Do you ever think about everything you have to get done in a day or a week and just feel unmotivated and overwhelmed by it all? I know I do!
Break it down!
Setting goals for yourself is a great way to stop that from happening! Breaking down tasks into small and manageable parts is a great way to get the satisfaction of being productive and actually makes you want to do the boring things like cleaning your room that you wouldn’t want to do otherwise.
Make the ‘unrealistic’, realistic!
The most important thing to keep in mind when setting these goals is to be realistic! Now what most people get wrong is this shouldn’t limit how big or “unrealistic” your goals are, it just means you have to make sure that you break down these bigger goals into smaller and more realistic parts.
For example, your goal might be to fly to the moon! To me, this is not at all unreasonable or unrealistic, as long as you can break it down! Start with the goal of researching how to become an astronaut, once you’ve done that, your goal might be to research the schools and training you will need to do, then consider the steps you’ll need to do that training and in no time you’ll be on the moon!
Okay okay, that is a very extreme example, let’s think about it when cleaning our bedrooms. I make the one goal of cleaning into several separate smaller goals, as I don’t know about you but my room can be a mess! Make my bed, put any dirty clothes in the washing machine, hang up any clean clothes, and so on until it’s all clean!
Celebrate!
The trick is to take a break or ‘celebrate’ somehow between each goal you complete to keep yourself motivated! This might be by watching a YouTube video, reading a Platfform4YP blog *wink wink*, or my favourite, eating some chocolate!
This is what I have done throughout most of my life to get where I am today. Things like going to university, it seemed like a big and difficult goal until I broke it down into many realistic and manageable goals. That way I was also able to track my progress and when the days inevitably came that I wanted to give up, I could just remind myself of how far I had already come based on all of the smaller goals I had already reached!
How do I do it?
To-do lists are probably the simplest method, the satisfaction you get from crossing things off the list is reward enough for some people! All you need is a pen and some paper!
What to take away
So, the next time someone tells you that a goal of yours is unrealistic, just think to yourself that they are just thinking about it in an unrealistic way. And that if you take some tome to just break it down, anything is possible!