Much of the conversation surrounding success often refers to setting goals as a key component in achieving what you desire or long for. Goals are wonderful markers to help you roadmap your success, but what about the little pit stops you take in between? How do you prepare yourself to navigate or prevent missteps, or calculate the baby steps? 

Whether your goals are personal or business related, it’s important to understand the power of shifting your energy toward structured success. So, how do you begin to set goals, and how do you track your progress?

Think About the Context Surrounding Your Goals 

Setting goals is great, but if you’re struggling to define your goal itself, start by thinking about how you want life to be once you’ve achieved your goal. Ask yourself hard questions, start picturing how you want life to look, and write it all down to get your words out and provide yourself with a compass toward your desired outcome. 

• Get introspective with yourself. 
• Who do you imagine yourself being when you reach your goal? How do you want to feel? When do you imagine accomplishing this? Setting a positive outlook based on self-awareness will provide healthy emotional and physical direction that will help you prioritize and protect your energy as you move forward. 
• Visualize what you want, along with who you want to be. 
• How does life look once you’ve achieved your goal? Who do you surround yourself with? What environment are you in? Think about the intentional connections and situations you plan to create for yourself. This will help you set and adhere to boundaries, foster intentional communication, and know what kind of support you will need and accept from others. 
• Write it into existence. 
• The term “manifest” is used largely these days—but there is power and freedom in taking to pen and paper and sorting through the messy ideas to pinpoint how you want your success story to be written. Train yourself to think in active phrases, like “I will” or “I choose” to give intention to the context surrounding your goals. This will also strengthen the neural connections in your mind that will recognize the routes you should travel down or act on to achieve your desired outcome.   

When You Set Goals, Set SMART Goals 

SMART goals are: Specific, Measurable, Action-Oriented, Reach for You, and Time Sensitive. Each of these components will guide you toward setting relevant, achievable goals that work with you. 

S – Specific: Setting specific goals gives your mind the clarity it craves to create an easy-to-visualize roadmap toward success. Being vague will make it harder to move forward with confidence. 

M – Measurable: Ensuring your goals are easily measurable will trigger a release of dopamine, causing you to physically feel happiness with your progress, and motivating you to continue moving forward. 

A – Action-Oriented: Provide yourself with actionable goals that incite movement and execution. When your motor cortex is involved and you make physical, tangible progress, the roadmap to achievement is easier to see. 

R – Reach for You: Engage your mind’s novelty center by setting goals that challenge you to be alert, aroused and attentive to your goals. This will stimulate a release of norepinephrine to break you out of your cognitive comfort zone, and help prove that new things are rewarding. 

T – Time Sensitive: Giving yourself deadlines to stay on track will create a mild stress response that improves your performance and focus—think of this as “productive pressure.”  

When you first write down your goal, it’s okay not to have all of this figured out! Just get your broader goal down first, and then apply the SMART goal guidelines to add structure to the achievement you’re striving toward. 

One idea to help make sure your goal is SMART is to implement smaller objectives that break down the specific, measurable, action-oriented, reach for you and time-sensitive steps you’ll take to achieve structured success. 

Give Yourself Smaller Objectives 

Imagine your goal as a destination. You have the map, you’re looking at different routes, and know you might have to schedule in a few smaller stops on the way there so you can refuel, stretch your legs, check your timeline and mark your progress. 

Providing yourself with smaller objectives is a great way to take calculated baby steps toward something bigger or even reevaluate the route you choose to reach your goal. 

Think of objectives as mini goals that help you track progress to reach a broader goal. There will be some overlap with the SMART goal here; objectives are a great way to manage time, have actionable, easy-to-measure steps toward your goal, and will help you stay specific as you challenge yourself to get to your final destination. 

When setting objectives in relation to your goal, ask yourself what kind of methods would work best, and what resources you might need to adhere to your SMART goal. Visualize the setup of your goal with objectives, write it down, and read it out loud to yourself, and keep it somewhere you can easily refer back to it: 

• My Broader Goal – the final destination
• Objective #1 – 1st pit stop on my journey 
• Objective #2 – 2nd pit stop on my journey
• Objective #3 – 3rd pit stop on my journey

Put Structure Into Practice to Achieve Success

For the sake of putting structured success into practice, let’s pretend you have a broad goal of deep cleaning your bedroom. This is a great start—but now it’s time to get introspective and visualize as you write this down. 

Think about the context surrounding your goal and write your ideas and vision down. 

Maybe you imagine yourself being more relaxed and at peace when you reach this goal; feeling zen and having more balanced energy in your clean room. These are the emotional and physical directions that will help you embody the mindset of having a clean room, and overall assist you in achieving your goal. 

Once you’ve achieved this goal, maybe you imagine it feeling easier to fall asleep at night because your space won’t be a stressor in your life. Perhaps the floors are vacuumed and cleaned, there’s no dust on the furniture when you run a finger across it, books and files are in their place, and all of your laundry is folded and nicely put away. Maybe you imagine this happening by the end of the week, so that when the weekend comes, you have more time to sit back and relax. 

As you structure goals and objectives to achieve this, remember to keep SMART goal-setting guidelines in mind. Write them down to better orient your goal of a clean room:

S – Specific: You want a clean room. This means wiping things down, dusting and vacuuming, organizing, and tending to laundry. 

M – Measurable: Maybe you focus on one thing at a time to measure your progress—laundry, then dusting & vacuuming, then organizing. 

A – Action-Oriented: Use your measurable steps to create action! You have three objectives to accomplish in order to achieve a clean room. Choose an order that makes the most sense to you. 

R – Reach for You: Truly cleaning can be overwhelming, but in breaking the steps down, you’ll create a routine that feels easier to approach and yet still challenges you to achieve your goal.  

T – Time Sensitive: You want this done by the weekend, so it’s easy to relax when the work week is over. Maybe you break it down by day: use one day for laundry, the next day for organizing, and the final day for dusting & vacuuming. 

Now that you have your SMART goal outlined, let’s break this down into something that looks and sounds approachable while still keeping you on track to reaching your desired outcome. Combine the visualization practice you did with the SMART goal you outlined to help you practice and achieve structured success. Remember to use active phrases. 

• My Goal: I will have a clean room by the end of the week to relax and feel at peace in. 
• Objective #1 – On Tuesday after work, I will sort and do laundry, fold and put it all away before bedtime so clothes are out of the way. 
• Objective #2 – On Wednesday after dinner, all books, blankets and other out-of-place items will be put back into their respective spots before bedtime to make a more organized space.
• Objective #3 – On Thursday after work, any surfaces in my bedroom will be dusted and wiped clean with the proper cleaning tools, and the carpet will be fully vacuumed. 

Even though it might take a little extra work to outline and define your goal, it will feel worth it to look at your roadmap to achieving structured success and feel like you have a clear sense of direction. 

Remember to give yourself grace when setting goals, too! For as much planning and structure as you can implement and practice, things might not always go exactly as you wanted. This doesn’t mean that your goal is unrealistic or unachievable, it just means that you might need to take an extra pit stop to reach it. 

You have the power to direct your energy toward achieving structured success to attain goals of any size in your personal life, in your career or business, and with a clear sense of purpose. Start implementing structure into your goals today and own that power!