Goal setting that works

You’ve built a well-formed goal, broken it into manageable steps, and set up if-then plans for the moments when motivation runs low. That’s most of the structure in place. The piece that’s still missing is what keeps all of it honest over the weeks and months ahead: accountability and review. Without these, even a well-designed…

Over this hub, you’ve worked through a complete approach to setting goals that actually get achieved, rather than the vague resolutions most people make and quietly abandon. This final article draws all of it together into a single blueprint you can return to whenever you’re setting a new goal. Most people fail at goal setting…

There’s a particular kind of paralysis that hits when a goal is genuinely big. Write a book. Change career. Get fit after years of inactivity. Build a business. You know it’s what you want. You’ve made it SMARTER, you’ve built if-then plans, and you still can’t quite make yourself start, because the whole thing feels…

You have a well-formed goal now. Specific, measurable, ecologically sound, scheduled. That’s a real achievement, and most people never get this far. But a well-formed goal still has to survive contact with an ordinary Tuesday. The alarm that doesn’t go off. The colleague who asks you to stay late. The wave of tiredness at half…

You’ve been told, probably many times, that the secret to achieving your goals is to think positively. Visualise success. Picture yourself there. Feel it as though it’s already happened. Believe it and you’ll achieve it. It’s appealing advice. It’s also, according to the research, wrong. This isn’t a contradiction of the article on focusing on…

Before you build a goal properly, you need to make sure it actually exists. That sounds strange. Of course your goal exists. You can think about it. You can feel it. You can describe it in a sentence. But can you see it? Can you picture yourself doing something specific when you’ve achieved it? Can…