Heidi Grant Halvorson, psychologist, and author of Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals suggests the following key steps:
1. Get specific. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there.
2. Seize the moment to act on goals. Decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance.
3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress. Check your progress frequently.
4. Be realistic optimist. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But don’t underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal. Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence.
5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. Avoid the tendency to focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.
6. Have grit. Grit is willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty.
7. Build your willpower. Take on challenge that requires you to do something you’d honestly rather not do. Start with just one activity, and make plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur.
8. Don’t tempt fate. Many people are overly-confident in their ability to resist temptation, and as result put themselves in situations where temptations abound. Successful people know not to make reaching goal harder than it already is.
9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won’t do. Plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves.
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