AMY HANSEN

As an adult, you have a lot of responsibilities.  From your job, ensuring you have enough financial means to live comfortably, to making sure your family is well taken care of.  There are a lot of demands on you each and every day.  But, some of these demands may be holding you back from fully experiencing life and achieving your goals.  You can’t let your goals and dreams die.  Here is how to fully experience life and love the life you live.

No Regrets

If it were just you, with no responsibilities, where you could do what you want, when you want, no matter where you want, it would be easy.  However, in today’s world, you most likely have obligations that require your immediate and undivided attention.  Yet, life is about the experiences.  If you’re simply stuck in your mundane day to day routine, you won’t be fully experiencing life and all that it has to offer.  You don’t want to get to the end of...

Water creates this calming effect, watching the tidal waves roll in and out.  Sometimes they are small laps against the beach while other times they are big waves crashing along the shore.  The ocean water is a lot like working to achieve your goal.  It can be calm until the next moment when it begins to build into larger swells.  Here is how to use the power of the ocean to help you achieve your goal.

Ocean Visualization

Close your eyes and imagine that you step into the ocean.  Feel your toes in the sand.  Sense the cool water on your feet, surrounding your legs.  Look upward and soak up the warmth of the sun as it beams down against your face.  Listen to the sounds around you.  Hear the seagulls call and the waves of the ocean.  Maybe you even hear faint voices or laughter from others playing on the beach around you.

Your Emotions

Now, imagine each time you experience an emotion that you’re stepping into the...

When it comes to achieving your goal, there are plenty of ups and downs along the way.  Sometimes you encounter a curve ball as test or reminder to see if you’re paying attention.  Often these are full of lessons to learn.  But, in the moment, it can seem almost impossible to face the upcoming hurdle.  Whether it’s bad news or something unexpected that happened, you will get through it.  It may just take more of a battle than you want it to.  Yet, your willpower, strength, and determination will help you get through a difficult time.  Here are six tips to help you get through a difficult time so that you can achieve your goal.

You’ll Get Through This

First, tell yourself that you'll get through this.  Remind yourself that you're strong, capable, and can handle whatever life throws at you.  Recall difficult past experiences that you’ve made it through as evidence that you can make it through this too. ...

A common reason why goals are abandoned and never achieved is due to trying to do too much all at once.  Big goals can feel overwhelming and sometimes impossible to achieve.  This is especially true when you feel like you’re running on all cylinders, working extremely hard but seeing little to no progress.  Achieving your goal should not feel this way.  If you want to achieve your goal, you need to see progress in order to stay motivated.  But, that doesn’t mean you need to go to extremes and work yourself to the bone of exhaustion.  Here are five tips on how to avoid overwhelm when it comes to achieving your goal.

Small Milestones

First, break down your goal into small bite size pieces.  Set small milestones for yourself where you can take little daily actions.  This will help you feel like your goal is more manageable because you aren’t trying to do too much all at once.  Yes, you want to achieve your goal...

There are some days when you’re feeling a lack of motivation.  You know you should be taking action towards your goals but you’re just not feeling motivated to do so.  Don’t give up.  Everyone has an ebb and flow of motivation.  Sometimes you feel discouraged because the path to achieving your goals gets difficult.  Other times you’ve just lost interest, passion or excitement.  The key is to get back to your motivation as quickly as possible.  Here are six ways to help you get your motivation back.

It’s Normal

First, recognize that it’s normal to lose your motivation.  It happens to everyone.  Don’t beat yourself up or get down on yourself if you’re feeling a lack of motivation.  Sometimes you’ll be super excited and motivated and other times you won’t want to do the work because it feels like a chore.  That doesn’t mean that you’re on the wrong track...

Think about what will happen if you don’t achieve your goal.  Yikes!  You might get really down on yourself.  Perhaps your inner critic will rise up saying mean things that you were stupid for going for this goal and ask you why did you ever think that you could achieve such a goal in the first place?  This negativity will not only prevent you from going for this goal, but it can also stop you from going after any goal in the future.  You can’t let that happen.  Learn how to stay focused on your goal so that you can finally achieve it!

Goal Clarity

Whenever you’re setting a goal for yourself, you need focus, clarity, and specificity.  You need to be clear on what exactly the goal is that you want to achieve.  Focus on one specific goal that you’ve set for yourself.  If you have too many goals or shinny objects, you’ll get easily distracted.  You need clarity on what goal you’re aiming...

Setting goals in your life is more than just the feeling of accomplishment that comes with achieving what you set out to do.  It’s about creating a life that fulfills you, challenges you, excites you, and creates some form of balance.  But, usually when you work towards one goal, another area of your life ends up falling out of balance.  Learn how to set the right goal that helps you to find more balance in your life.

Reassess

A balanced life looks different for everyone.  It’s up to you to decide what that looks and feels like for you.  Take time to reassess where you are in your life.  Give a score to each area of your life.  This includes finances, relationships, hobbies, career, physical health, surrounding environment, and mental wellbeing.  Think about which of these areas feels off and needs improvement.  Then, refocus your energy to set a goal to improve that area of your life.

Set A Goal

Goal setting...

You’ve just achieved a big goal.  Now what?  You’ve dedicated so much time and effort working towards achieving your goal.  It’s consumed so much of your time.  After that massive amount of work, you were able to achieve something that you’ve dreamt of for so long.  But, now you may be feeling lost and stuck, not knowing what’s next for you.  That in between stage can be a bit scary.  You may be thinking that you just want to play it safe rather than step outside your comfort zone and take a risk to achieve another goal.  However, as an achiever, you don’t want to just coast through the rest of your life.  You want to continue learning and growing.  Here are four things you can do when you’re in between goals.

Educate Yourself

Start by reading books on topics that peak your curiosity.  Educate yourself further by taking an online course or decide to go back to school.  Get a...

Having a strategy to achieve your goals is important.  Without a plan, you won’t know what to do in order to achieve your goals.  That’s why it’s important to find the best strategy that works for you.

Strategy Example

For example, if you want to lose weight, your strategy would be to exercise and eat healthy.  You might choose a good strategy to exercise and cook at home three days a week.  Your better strategy would be to exercise and cook at home five days a week.  Your extreme perfect strategy is to exercise and cook at home seven days a week.  Your good strategy is the bare minimum you would consider to be making progress towards achieving your good goal.  Your better strategy says you’re being more diligent and taking the right steps to achieve your better goal.  Your perfect strategy leaves no margin for error.  It says that you’ve knocked it out of the park to go above and beyond in order to...

You may have heard of the good, better, best goal setting strategy where you set three different goals to achieve.  For example, if you want to lose weight by the end of the month.  Your good goal is five pounds, your better goal is seven pounds, and your best goal is to lose ten pounds by the end of the month.  Your goal is to lose weight but there is scale in which you can achieve that goal.  But, is this really the best goal setting strategy?

Three Winning Goals

If you achieved your good goal, you’d be happy with that result.  But, you’d feel even better if you achieved your better goal and over the moon excited if you achieved your best goal.  The idea is that you’d put forth the same amount of time and effort to achieve the goal, but you wouldn’t be upset if you just hit your good goal instead of your best goal.  Each goal is a winner to you.

Bigger Goals

However, let’s be honest, in the above...