Welcome to week 3 of my series on goal setting.  If you haven’t read them already, you can find week 1: Brainstorming here and week 2: What Will Success Look Like here.

By now you should have a list of goals that enthuse you and fill your heart with joy.  You may realise as you read through them that some are becoming more important or seem more achieveable to you.  Remember that you should only choose a goal because you want to achieve it, not because you think you should.

Look at each goal and focus on what you wrote last week when you were thinking about what success would actually look like.  You now need to think about breaking these down into the following steps:

What will it look like by:

• the end of the month,
• the end of 3 months,
• the end of 6 months,
• the end of nine months,
• the end of 12 months.

Be specific and realistic in the steps.  Last week I wrote about my goal of getting fit.  I’ve broken that down into the following smaller steps towards my main goal:

By the end of the month – I will have run every day as part of RED January.

By the end of March  – I will have taken part in one 10K race.

By the end of June – I will have entered a half marathon and completed another 10K race.

By the end of September – I will have taken part in a Half Marathon race and another race.

By the end of the year- I will be running regularly, raised at least £500 for Mind (I’m more motivated to run when I’m raising money for charity) and I will have doubled my medal collection.

To me, these goals seems achieveable.  In fact, as I look at these steps I am well on my way to completing the first (currently on day 19 of my planned 31 day runstreak), I’ve entered two 10K races (Great Northern and Derby), one 5K race (Sunrise run) and Ipswich half marathon.  I already feel better, both mentally and physically, for running at least a mile every day in January and I know that it will do me good to keep running throughout the year.  I’ve also raised £160 towards my goal of £500 by the end of 2018, if you’d like to help me raise money for the mental health charity Mind, please click here. You can follow my progress on my Instagram account here.

Hopefully this will help you to see how you can break down your goals.  Next week we’ll think about how you can make sure you keep up the motivation to complete them.  See you next week.

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