If you want a happy life, you need life goals to work towards.
As a certified life coach, I can help.
Discover how to set realistic life goals, then develop an action plan to make your dreams come true.
Here’s how you can achieve your life goals.
Life Goal Mistakes
Before diving in, we must highlight the biggest mistake people make when setting their life goals: they’re living in a dream world.
Although we’d love to say anything is possible, reality often bites us in the rear, reminding us that, no, anything is not possible. Humanity hasn’t discovered time travel or how to explore other planets, so your life goal can not be space travel.
Leave those lofty dreams of things that can’t happen to the realm of imagination.
Once you do that, we can help you set realistic life goals and create action plans to achieve them.
How to Set Life Goals
The first step to anything is deciding what you want.
Check out our epic list of fifty life goals. Pick a few items that speak to you and write them down. Narrow your list down to five, and affirm that you WILL accomplish them.
You’ve set your mind to what you want – that’s it, right?
If only it were so simple. We have to transform those goals into things you can actually do. But there’s a great tool for that – the SMART goal framework.
What Are SMART Goals
SMART is an acronym for setting goals. Each goal should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-based (SMART!).
While a goal to walk on the moon may be specific and measurable, it’s unrealistic for most people. Similarly, while a goal to travel may be achievable, without a specific destination or time frame, it might be more of a dream than a goal.
Applying the SMART Framework to Life Goals
It might be harder to think of massive, long-term life goals in the SMART goal framework (how do you even measure happiness anyway?), but a little creative thinking can help you get there.
Let’s use our number 1 life goal that everyone should pursue as an example: Being happy.
How can we reframe this lofty, ambiguous goal using the SMART framework?
Specific
Saying “I want to be happy” is about as far from specific as you can get. It’s vague, unclear, and a little cryptic.
It works great on a big list that’s supposed to be general enough for everyone, but when you set it as your goal, you need to get way more specific.
You need to define what happiness means for you. Consider the following questions:
- What would a happy life look like?
- What activities make me happy?
- Do I find happiness in work, family, learning, exploring, or something else?
- When am I happiest?
When you have an answer to these questions, you can determine what would make you happy, and you can make achieving that your top life goal.
Measurable
How do you quantify happiness? You can’t, but you probably can measure the specific things you identified that will make you happy.
For example, I find happiness in traveling. Therefore, I can “measure” my happiness by counting how many trips I’ve taken or how many trips I have planned. I can count all the cool places I’ve seen and epic adventures I’ve had.
It’s not exactly a measure of happiness, but since it’s something that makes me happy, it’s a fair substitute.
You might have to get crafty in finding ways to measure your own happiness, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Achievable
I think happiness is achievable for everyone, so this is a gimme.
But – look at what you decided brings you happiness. Is that achievable? Is it something you can really do with the time you have on Earth?
Your life goal can’t be a pipe dream – it must be something you can actually do.
Realistic
I’m certain world peace would bring us all happiness, but there’s nothing we can do to make it happen. It’s unachievable and unrealistic.
We talked about loft goals being dream killers, so it’s time to ensure your life goal aligns with reality.
Time-Based
Here’s where some of the life goals get tricky. They are so long-term that it’s hard to define a time limit.
In our happiness example, we want to be happy for the rest of our lives. We want to find happiness and maintain it. There’s no time limit on finding happiness.
But there might be a way to set timeframes for achieving the things that make you happy.
It’s okay if you can’t determine all aspects of the SMART framework. However, you should apply it when it makes sense.
How to Achieve Your Life Goals
You’ve set your life goals, but now you’re stuck. How do you achieve them?
A lot of people fall flat here. They have the desire but never take the action needed to make a lifelong dream happen.
We can help.
Achieving your life goals may take a lifetime, but that’s okay, that’s why they’re called LIFE goals, right?
Follow these four steps, and you’ll be on track to getting everything you want out of life.
Focus
Your teachers, parents, and society in general gaslight you into thinking you can have everything.
That’s not true.
One of life’s harshest truths is that we can’t have everything we want. You can’t have a fantastic career while being a stay-at-home parent. You can’t dedicate all your time to practicing an instrument and learning a craft.
We are limited by the hours of the day.
But we can have anything we want. We can have an impressive career or be a fantastic stay-at-home parent. We can master either the guitar or fine art oil painting.
A critical step in achieving your top life goals is prioritizing them so you can focus on what’s most important.
You can have anything. You just can’t have everything at the same time.
Break It Down
Life goals are giant, generalized ideas of what we want. To achieve them, we should break them down into smaller, more manageable steps.
Consider the long-term and short-term goals you must accomplish to achieve your ultimate goal.
Let’s take owning a home as an example. It’s a fantastic life goal, but there are a lot of smaller steps involved. You may need to improve your credit score or save for a down payment. You’ll probably want to establish a target date, then set even smaller goals to help you get there.
Let’s say you set a timeframe of ten years to save money for a down payment. You must determine how much money you need to save in that period and then break it down into monthly savings goals.
With average home prices reaching about $400,000, you’ll need about $12,000 for a down payment for an FHA loan (2.5% x 400,000 plus an extra $2000 for inflation). You’ll need to save $1200 per year or $100 monthly to reach that goal.
Your new goal might be “Save $100 monthly for the next ten years in my house down payment fund”. We transformed the lofty dream into a SMART goal.
Develop an Action Plan
Action transforms dreams into reality. But what do you do?
An action plan will help. It records the steps you need to take to accomplish your goals.
Now that you have your short-term SMART goals, you can decide what actions to take to achieve them.
In the example above, you could set an automatic transfer from your checking account to your savings account or start a side hustle to fill in any gaps.
The actionable tasks you must take will depend greatly on your specific goal. Take time to plan out the critical things you need to do to achieve what you want out of life.
Re-Visit
As we grow and change, so do our life goals. Your top goal at 20 may have been to have a family, but by the time you hit 25, you realize that’s not what you want.
You must review your life goals at least every year and ensure you still want everything you are working for.
You should also revisit your SMART goals and action plans to ensure you are on track to hit your targets.
You Can Achieve Your Life Goals
Your life goals are within reach. With a little effort and pre-planning, you can have anything you want.
Stop dreaming and start doing – you’ll be amazed at what you accomplish.