Plan Out a Goal | Day 20: Improving Your Life in 31 Days

This is the twentieth post in the “Improving Your Life in 31 Days” series. For more information, and to view an index of all the posts in this series, please click here to go to the central page.

Today you’re going to either create a goal, or pick from your list of already set goals, and plan out its execution. Most people call this process creating “sub-goals”, but honestly, I don’t like the word goal very much—and here’s why…

The Psychology Behind “Goals”

With all the books, articles, and essays written on planning, creating, and following through with your goals, it’s no secret that we view goals as something very important, but unfortunately difficult to accomplish.

Because of that negative association which we are conditioned to adopt, goals are often set, but rarely achieved, which is also something that’s not very surprising to us. I mean, would you be surprised if your neighbor told you he had a goal to lose 50 lbs and a month later you see he’s even bigger than before? Not very surprising right?

With that being said, since it’s obviously a good thing to see your goals through to completion, it’s not such a good thing that we are conditioned to think of accomplishing goals as being a “hard” thing. Unfortunately, it would be a pretty huge goal in itself to disassociate the overwhelming feel of setting and achieving goals in your mind.

So why not just look at it through different lens?

What Are You Used to Following Through With?

Have you ever went on a trip for vacation? Let’s assume that you did, and let’s say you went camping at your family’s favorite lake. Below may be some of the steps you took prior to actually going on vacation:

During the year you saved up some extra money so you and your family could go on vacation.
Once you got enough funds to cover your trip, you found out when you could take some time off, and told the rest of your family to take off on certain dates.
Once you got the dates straightened out, you decided where you wanted to go.
You made a list of things you need to take on the trip, and a list of things you need to purchase for each portion of the trip (the drive there, the stay, and the drive back).
You and your family packed your things up, and on the day of the trip you left home and had the time of your lives.

What does the process I described above look like to you? To me, it’s almost identical to setting a goal and following through with it to completion. The goal being, “Go Camping at Deep Blue Lake” and the sub-goals being all the steps you took in between.

The thing is, you didn’t call it a goal did you? It was your PLAN to go on vacation. Allow me to repeat myself…

You made plans to go on vacation and you followed through with it.

Technically speaking, planning to do something and setting a goal to accomplish is really nothing more than the same exact thing, only you are psychologically conditioned to not see “plans” as such a big deal, whereas you have much more pressure when trying to achieve “goals”.

So although they are the same thing, following through with plans becomes much easier than achieving “goals”. It’s pretty amazing to see how big of a difference something as simple as what you call something can have on you, and the way you see and do things.

Your Day 20 Task

So allow me to re-iterate your task for day 20 of “Improving Your Life in 31 Days”:

Create a plan for something you want to accomplish, and make note of all the steps you need to take to see it through to completion.

Now I’m not talking about planning on taking a vacation. I mean anything you’d normally consider a personal goal, only this time you won’t call it a goal—you won’t even think of it as a goal.

Today, you’ll make plans to achieve something YOU want, and begin taking the first step in the process. Good luck!

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