How to Achieve a Big Goal by Breaking It Into Smaller Ones

One of the primary reasons people fail to achieve their goals is because they felt overwhelmed and quit. This is often because the original goal was too big. You can avoid this, however, by breaking your goal into smaller, more manageable parts. That way, your goal that seemed so big and daunting becomes something that can be accomplished over time in several steps. Upon completing these steps, you'll realize that you've reached the goal that you originally found overwhelming or even impossible. Start by doing the same thing every morning. Whether it's meditation, exercise, or reading, creating a morning routine is a key part of achieving any goal. At the end of your morning routine, choose one daily task. So long as that task gets you closer to your goal, you have just successfully broken down the larger goal into manageable chunks! Do this every day and you'll eventually achieve your goal. Celebrate your successes. Each time you complete one of your sub-goals, it is a cause for celebration. You're one step closer to achieving your overall goal, and you should be proud of that. Celebrate any way you want: watch a movie, go out for dinner, take a day off. It doesn't matter. These little celebrations will give you something to look forward to and keep you motivated to accomplish your goal. When working towards any goal, it is almost inevitable that you'll experience hardships. The key is not avoiding obstacles, but planning for them. If you anticipate problems ahead of time, you can have a system in place for overcoming them. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep yourself motivated all the time. If your goal is difficult or you aren't seeing progress fast enough, it's normal to get frustrated. This is where a support network comes in. By telling friends and family about your goal, you're creating a network that can help you if things get tough. With a good support group, a difficult goal becomes much more attainable. Achieving goals is usually a process rather than a one-time commitment. While you work towards your goal, you'll need to stay motivated. A great motivator is seeing improvement. Check in with your progress regularly to ensure you see results as they happen. It helps to keep a written log of your progress and update it every week or month. Careful monitoring will also let you know if you've fallen behind your goal. If you stop seeing improvement, you know you have to work harder. It helps to set a date that you would like to achieve your goal by. This will help you stay focused and committed to working on your goal. Set timetables for the overall goal, and for each smaller task you break that goal into. That way you'll always know where you stand and if you need to adjust anything. Remember, the point of breaking up your goal to make it more manageable. Therefore, you should spend your time focusing on the smaller tasks you've come up with. If you start to dwell on the overall goal, you could end up overwhelming yourself. Since the point of breaking your goal into more manageable tasks is meant to prevent you from getting overwhelmed, you should avoid focusing on too many sub-goals at once. This can be just as overwhelming. Instead, analyze your list of smaller tasks and see which ones are most important to achieving your goal. Then focus on them first before moving on to other tasks that may not be so important. Once you successfully identify the different components of your goal, you'll have to come up with a plan to accomplish each. These little chunks of your overall goal will allow you to focus on one area at a time and gradually accomplish the larger goal. Even when you've made your goal as specific as possible, there will still probably be different parts to achieving it. Examine your goal and identify as many different components as you can. Then you can design a plan to accomplish each of those smaller tasks. When you do that, your overall goal will fall into place. After narrowing down your broad idea and defining what you mean by it, you can decide what exactly your goal is. Taking your broad idea and the narrowed-down elements, you should explicitly write what exactly your goal is. Initially, your goal will be vague and unfocused. This is fine to start, but if your goal stays vague it will be difficult to complete. You won't be able to track your progress and determine if you've been successful. It is more effective to whittle the idea down into a more concrete and specific goal. Once you come to a precise goal, you can work on breaking it up into manageable tasks. When formulating a goal, you may only have a vague idea what you want. This is okay. Starting broad will actually help you map out a clear path towards more specific, attainable goals. 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