How to achieve your most ambitious goals
Mental health

How To Reach Your Most Ambitious Goals

You’ve heard to saying “How do you eat an Elephant? One bite at a time.”

Meaning: How do you achieve, what seems to be, a huge ambitious goal? By breaking it down into manageable tasks. Keep reading below to find out what that actually looks like in real life. F

First, know it is a good thing to have ambitious goals! People in your life may not have thr vision or faith you have in your goal but don’t let that stop you.

We all have intuition and drive that may kick in powerfully and those around us may try to crush our spirit before we begin to take off. Some may not let us forget our past failures and their fear can be contagious. Don’t catch their fear.

If you’ve failed in the past (and who hasn’t), use those failures as learning experiences and keep going. Some goals you may need to keep to yourself. Sometimes it takes a while to have evidence of progress on the outside but what you are gaining on the inside by stepping towards your goal is addictive and rewarding each step of the way.

Get a clear picture of your goal

Be as clear as possible about your end goal. Write down the specifics. Use your imagination to envision having achieved the goal and what it feels like. That feeling is key.

When you are going through the next steps bring back that feeling you are going to have when you’ve accomplish your goal. This feeling makes working towards your goal feel less like work and more like play.

Having a long list of ambitious goals at once isn’t the best idea. Focusing on one, or a few things in different areas of your life is realistic and attainable.

Your goal needs to be in line with your priorities and values or you will soon realize that the ambitious goal really wasn’t important at all.

Break down your goal into small tasks

Start with the elephant’s toe, gross, but you get what I mean. You don’t need to have a detailed plan about the whole elephant yet.

If weight loss is what you are after, you have probably learned by now that going cold turkey cutting out carbs and hitting the gym for two hours a day after being inactive is going to lead to failure sooner or later.

If a dream body is your goal, for example, know that marginal improvements, a little at a time will not only be manageable and achievable but will seem effortless.

It’s important to know that you won’t know and shouldn’t plan every detail of how you will reach your goal. This may be hard to do but don’t put all your focus on the “How”.

I have a love hate relationship with bullet journals. I love that they break down goals into smaller daily tasks but I don’t like the rigidity to them. If they work for you, use them! But it’s important to be flexible and fluid through the process as well.

How is this going to get done then?

Start by being clear about where you want to end up, why you want to be there and how you believe achieving this goal will improve your personal, emotional, professional, spiritual life.

Write down small tasks needed to get you to that goal with deadlines.

I like to use a goal journal like this one. It’s laid out in a simple visual way and is easy to fill out. Having small tasks may change often so having one place to write in and keep organized as you flow though this is vital.

Take the first step and work on those tasks you lined up for yourself.

For Example:

If weight loss is your goal:

  • Find a workout buddy and make plans to get moving
  • Walk the dog every morning
  • Try new fruits and veggies, add them to the foods you already love
  • Start swapping one sugary food at a time for a healthier option
  • Stop snacking after dinner / before bed
  • Finish a bottle of water before you have your preferred beverage of the day

These changes will not be done in one day or started at the same time but little by little, small changes that don’t feel like rules and restrictions but make you feel good, healthier and energized.

As you slowly swap in healthier foods, that you choose, with the foods you already love, your unhealthy habits will start to melt seamlessly into healthier ones.

When you feel you’ve mastered one new habit, or it starts to feel natural and not forced its time to take on the next manageable task. Achieving micro accomplishments feel just as good as accomplishing bigger accomplishments, believe it or not.

Sometimes along our way we get so attached to our “How” we set for ourselves that we become limited, frustrated and more likely to fail. This is a big goal you’ve set that you have yet to achieve so it’s unlikely you know exactly how you will achieve it yet.

Keep your attention on your end goal, take your small steps you’ve planned, and then be open to all the opportunities and insights that WILL come your way along your journey.

It is always amazing to me how things begin to unfold as I start moving toward my goal. Things that I would never have been able to put in my plan in the beginning because my dream started out with limiting beliefs.

Making small accomplishments feeds your positivity and helps you be receptive to taking an action you may not have originally thought of. Not just sometimes, but all the time “How” I thought I would get to my end goal was way more difficult or completely off track compared to the path that actually took me there.

The path may change along the way but tweak and reassess regularly. Without taking action and moving on the insights and ideas that come to us will have us spinning in circles and getting us nowhere and wondering why we just can’t seem to reach our goal.

Make you plan, be clear on you small actionable tasks, tweak as you go.

You will soon be looking back wondering why you never realized how easy it was to get where you are now. The changes will be slow, so slow you will begin to wonder how it actually happened with such ease because we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe ambitious equals really hard or next to impossible.

Most likely you won’t be the first person to ever reach this goal. It is possible on achieve it. This has been done before and it can be done again. You can be the one to do it!

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