Royane Real

By Royane Real

Author of “How You Can Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better and Be More Creative”

When we look around us, we can often see that some people seem to know exactly where they want to head in life, and they seem to achieve all their goals effortlessly.

Other people seem to flounder a bit and get confused.  We get stuck in dead end places and we don’t know how to change.  All we know is that we want to be someplace else, but we don’t really know how to get there.

Learning how to think and plan and accomplish goals isn’t easy for everybody.  Some of us need more help with certain steps than other people do.  We often have talents and abilities that can get us part of the way towards a goal, but we don’t know how to get the rest of the way.

Sometimes, all we know is that we don’t want to be where we are right now.  We don’t really know how we are going to get from where we are to someplace better.  We don’t always know exactly where we want to go, and often we don’t have any idea how to get to where we want.

Setting goals can be an important part of getting to where you want to be in life.  You need to practice making goals and achieving them.  There are many steps involved in setting goals successfully.

One important part of setting goals is to understand what your goal is, exactly.

Another part of setting goals successfully is to understand exactly why you want to accomplish this goal.

No only do you have to understand why you want to accomplish a particular goal, you also have to believe that you deserve to achieve it.  If you believe that you don’t really deserve to be a success, you won’t be.

To keep working towards accomplishing your goal, you may need to remind yourself often why you are working on it.  You will probably need to remind yourself several times every single day in order to keep up your motivation.

The truth is, if you don’t know why you are working towards your goal, you will lose your motivation and drive very quickly.  When you don’t really know why you want to achieve a particular goal, you will be derailed the very first time you encounter the slightest obstacle in your path.

You have to be honest.  Is this goal really important for you, or is it important for someone else?  Is your goal consistent with your view of yourself?  Does it require you to ignore your deepest values?

It will be hard to force yourself through medical school if you are only doing it because your parents want you to be a doctor.  If you don’t actually desire to be a doctor, you will experience many terrible moments where you will lose all commitment and motivation.

If you say to yourself, “I want to work really hard at making sales over the next two years so that my kids can go to college”, this goal is very much about someone else.  It isn’t really about you.

You need to find the part of the goal that is about you, even if part of the goal is about someone else.  For example, you may decide, “I want to feel that I have been a good parent.   I want to feel that I have done my part in giving my kids a good start in life.”

Understanding why you want to achieve your goal can be difficult, because it involves really understanding yourself.  However, this deep honesty about why you want to achieve your goals is essential if you are going to generate the motivation to keep on going.

This article was written by Royane Real, author of “How You Can Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better and Be More Creative” available at http://www.lulu.com/real