People constantly set new goals to improve some aspect of our life, such as health, financial aspects, leisure time, education or mental stability. These tend to fail for more common reasons than one would think, and it is not directly related to our willpower or determination. There are factors that affect everyone and, although they may not seem important at first glance, they are essential to maintain consistency in our goals and achieve what we propose.

One of the most powerful reasons for not reaching our goals is self-sabotage, this can be caused by the size of our goals, the time we want to invest to achieve it, the strength to make sacrifices, the discipline and the mentality that we have to pursue it. This means that from the moment you set a goal, that same person is causing your failure. To solve the situation, we recommend you read our article How to correctly set our goals?

Later when going through this, and having correctly defined the objective, we will give you specific advice to determine guidelines of what you have to do to give continuity and completion to your goals.

1. The moment you start working on your goal, whether it’s going to the gym or going to French classes, your motivation is at its highest. You feel satisfied to be complying as you had established, but as time passes it is normal for laziness to appear and your motivation to decrease. This is where the challenge begins. You must find a way to maintain a constant attitude until you finish with your work: we recommend you observe how you are achieving your goals, reward yourself for your perseverance and recognize when your work and concentration have been good enough.
2. Many times we think that the objectives should be allocated towards a single activity and absolute time has to be invested to focus on each goal . The reality is completely different. We can combine our goals : there are some objectives that can be combined in a single activity, for example, if you want to save money for a trip and also eat a healthy diet, stopping spending money on sweets or fast food could be used to save money. ; Or if you want to read more and exercise, you can take readings while on the treadmill.
3. You are not the only one who is setting goals, there are thousands of people who want to start exercising, undertake a project, change and develop the workplace or start a graduate degree. Socializing with the groups that have your objectives and finding colleagues who are in the same process as you to achieve their goals, can be a support to continue working and see the group results of a joint effort .
4. We currently have access to various communication tools and entertainment media through our mobile device. Although these have made our lives easier, they also absorb time that we could use to work on our projects, so it is important to establish leisure times and determine the hours in which we use these devices without exceeding ourselves.

In addition to this, there are also actions that do not help us meet our objectives, so we give you the following tips on things you should NOT do in your process to meet your goals .

1. Although they go unnoticed, there is a vocabulary that we use when we talk about our goals and that, instead of supporting us, takes credit from our efforts and ends up demotivating us, which can lead to us abandoning our goal. Negative language can be identified with some similar phrases “I want to go on an exchange to make my family happy” or “I want to eat healthier to look better.” Although it is true that the people around us could see us healthier when we eat well or our family would feel good knowing that we are studying in another country, we must do these goals to feel healthy with ourselves and to be happy to take advantage of opportunities for which we work. The goals we want to achieve should be for benefits we want to have, not to prove a point to someone else.
2. The main recommendation to meet goals, although some can be combined in the same activity (reading and exercising or saving and dieting), is also not to achieve more than 3 goals at the same time. Do not overextend yourself, the purposes come to be considered great because they represent time and effort, for this reason you must dedicate enough to each one and not want to achieve all the goals in the same period. We must plan our objective well and how we will develop it, if you want to increase your salary 3 times, it should be considered that you are going to work triple what you do, so it is recommended not to make big jumps, start little by little until you reach where do you want.

Culminating with the objectives that we establish should be considered as a continuous challenge that is visualized in the medium – long term, for this the efforts must be combined and our motivation has to persist so that we do not lose the discipline and the way to get there.