To achieve any goal, you need to act. Without action nothing will happen no matter how much you will or pray for it to happen. Many people may tell you otherwise but that is just deception.
Most everyone realizes that to achieve a worthwhile goal action is required yet often the first step is never taken. I always recommend writing down your goal and thinking it through and for that reason I make available my free goal planning worksheet.
Many things can stand in the way of acting on a goal and they can be both internal and external factors. Internal factors are things like fear of failure, lack of self-confidence, low self-esteem, lack of motivation and procrastination. External factors can be lack of know-how, lack of resources and other factors depending on the goal.
I have an important goal to publish a new online training on knowing yourself using a types of people approach that was developed by Fritz Glaus and explained in his book CrazyZoo, Know-Thyself Made Easy! This training is part of a larger training on a process to manage employee performance.
I found myself procrastinating on working on the course creation and I was becoming more and more down on myself because of this. I realized that I needed to break down my goal into extremely small action steps and have a daily plan for these steps.
I also realized I need support and help for some of the design tasks that I am not fully skilled for. I found myself projecting the workload into something bigger than it was and this stopped me from acting as I feared I would not be able to do other tasks that are important and that I enjoy more.
Imagine someone who has friends that run marathons and this person always feels left out. She wants to be able to join the events but hardly exercises. She knows that being active would greatly improve her health. But just the thought of running a marathon seemed impossible.
The first step for someone like this could be to go out and buy a good pair of running shoes. The next step could be walking briskly for 30 minutes every day or 2nd day. The next step could be to increase the walking time and gradually start a slow job and then increasing the pace, and so on. As each new step is taken benefits start to be experienced and confidence and skills grow. There is a well-known quote from John Bytheway, “Inch by inch, life’s a cinch. Yard by yard, life’s hard”. I find this to be true, yet many people seem to focus on the big steps and never start acting towards their goal.
My goal planning worksheet walks you through each step of the goal achievement process and the obstacles to solutions section is where you then create your action steps. If you are procrastinating on your goal use this worksheet and when you get to writing down actions, break them into ridiculously small steps if necessary for you to take action, and then progressively go to each next step.
Actions and small steps make goal achievement easier and if your goals are worthwhile then take action now and start with the first little step.