The biggest hurdle to achieving goals is starting with goals you can achieve. Having achievable goals means keeping them short and simple. This is a basic concept to understand, but many of us fail to implement it. Forget pie in the sky... be realistic about your ability to achieve your goals and break them down into doable tasks.

Goals come from our need to do better and feel better about ourselves. The source of this need comes from our environment and the way we were brought up. We are inspired by people we see around us in society and television, our role-models. Yet, our goals are difficult to achieve. Why? Because they come from external sources that don't necessarily apply to our way of doing things. We need to find a way to make our goals our own.

We have ambitious goals we would love to achieve. The gap between these goals and our reality is in need of help, right? Our goals aren't the problem and where you are in life is just a place away from your goals. This gap is our biggest hurdle. In order to bridge that gap we need to set achievable mini-goals that help us get there.

I'll give you an example shortly, but I can't emphasize enough the importance of these mini-goals. It's analogous to driving from New York to California. No one can possibly drive that far by simply getting in a car. You need to plan the trip, and while on the trip, stop to refuel and look at a map (among other things). Let's examine this analogy one step further.

1. Plan Your Trip

How do we get there? The answer to that question is how you plan to achieve your goal. In order to plan our goal, we need to find out how long it will take to get there. We need to forecast how many stops we need to make based on our specific abilities and personal needs. The most important step in this phase is to be as detailed as possible and to know yourself and your weaknesses. Improper planning and achieving your goal is doomed from the beginning.

2. Refuel

We refuel in our goal achieving process to help us regroup and maintain our focus on the goal. We need to look back at what we've accomplished and pat ourself on the back for getting here. This is a very important step to achieving your goal. Without stopping to smell the roses, you won't appreciate what you've done and feel better about yourself.

3. Look at Your Map

After we've smell a few roses, we need to focus on where we are in the goal-achieving process. Our map tells us how much we have left to go. Do we need to make any adjustments to our plan? Are we moving in the right direction? Now that you've started this trip, are there things you can improve? It's very important we don't lose track of our goal. It's the whole reason we started this process.

Repeat steps 2 & 3 as necessary... as long as it takes knowing that every day you are one step closer to getting to your final destination. Achieving your goal is almost anticlimactic. You created a goal, with a narrow focus on the process. That's the secret to setting goals you can achieve.

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