How do you feel when you achieve your goal?

How often do you celebrate the little wins you have along the way?

What do you do once you’ve achieved your goal?

What you do next is important but making just two changes can help you avoid making the same mistake everyone makes.

Welcome to the fourth and final part of my series talking about the process I use to help my clients achieve their goals and go on to achieve way more than they hoped for when they started.

Step 4: Achieve

Achieving your goals is a huge accomplishment but actually, the point at which you complete the goal can often be underwhelming.

That’s because that final step is much smaller and less significant than it was when you started.

When we start out, we all dream of completing our goal to a fanfare and huge celebrations. In reality, the completion of most goals are little more than a box-ticking exercise.

There is a better way that will allow you to get the celebrations you want and avoid making the same mistakes as everyone else.

Celebrate Your Smaller Wins

That is to celebrate your smaller wins and review and reset your goals more often.

Your smaller wins are much more significant than your bigger goal. These can often be totally unrelated to your big goal but make a big difference to you.

Things like your back no longer feeling sore, getting a good night’s sleep, no longer getting energy slumps in the afternoon, going through a day and noticing you didn’t have a biscuit or feel like you missed it.

There are plenty more examples but imagine how these kind of things will make you feel if they happened. Huge eh? Potentially, just one of these things could be more meaningful to you than the goal you’re going after.

Review and Reset Your Goals Often

The biggest mistake people make is to achieve their goal and stop.

This is very common. You achieve your goal but you haven’t thought of what next. Clients often tell me they want to maintain what they’ve achieved, whether it’s a running goal or a weight loss goal. The problem with that is that you can’t maintain these things and once the novelty has worn off, you will quickly lose motivation. The danger then is losing all the good work that you’ve achieved.

We all know people who have lost weight on diets or completed C25k, vowed to maintain it and either put the weight back on again or stopped running and feel like they’re back at square one again.

I encourage clients to review and reset their goals often. It can be as simple as a daily reflection on what you did well with, what didn’t work so well and what you can do tomorrow to get a better outcome.

It can also be about once they’ve hit the first target, to think about what the next goal can be. Sometimes this can be something else that has come up that they would like to have a go at. Something you’ve discovered along the way that you’re enjoying like the type of training you’re doing or an opportunity has come up to try something else that excites you. Like open water swimming or hill walking.

Something you never even considered when you started out but because now you’re feeling more relaxed and enjoying the progress you’re making, you feel excited about a new challenge.

Keep challenging yourself, keep raising the bar and keep dreaming of new challenges.

THAT‘s where the magic happens. That’s where the thrill lies, the momentum continues and you discover what you’re truly capable of. It’s a wonderful place to be!

If you wait until you’ve achieved your goal before setting a new one, it’s too late.

What’s your dream? You don’t have to have a big goal when you start out. Many people just want to feel better about themselves and get back that feeling exercising used to give them. When you get to that stage, that’s where momentum keeps you going and helps you set bigger goals.

The hardest bit is usually getting started. If you’re keen to get started, don’t wait until Monday or January, start today. Now is the perfect time to start.

Click here, let’s have a chat, paint pictures and get you moving to where you want to be.