4.5 Strategies For Reaching Your Goals

Monitor Your Progress Toward Your Goals

Monitoring progress can help you stay on track toward achieving your goal. Maybe you will use a planner, journal or online tool or app, or checklist to help you keep track of and review your progress. Keep it simple and accessible. Monitoring will help you track progress and can help you determine what is or isn’t working for you and identify changes that you might want to make to your plan, routine, or goal.

Use Short- and Immediate-term Goals to Reach Long-term Goals

If you’re working toward a long-term goal, it can be helpful to also plan short-term and intermediate-term goals to help get you there. The long-term goal is the end result you hope to achieve. An intermediate goal will be planned about halfway to your long-term goal, and a related short-term goal is one that you focus on initially and hope to accomplish within a week or two.

Examples of Short-term Goals

Over the next three months Faith wants to work up to jogging 30 minutes without walking three days per week, and she’s currently not doing any jogging. Her short-term goal might be to start with 5 minutes of jogging during a 30-minute walk. After two weeks, she might increase this to ten minutes of jogging, then 15, 20, 25 and then 30.

Anton currently drinks three sodas per day and wants to reduce his intake of sugary beverages by the end of next month to one per day or fewer. He might start by substituting water for his second soda each day, then reduce to two sodas per day by the time he reaches the halfway point of his long-term goal. Notice that Anton doesn’t completely eliminate all three sodas right away; gradual steps will likely prove more sustainable when it comes to a longer-term goal like reduced soda consumption.

Once Faith or Anton meet short-term goals and these goals become habits, they can add to it until they reach their long-term goal.

Communicate Your Goals: Social Support

You might consider letting others know what your goals are and why they’re important to you. Not only can it be fun and motivating to work toward a goal with someone, but simply communicating your intentions and goals to your friends and family can provide some accountability. Ask them to support you and let them know how you want to be supported. For example, maybe you want your mom or friend to ask you about how your goals went this past week. Try to think about what would be helpful for you, and then communicate that to your support system. Also consider what wouldn’t be helpful. Similarly, ask yourself how you might support others’ goals. Ask open-ended questions like “How can I support you?” rather than closed-ended questions like “Can I help?” because it’s easy to say “No, I’m good” even when support would be helpful. Have a conversation about how you can best support one another.

Another way to use support is to establish other connections or sources of accountability. This includes group fitness classes, cooking classes, motivational apps, online support groups, and taking advantage of competitions or challenges with others if you find it motivating.

Student Perspectives: What Factors Have Helped You Make a Change?

Video Transcript

Celebrate Your Successes

Meeting goals, even small ones, is an accomplishment! Reward yourself for your efforts once in a while to motivate you toward your next goal. At the very least, take a few moments at the end of each bout of activity to relax and reflect on how your mind and body feel. Pat yourself on the back for taking care of yourself.

Be Realistic in Goal Setting

It’s important to make sure that your goal is attainable. Consider what is realistic and achievable. This doesn’t mean that your goal shouldn’t challenge you. Setting realistic, attainable goals just means that you’re being honest with yourself and setting goals that are actually going to fit into your life. After all, you’ll likely find more success if you feel good and excited about your goals.

Keeping Health Goals in Perspective

Think about health-related changes and goals within the context of your life as a whole. If you’re not a competitive athlete, then maybe it doesn’t make sense for you to work out like one. If it is more important that you focus on your family relationships for the time being, then do that and check in with your overall wellbeing in a few months. If your ultimate goal is to achieve a sense of balance and overall wellbeing, be cautious of focusing on health behaviors so much that it prevents you from working on other parts of life. All of the dimensions of wellbeing are important, and the more they’re balanced, the happier and more satisfied you’re likely to be.

Sometimes goals are set for us. For example, an employee might be assigned a performance goal or a patient assigned a goal related to sleep. Further, certain needs might need to take precedence over our individual goals; an individual’s physiological needs for things like safety, housing, and food and water will need to be met before other goals are created. Setting goals around certain health behaviors depends on the individual’s readiness, how well their physiological and physical needs are being met, and access to resources of many kinds.

Keep a Positive Mindset

While change isn’t always easy, staying positive is key. Instead of focusing on the roadblock itself, brainstorm potential solutions or implement a solution you brainstormed during your planning. Ask others for ideas and support and offer yours to them. When you’re having a tough day or week, try to view it as a challenge to be overcome and keep moving forward—even if slowly.