How to Achieve Your Goals

I have achieved success as an engineer, dancer and a speaker. In this blog I want to talk about how you can map a path to success, take action to achieve your goals and track your progress.

I would like to start by defining what success means to me. Personally, I believe success comes in different forms, and I define it as acheiving your own dreams and goals; whatever they maybe. A doctor may save thousand lives during his lifetime, and I would say that is a hugely succesful life. Getting my degree in engineering after recovering from my mental health issues, and performing infront of large audience as a dancer were two of my biggest successes to date. Neither of those events got me money, but it was the foundation which I built my life on. They were two of my proudest moments. First, ask yourself what do you want to achieve? Once you have a goal, you can begin to map a path towards it.

Have a look at the picture above. One of the flow diagrams shows the path I took to become an engineer and the other diagram shows the path I took to become a performer. Think about what you want to achieve, and see if you can come up with similar flow diagram for you goals. You may find that this path may change, but that's fine. Everything changes in life.

Next step is to come up with list of actions you would take to climb up your path and create a tracker for them. On the table below I have shown some of the actions I took to become a public speaker. First, I identified several activities to help become a speaker such as speaking at Toastmaster and reaching out to speak at other events. I then came up with actions for each activity and I recorded the progress of the actions under the "comments" column. Notice some of the actions are small as joining a speaking club. The actions you take towards your goals does not have to be large steps. Just like climbing a staircase take one step at a time. I then colour coded each of these actions. Highlighted in green are the activities I completed, highlighted in red are the activities I was still working on, and highlighted in purple are activites that were put on hold. The colour coding helped to easily identify which actions were outstanding when I opened the document to update. You could also priortise your actions. Next to each action I also recorded the date I lasted acted on that action. Once setup, I updated this table every few weeks. You can dowload a blank of this document here.

Creating a complete record of actions that you take towards your goals like this is helpful to identify whether you are making your progress or have a hit a wall. If an activity you are undertaking is not making any progress, then you may need to come up with a new activity, or go back and alter your path. Go outside the box and network to see if you can discover new paths. This can help you navigate around any obstacles. It's also a good idea to identify your weakenesses and strengths with relation to your goals. Set aside sometime to work on your weakenesses and use your strengths to get new opportunities. You could create another tracking table on actions you wish to take to improve on your weaknesses.

Finally, remember perserverence is key to achieveing your goals and a good mindset is necessary to achieve your goals. I have written an extended blog on how to develop mental strength which you can read here.

I deliver motivational speeches and dance performances at schools and events. You can read more about them here.