How to Achieve Any Goal Without Burning Out

Research shows that setting goals helps you achieve success. But the difference between someone who creates lasting value and someone who burns out on the way to success is the follow-through. This article will help you dial in your mindset and activities so you can persevere despite any obstacles.

The four steps to achieving any goal without burning out are to:

1. Build full-body belief
2. Create a plan
3. Develop habits
4. Seek feedback

Build full-body belief

If you don’t see yourself succeeding, how is anyone else going to? It’s not your boss’s job to believe in you. It’s not your partner’s job to believe in you. It’s yours. And if you want to achieve your goals, you must do it on purpose.?

To build full-body belief means you are focused on your success in a way that creates emotions most conducive to achieving your ends. Emotions are simply vibrations in your body, and they are the most powerful fuel available to you. Getting skilled at creating them will accelerate your progress towards your goals.?

To prove this point to yourself, think about how it feels when you don’t believe something you want is possible. The emotions include apathy, fear, doubt, anxiety, sadness. Those emotions do not result in creative thinking or inspired action.

However, by seeing yourself already succeeding—in vivid full-sensory detail within your mind’s eye—you build your belief that it’s not just possible, but that your goal is a done deal. You can harness the powerful emotions of gratitude, confidence, and joy. And with the belief that “this is happening” you might even find yourself having fun with it.?

To build full-body belief, ask yourself questions such as: Where am I when I see the indicator that I’ve achieved my goal? Who else is with me? How do I feel when I see the evidence that my goal is complete? What sounds, smells, and physical sensations am I experiencing in that moment?

Visualizing your success is not just a one-time operation. Make a habit of seeing yourself in the future place you want to be. Once the details of your success become such an accepted fact in your mind that it’s almost boring—almost—then you’ll know you’re on the right track.

Some ways to do this include creating a physical vision board in your space, selecting images for a Pinterest board that you have an open browser tab, and including visualization in a daily morning routine. It also helps to say it out loud: “I have created (your result) by (your date).” The reason this works is because as your belief in your success grows, so will your creative problem solving and ability to muster the resources necessary to achieve it.?

By giving your brain prompts about where you want to go, it will start giving you back ideas for how to get there. You’ll be working on it in your sleep, as you exercise, in conversations with people, in how you ask for help and in how you see yourself.?

Create a Plan?

To have the most potential for succeeding, your goal needs to be specific, measurable, and time-bound. That will allow you to work backwards from the target date and prioritize the activities most likely to get you there.

It’s important not to get overly detailed with your plan, because it will likely change as you gather more information through executing it. But without a specific plan on how you will get from your current point to the goal point you will get distracted by things that seem important, but don’t contribute to your goal.

So create the plan, then align your resources—time, money, and energy—to make it inevitable.

And the better you get at creating a plan and executing it, the more self-confidence you will develop. Self-confidence comes from being true to your word and aligned with your values. Creating a plan makes this easier. The plan is your word in written form. You put it on the calendar to make your written word become your daily actions.

That’s how you become unstoppable in your pursuit of your goal.

Develop Habits

If your goal is big, you won’t be able to get there through willpower and all-nighters. You’ll need the building blocks of good habits in place to make incremental progress over time.?

Once you decide on the habits that will support your plan, make it easy to do them. Prime your environment in as many ways as possible so you can override the urges to get distracted that will arise along the way.

For instance, to be able to wake up at 5:30am every morning I prime my environment by setting my alarm clock 8 feet away from my bed and next to the clothes I’m going to put on for the morning. That way when the time comes all I have to do is put my feet on the ground and the momentum of my environment carries me the rest of the way.

One of those habits should be celebrating success. Research shows that making progress on meaningful work is the best way to boost emotions and motivation. Acknowledging the progress that you’re making on a regular basis will propel you forward despite setbacks. So make it a habit to find the wins, big and small. At our home we use Celebration Friday at dinner to celebrate our wins for the week.

Get Feedback?

If you want to do something big, it means you likely haven’t done it before. So why make it harder than it needs to be by stumbling around hoping you eventually get it right??

Seek out feedback—relentlessly and ongoingly—from sources you trust. Set up experiments to provide real-life learnings towards your goal. For instance, if your business goal is to, say, double your revenue in 6 months then experiment with sales channels that you think will contribute to that growth. Let it be imperfect and not the A+ version of how you would work with that channel. By setting up a low-fi experiment you will get valuable feedback to see if that channel is worth further investment.?

But if you’re avoiding feedback, perhaps because you don’t want others to think you don’t know what you’re doing, your goals will take longer to reach. I like to take the opposite approach. One of my personal growth hacks is raising my hand when I don’t know what I’m doing. It drives me to ask questions, seek out mentorship, and confide in peers I trust. It always leads to growth.

Work with someone who has been where you want to go and ask powerful questions of them. Don’t look to them for answers, but instead bring them your current best understanding and see what else you can learn from them. The more perspectives and experience you bring to help you achieve your goal over time, the better your chances of achieving it will be.

Your goals are important and you deserve the best shot at achieving them. Following these principles will help you become a master at getting what you most desire in life.

To help you fast track your life and business goals I created a VIP Strategy Intensive for leaders. Learn more about the intensive here.