable and stuck in your life with the resources that are available to all of us right now.”

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