Top Tips for Achieving Your Goals

Tip 1 – Make it Achievable

Success breeds success because of all the feel-good chemicals that come along for the ride when we achieve our goals, which means you don’t have to do something huge to feel like a success. The feeling of achieving your goal, even a fairly modest one, will be the fuel for the next, possibly larger goal.

Tip 2 – Make it attractive

Make your goal something you want to work towards.  This trains you to use both your ‘towards’ as well as your ‘away from’ motivation and we need both to achieve big things.  No-one ever climbed Everest with the goal of “I don’t want to not have climbed Everest this time next year” – it sounds ridiculous doesn’t it!

Tip 3 – Make it Tangible

Write it down, tell someone, put a date in the diary.  Goals that are tangible in some way are 50% more likely to be achieved.

Tip 4 – Find a Goal Buddy

We are more likely to let ourselves down than we are to let someone else down. So why not find yourself a ‘Goal Buddy’ – someone else who has a goal they want to achieve.  Share your goals and commit to each other what you will achieve by when. Check in regularly with each other to see how you’ve been doing.  No one wants to the be person who hasn’t done what they said they were going to do so you are both more likely to take action to move you towards your goal (even if you do take the action the day before your ‘check in’!)

Tip 5 – See the bigger picture

Achieving our goals is really important – it gives us a sense of worth and value and builds our self-esteem.  But if we focus solely on achieving our goals then we are missing a trick! Our brain has a clever way of keeping us motivated on our tasks.  When we take positive action towards our goals it rewards us with a release of a hormone called serotonin, that give us a sense of achievement in what we’ve done and motivates us to take the next action. But there are other ways we can get serotonin too – any kind of positive action, positive interaction or positive thinking will give us a hit of this magic, motivating hormone.  So if you’re stuck on a goal, step away from it and meet up with friends, take your dog for a walk, do some gardening, write a gratitude list.  All of these actions will release serotonin giving you some much needed motivation to get you back on track with your goals.

Tip 6 – Visualise it  

Visualising your goal helps to set the co-ordinates in your brain. Our brain is designed to act on what we predict will happen next so visualising you achieving your goal helps your brain to take the right action.  This is how professional athletes train – they set their goal, they visualise themselves achieving it and then they take the action to move towards it, training their brain and their bodies so that they can be the best they can be.

Tip 7 – Verbalise it

What we say isn’t just about communicating with other people, it’s about communicating to ourselves, after all we hear what we say too!  If we find ourselves talking to a friend about our goal and saying “I’m useless, I’m never going to achieve this” then our brain will hear this message and take it on board. It will then divert all efforts and attention away from trying to achieve that goal because we’ve told it it’s not achievable.  If we change our language slightly then it can have a huge impact.  A phrase like, “I’m not sure how I’m going to achieve this goal yet” gets our brains interest, we’ve set it a challenge, the word ‘yet’ indicates there is still some work to do to figure this out so it starts working on this problem in the background trying to find the solutions that could help you.  Check in with your self-talk too – it makes no odds to our brain if we speak it out loud or inside our head, it still hears it!

Tip 8 – Celebrate!

Make a BIG Deal when you achieve it! Get that serotonin flowing in time for the New Year and who knows where you might be this time next year!

If you’re finding it difficult to achieve your goals it may be time to contact your nearest Inspired to Change hypnotherapist to book your FREE initial consultation. Inspired to Change Hypnotherapists are based across the UK in Bristol, Cambridgeshire, Devon, Kent, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Norfolk and Somerset.

Inspired to Change Hypnotherapists are all recognised by the National Council for Hypnotherapy, the UK’s leading not-for-profit hypnotherapy professional association.

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