Editor’s Note: This post was written by Charlie. You can visit his personal development blog here ^[1].

We all have desires. We enjoy thinking about the future and coming up with new ideas about how things are going to play out. However, a surprising amount of people I’ve talked to contemplate the success they want in their future, but they don’t do anything about it!

If we want to make positive change in our lives, we must put thought AND action into doing so. An effective goal setting plan is healthy, smart, and can also be very enjoyable. Here are 12 tips you can mix, match and order to create a superb goal setting plan:

1. Organize

The first step to any successful goal setting plan is to have your life sorted out. By organizing, I mean a few different things:

• Your mind and body: Eating healthy, resting, engaging in enjoyable activities in your spare time and staying well exercised.
• Your working area: The common thought when you hear ‘organization’. Archive papers, be on top of things, and have awareness of where you are putting what.

By organizing these 2 important parts of you, you allow yourself to focus on working towards achieving your goals more efficiently and effectively.

2. Visualize

This method is very enjoyable. It consists of a few very simple steps. Take a seat, breathe, and envision your goal as if you are living life with it complete. Whatever your goal is; if you’ve seen, felt it, and breathed it you’re that much closer to achieving. There are plenty of resources out there to help you learn about this technique.

One thing I learned from various resources is to keep a vision board. Not only is this fun, it’s also effective. It involves cutting and pasting pictures of things (material or symbolic) that you want to have, and goals you want to accomplish on a board. This helps to embed your goals in your mind both consciously and subconsciously. If you decide to create a vision board, place it somewhere you will see it often so you don’t forget your goals. Once you get used to visualizing, it becomes an exciting and realistic experience.

3. Write

What do you want from your goal? This step is easy to do, and extremely effective. Simply keep a log of what your goals are, and how you plan on achieving them. If you want to combine this with the visualization idea, a great thing to do is to write in detail what you see being the outcome of accomplishing this goal. The more mindfulness you put into writing your goals, the better the experience will be in the end.

4. Think

Spend some time thinking about your goals. You can do this while going about your day, and you can also put aside some time to meditate and focus on them.

5. Optimize

Make achieving easier for yourself by optimizing your time and efforts. Don’t put in too much or too little; find what works for you from experience and use that knowledge to grow.

6. Discuss

Have a nice conversation about your goal setting plan with a friend or family-member. The people you love will be happy and proud to hear about your aspirations.

7. Implement

Take all of these steps, and implement them into your daily life. Use them for accomplishing the little goals as you get through your day, as well as your big goals.

8. Create

Be creative with your goal setting! If you enjoy art, draw a picture of yourself at the scene of your accomplished goal. If you’re into computer graphics, try making a virtual vision board. The more you use your great imaginative mind in goal-setting, the better the outcome will be.

9. Rationalize

Be sure your goals are realistic. You don’t want to be getting into more you can handle. However, if you have the bold personality to dream big, go right ahead! There’s nothing stopping you from accomplishing whatever it is that you desire in life.

10. Develop

Learn from your experiences as you set goals. The best achievement of all is a gain of knowledge.

11. Grow

This is similar to the development step, but as your life moves on and you continue to grow, change your goals accordingly. I personally enjoy making a goal, and then redesigning the same goal after I have achieved it once. For example; if you have a business goal to bring in X amount this quarter, make it another achievement to bring in 150% of X in the next quarter.

12. Enjoy

Have fun doing all of these things. Goals are not worth pursuing if you make yourself a wreck while doing so. Make sure you don’t obsess over your goals but still put enough time into them to help you succeed.

All of these steps are important in setting and achieving goals. Try them out and see how they work for you. It’s important to remember to combine multiple steps into making an effective goal setting plan. Create your own and see how they work. The most important part of goal-setting is to try.

Remember:

“Without goals, and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.

Fitzhugh Dodson

About Charlie

Charlie is a student who blogs personal development related articles. He focuses on positive thinking, productivity and zen related subjects in his posts and also adds in helpful tips on how to integrate technology into developing a positive living experience. Two of his posts that I know you’ll like are 30 qualities of productive people ^[2] and 25 little things to appreciate ^[3].

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