You'll often hear (or read) about how important goals are if you want to attain success but did you know goals can actually make your life much less stressful?

How goals can help you

• Help you focus on what you need to do
  
  Setting achievable goals enables you to break down a bigger task into more managable chunks. When you complete each goal, you're a step closer to completing your tasks for the day/week/month (depending upon your goal's timescale). The best thing about goals is that you know what you're supposed to be doing instead of jumping from one thing to another and never really getting anything done.
  
  
• Help you recognize your wins
  
  When you've completed a goal, you can tick it off and you can see that you've made progress. If you can see that you've made progress, the fear of failure is diminished because you can see that you're making things happen! Fear is a negative emotion that cannot thrive when you have a positive mindset.
  
  
• Help you identify areas for improvement
  
  Let's say you've encountered a goal that you really struggled to complete. That doesn't make you a failure. That makes you a success. You've now identified an area that you need to research or get some help with. It might also be a goal that needs to be broken down further to make it achievable.

How to set goals that are achievable

Since I started my new game plan, I've been using daily goals to ensure I keep moving. I keep track of them on a to-do list application but there's no reason you can't just use a notebook.

When creating your goals, try to make them SMART goals. SMART is an acronym of the five attributes of an achievable goal:

• Specific - Be precise about what you need to do (not vague)
• Measurable - Is it a yes / no goal? Do you need to do a specific number of actions?
• Achievable - Based on what you know about yourself and your time, can you do it?
• Relevant - The goal should be a task related to what you're trying to do.
• Time - When does the goal need to be completed? Today? This Week?

Here's an example goal:

I will publish two new articles to my niche website by the end of the week.

Let's measure it against the SMART attributes:

• Specific - I'm going to publish two articles to my website. That's specific.
• Measurable - When I've published TWO articles, I'm done. :)
  
• Achievable - Based on the time I have available, I can write two posts.
• Relevant - Adding two new pieces of content to my niche site IS relevant.
• Time - I'm going to do this by the end of the week.

By using SMART goals to break down your tasks, you're creating a positive environment to work in - it doesn't matter if people aren't buying from your website yet - if you're taking all the right steps as taught in the training, you cannot fail.

One final thought on the topic of goals:

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. :)