Four Key Ingredients to Achieving your Goals

What dreams and goals do you have for your life? Do you aspire to starting up a new company, to leading your current organization, or working for yourself? Do you wish you could leave your job to run a nonprofit, or become the artist you always wanted to be? Or have you always dreamed of doing standup or writing the great American novel?

You see people who are doing the very things you feel you can only dream of, yet you stay put.

What’s standing in your way?

Having the careers and the lives we want isn’t easy and for some it’s harder than for others. Yet it’s do-able for all of us.

First, we need a clear personal vision. When I ask my clients about their vision – what they deeply and personally want for their lives -- they often remark that they’ve never asked themselves that question. They’re striving for things, yet they don’t truly know why.

A clear personal vision is our own sense of purpose. We can see ourselves living it and we can feel the meaningful impact it has on us and on others. It helps us quiet the noise and avoid the distractions of things that seem important yet aren’t in furtherance of what we truly want. When we encounter obstacles along the way, our personal vision reminds us of our “why” and helps reinforce our resolve.

Once we’re clear about what we want and why it’s important – we need to state our intention out loud, clearly and succinctly. Tell it to ourselves and to other people. The more we state it out loud the clearer and more real it becomes to us and helps us focus our energy toward achieving it. Telling other people also helps us find the support and resources we need.

To bring the vision to life we need to do the work. Achieving big dreams takes more than talent. It takes lots of hard work and intentional practice. We need to know what knowledge, skills, tools, and resources we need to achieve our goals, and put in the effort to gain them, build them, and use them. It also takes giving ourselves grace when we fail and learning from our mistakes. When we have setbacks, we can applaud our resilience and perseverance. Staying in it when things get really hard can be the difference between achieving and merely dreaming.

Finally – and this can be the hardest of all – we need to believe in ourselves. We need to have faith that we will accomplish our goals and believe it so hard that it feels like we already have. When we encounter obstacles, experience setbacks, or make mistakes, remind ourselves of our personal vision and the progress we’ve made toward living it. Have faith that we can achieve it. See ourselves in the vision and know in our hearts that we can live it.