How to Simplify and Achieve Your Goals

Last updated on September 4th, 2023 at 10:58 am

Sometimes even with discipline, we find ourselves struggling with our goals. Occasionally, we’re on track, other times, we just can’t figure out what’s wrong—or why we are not getting significant results.

Setting goals and developing a structure, especially for something we’re trying for the first time, require trial and error. You try something, check if it works, tweak, restart, restructure—rinse and repeat.

These three steps can help you simplify your goals and bring you closer to achieving them.

Reflect on your why: 

You need to understand the reason you want to achieve this goal. Sometimes, we want to achieve certain goals not because we really want them but because the goals are trendy. Forcing yourself to think of your why can help you become aware of whether or not it’s something you even want. When we think of goals, we want to be able to view them mentally in the form of a mind map.

At the core is the actual goal, then you start to break them down into simpler blocks. This is only feasible if you know your reason. If your goal is to sleep or wake up at a certain time, what’s the reason? Many times, we don’t do well with our goals because we don’t know our why which then means that we can’t fine-tune it to what works for us.

Highlight your strategic pillars:

These are your areas of focus within the goal. If you want to work on your fitness, what are the strategic pillars of this goal (fitness)? What aspects do you want to focus on? These aspects are what you consider relevant, you want to narrow down your focus. Your success with these strategic pillars aka focus areas is what you consider as actualising your goal. 

Say you want to improve your feeding, your strategic pillars can be: simplicity, non-restrictive, hydration, and elimination. Instead of focusing on every single thing, (for a specific period) you can decide on your focus areas. You can consider simplifying your diet for a month, and then move to another strategic pillar the next month. This makes it easier to achieve. Once you achieve success in these areas, you can say that you’ve achieved your goal.

Create a system that hinges on your focus areas:

After mapping out your areas of focus, you then want to create a system that works, a system that enables you to realise your focus area(s). If fitness is your goal, then you know your why, you can outline the focus areas. Let’s assume the focus areas are strengthening and flexibility. You need to create a system (in this case, a list of workouts) that upholds these two pillars. 

This looks different for different people, but the idea is that every workout that you do subsequently leads back to your focus areas. This could be doing weight-lifting and cardio for strengthening, and possibly yoga poses for flexibility. 

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As always, remember to give yourself grace when you don’t meet up with your goals. Patience is a key factor that we can always miss out on because we want results like yesterday. 

If we can be patient and trust, we’ll find and remain on the path that works uniquely for us.