You've Been Trying To Reach Your Goals All Wrong

When organizing your goals, you want to create a plan to accomplish them. This is where using "step goals" can be hugely beneficial. Step goals map out a journey that will help you find clarity in why you are trying to change as well as what steps will help you get there as well as help you stay motivated in the process. This aspect of creating change can be helpful as you are constantly in the process of achieving smaller accomplishments, which stimulates the reward center of the brain and increases your motivation as well as confidence that you will succeed.

To start creating step goals you want to think of it like reverse engineering. If we were to think of where we want to go, and where we are, we can start to fill in the pieces that will help us get to our desired outcome. With the end goal in mind, we can start to break apart benchmarks that are necessary for us to slowly but surely work out a way towards where we want to go.

Let's use a hypothetical situation of someone who is getting physical therapy after a knee surgery. When you enter the physical therapy clinic, there is usually a set method for helping an individual walk again. For instance, they might want the patient to start with rehab exercises to strengthen the leg muscles, and then they want them to eventually progress to walking on thier own. To accomplish this goal, we need to understand the steps that will help build off each other that will end with the patient walking again. We can look at a step goals with this criteria in the following:

Goal 1: Get to the physical therapy clinic and start treatment

Goal 2: Undertake physical therapy to get the muscles and movement to walk again

Goal 3: Start to learn to walk with the guidance of a therapist

Goal 4: Gain confidence in walking again with supervision of a therapist in the clinic

Goal 5: Build the confidence to walk again at home with a family member or friend there for support

Goal 6: Regain the strength, confidence, and capability to walk and live independently

You can see that by identifying the end goal of being able to walk again independently, we can start to break down what other smaller actions we need to do to be successful. This give us a map of smaller goals that we can to take on onto the other. This is why they are called "step goals". Finishing one task helps place the footing for moving onto the next one which will help take you one step closer to you penultimate goal.

This process, from start to finish, has been shown to be the most effective when gone correctly in helping create lasting change in your; from diving deep into why you want to set a goal in the first place, to structuring your goal so it directs focus and attention, to mapping out every step you need to take to get there. Using this method to set your goals and take the path towards growth and prosperous change will be the most successful method toward completing any goal you create in the future.