Congratulations! You’ve just done something most people never do. You’ve set out to achieve your dreams. Dreaming is the first step, and setting goals the second. Lastly, the toughest one is executing your goals to help you achieve your dreams. However, as they say, if it was easy, anybody would do it.

Seth Godin says, “Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you’re doing something others are unlikely to do because they’re hiding out in the comfortable zone.”

Achieving your dreams may not be easy, but it can be simple. Unfortunately, you will hit some roadblocks. Just remember to say to yourself that any obstacle you face is on your way to success and not in your way of success.

Once you’ve identified your dream, you will need to set goals and execute them to achieve your dreams. Here are three steps to help:

Step 1: Have a plan

It’s important to plan out your activities beforehand as it makes your goal achieving process cumbersome free. It gives you mental clarity and a clear vision and shows you a way forward. The idea here is to start small if your target is huge.

Step 2: Start small

When you plan on something big, the key idea is to break it into small ideas. Why? In order to escape the feeling of being overwhelmed. Sometimes you set out goals for yourself that seem great but unachievable at the moment but since you are really passionate about it so you go ahead anyway. Initially, you are highly optimistic and energetic, but after a day or two, you exhaust.

Have you wondered why some ideas that you were initially so passionate about, died out after a day or two? It’s not because your idea is absolutely unachievable. Nothing is, for that matter. Let’s fill in the gaps for you. What happens is when we set out a plan or a project, we are so excited and thrilled about it reaching its destination, that we miss out on the most important prerequisites, which show you how to set goals:

1. Break down the core idea into small achievable targets.
2. Set out goals on a weekly basis. Not more than that of a week at once.
3. Set out a set of easy goals and ascend towards moderate and eventually step up the difficulty level.
4. Make a point to pen down the weekly goals and keep it in the vicinity of your sight. This will remind you to come back every time your mind wanders elsewhere (which happens so frequently).
5. Make sure you accomplish 8-9/10 goals each week (you need to be neither too strict nor too easy on yourself. We are not machines, after all).
6. Trust yourself that you can achieve it and you will no matter what. Be your biggest motivator and cheerleader.
7. Have patience. Persistence will pay. All good things take time and effort to accomplish.

Step 3: Form good habits

We are a sum total of our habits. Everything we do each day subconsciously becomes our habit. That is why usually when we start something, most of the time we cannot sustain it because that simply isn’t our habit. In order for it to become our habit, we have to do it on a daily basis. And here’s the trick. The bottom line is to not overdo anything because that leads to exhaustion in the early stages. Identify what needs to be done on an everyday basis and introduce one change at a time. It takes anything to become a habit if we do it for 21 days straight. So be conscious of what you take up for the next 21 days because you do not want to inculcate any habit that contradicts your goal.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear said, “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results”, and rightly so because what you are doing today is not going to reap its benefits just yet, so don’t get disheartened. All of the changes that you are making today are for a greater purpose henceforth. Initially, when you introduce changes, your ecosystem might find it difficult to cope with the newness and that is when the uneasiness and discomfort creep in, longing for you to run back to old habits because that seems familiar and comfortable. That is where the task lies. You have to keep doing what you are doing for at least a span of 21 days without fail.  Doing it repeatedly is what makes you comfortable with an idea and slowly and steadily, with each passing day that eventually becomes your habit with minimum effort.

Passion is what gets you started but persistence is what sustains it. It all starts with that one discomfort, which when practiced repeatedly over a period of time turns out to be your success story.

Here’s wishing you yours,

Vibhorika Bhagat