10 Tips to help you achieve your goals in 2018 is a guest post by Jake Voohrees
Are you wondering how you can actually achieve your goals in 2018? How can you put yourself on the best path to get the future job of your dreams? To level up your career? To get the promotion you seek?
This article provides ten tips you can implement to help you have a great year and reach your goals in 2018.
1. Actually Set Goals
Step number one to help you achieve your goals is to actually set goals. Zig Ziglar said, “if you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”
Write your goals down. Announce them with your family, your friends. Create an accountability system. When you publicly announce your goals, you create a societal expectation. You will then be motivated to work harder to achieve those goals, or at the very least, work really hard to reach the bar you have set for yourself and announced to the world.
2. Get Started
Usually, the things that are most important for us to do are the things that create high levels of procrastination. Starting is often the hardest part. It’s hard to be confident when you’re not exactly sure of the entire path to achieve the goal(s) you’re seeking. It’s okay to be unable to see the top of the staircase, when you start at the bottom. Remember, objects in motion are harder to stop. Once you start working towards your biggest goals in 2018, you’ll eventually witness a snowball effect and keep going.
3. Create a Plan
Many people don’t hit their goals because they set goals that are unachievable or unrealistic. Doing this can confuse yourself as to what you need to do to begin to work towards accomplishing your goals, and then never try. You never get started.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Break things down into easily achievable tasks that you can accomplish, each and every day, to work closer to your ultimate goal. If you want to get that dream job, make a goal of applying to five new jobs per week and sending three networking emails per week. Whatever might work best for you, but you have to set micro-goals that align with your macroscopic vision.
4. Self Awareness
In order to become our best selves in 2018, we need to truly become aware of ourselves.
We need to face the fact that we are weak in a lot of areas, and really strong in just a few areas. It’s okay. Most of us want to convince everyone that we’re great at everything. That’s the opposite of leadership. That’s the opposite of what the best achievers in the world do.
These people surround themselves with those who are much better at the things they are deficient in. Great leaders are great at team management, decision-making, and empowering others to fill all the other gaps.
5. Invest in Yourself
Become a better person. Become a better listener. Develop stronger emotional intelligence. Learn about empathy. Be more present. Never stop learning. Never stop growing.
The minute that someone thinks her or she knows everything, is the minute they start going in reverse.
There is someone else working on that same thing we want. That position, that dream job with another company, that managerial role – someone else has it in their sites as well. How are you investing in yourself to get there first?
6. Change your Mindset
Consuming content in books like Mindset by Carol Dweck, how a growth mindset and a positive open-minded view, is mandatory for success. Believe. You have to believe that whatever you’re working on, is going to be successful.
If you start thinking that you’re not good enough for the promotion, it’s already over. What happens next is a series of subconscious self-defeating acts. You won’t put in the extra time on projects, the extra effort to stand out and go another mile. You won’t use the right language in emails and you won’t have the charisma when interviewing for new opportunities.
Instead, you become the things you think about, so you have to believe in yourself. You have to believe that all of this is going to work out.
7. Don’t Waste your Time
I can’t stand it when people say “I don’t have time for that”. That’s ridiculous.
We all have the same amount of time. Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk have the exact amount of time in their day as we all do. What you need to do is utilize self-awareness, and say “I’m not making time for that.” If we made the time to do the little things that add up to the next big thing, then big things will happen.
8. Change who you Spend Time With
Don’t listen to negative voices. Spend more time with mentors. Spend time with people who are going to make you great.
Jim Rohn said we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. So find the people who are already in the position you are trying to achieve in your career, and spend more time around them.
9. Get Healthy
Just for a minute, I want you to imagine yourself as the coach of an Olympic team, whatever sport you desire. What would you want your athletes to eat and drink? Would you want them to do anything that can inhibit performance? Of course not. You’d do everything you could to create a body, a mind, and an overall lifestyle to facilitate them winning.
In 2018, if you want to be the best you, you need to maximize your health. Exercise, meditate, eat cleaner and remove toxins from your lifestyle in general. It’s worth it. You’ll wake up feeling better every day. You’ll be more confident, have more energy, and more be more positive. You’ll feel more full-of-life in general when you are healthy. Treat your body like you’re an Olympian.
10. Work Really Hard
Your actions need to reflect what your goals are. No one in this world who is a great achiever, has just had good things magically happen to them. Successful people work really hard.
When you work hard, each day you will go to sleep satisfied and wake up feeling excited to tackle the next day. You start to understand that one day at a time if you’re deploying these tips, you’re one step closer to achieving your dreams, and to get there, you have to do the things that most people won’t, so you can have the career and life that most people can’t.
For the video version of this post click here.
About Jake Voohrees:
Jake Voohrees is a civil engineer, whose life passion is engineering student mentorship. He is the founder of The 1% Engineer Society, a tribe for “empowering young engineers”, where the community helps each another rise to the top 1% of their career. His YouTube show teaches lessons on how to be successful in engineering, and hosts featured guests who are successful engineers. Focus topics include professional development, career passion, networking tactics, interpersonal skills, and communication.
Please leave your comments, feedback or questions in the section below on how you can achieve your goals in 2018.
To your success,
Anthony Fasano, PE, LEED AP
Engineering Management Institute
Author of Engineer Your Own Success
