Are you taking action on your goals everyday? If not, why not? It’s time for Day 14 of the Just For Today Challenge – 31 Days To A Better You.

Today’s Challenge is to take one task that is part of your goals and complete it.

You do have goals for your life, right? What do you mean you don’t? Then you need to go and read my previous article Show Me Your Plan and I’ll Tell You Your Future and then come back to this Challenge. We’ll wait for you. This is something very important that everyone should have. Otherwise you are the whim of people who do have goals and are going after them.

For those of you who know what they want in life and have written it down, continue reading.

Are you consistently taking action on your goals? Ideally, you should be making progress daily, if not weekly toward your goals.

We know this, but many of us don’t follow through. Why not? Because it can get overwhelming and scary to see these great big goals that we have for our lives. You stare at your list and wonder how you will accomplish everything that is on there. You don’t know what to do. So, you do nothing.

It’s only two weeks into the new year and maybe you have already given up on your goals for this year. Your goal of going to the gym and working out everyday – out the window. Maybe you wanted to quit smoking as one of your life goals for 2010 and only made it to Day 4 without cigarettes. Did you promise yourself that you were going to finally save some money and not end up living paycheque to paycheque this year? Are you dying to quit your job and go back to school?

Did you promise yourself that this year would be different? You weren’t going to give up so easily like in the past and were going to complete some of your goals, dammit! What happened to that motivation? Life gets in the way, of course. Well, today we can halt that downward progression and do a fresh restart. Just For Today, complete one small step towards completing one of your goals.

Let’s take the example of quitting your job and going back to school to become a teacher. Maybe this is something that you have always wanted to do and it’s been on your life list for a long time.

You are currently here: Working a full-time job in a corporate environment

You want to be here: Student enrolled full-time in an Education program at a local university

What do you need to get from Working to Student? Lots of things! It’s too overwhelming so we’ll think about it some other day, right? No way!

Let’s list some of the things that you have to do to go from working a full-time job to becoming a teacher. This is not an exhaustive list, but here are some of the subtasks associated with the bigger goal:

• Figure out which school(s) you want to apply to
• Send out emails for school brochures or visit websites for information
• Contact the school for an application form
• Contact people to act as references for the application
• Pay the application fee
• Find the contact details for the school and either call or email the school and talk to a career coordinator for mature students
• Find out how much tuition will be for the 4 year program
• Apply for student aid
• Divide the tuition amount by how many months/years you have until you start the program
• Start saving the tuition amount now, if you can
• Figure out ways to make more money
• Pick a quit date for your job or talk to your boss about part-time employment while you’re attending school
• etc.

It looks kind of scary because there are so many steps between the Start and End states.

Just For Today, take this list and pick the easiest thing on it that you can do to advance you to become a teacher. Maybe you already have the application forms and the references, plus you know which school you are want to attend and know how much the tution will be. You can then take another subtask, such as the financial aid one, and take action on this task. What do you need to apply for financial aid? Is it to find the contact details for the financial aid office for your area and call/email them for an application? You can do that today, can’t you? It’s pretty simple to get the application form, no? You don’t have to fill out the entire thing today. Just call/email and get the forms. There you go, you took positive action toward completing your goals. You’re one step closer!

Let’s take another example. Maybe you have a life goal of losing 50 pounds by July 1st, 2010.

You are currently here: Fat (just kidding). Let’s say you are Unhealthy.

You want to be here: 50 lbs lighter by June 1st, 2010 

What’s involved between the Start and End states? This is what we know:

• 1 pound has 3500 calories so 50 lbs is 175 000 calories. (Holy cow, that’s a lot of calories to lose, so let me grab another chocolate bar! No, don’t do this.)
• There are 167 days until July 1st and 25 weeks left to lose the weight
• We are in good health overall and can do some moderate exercise
• We know that in order to lose the weight healthily, we should be losing 1-2 lbs per week
• If we lost 2 lbs per week for the 25 weeks we will have a 50 lbs weight loss!
• 2 lbs per week equals 7000 calorie reduction (3500 calories x 2 =  7000)
• We can reduce our food consumption by 500 calories per day and exercise to lose another 500 calories to get to the 1000 calories loss per day that we need. This is manageable. We can do this!

How are we going to reduce our food consumption by 500 calories per day and exercise to lose another 500 calories per day?

• Set our alarm to get up earlier to exerise with the Wii Fit in the morning
• Go for a walk during the lunch hour
• Figure out how much we are currently eating by writing down everything we eat and then getting their calorie total
• Reducing our calorie total by 500 each day
• Calling a friend to exercise with on the same day every week
• Calling the closest gym to see how much it costs to join
• Making a list of healthy receipes
• Throwing out all the bad food in the cupboards
• Going to the grocery store to buy healthy foods
• Making a meal plan for the week
• etc.

What can you do from this list that will take you one step closer to your goal? Maybe it’s calling your friend to get their support and setting up a day next week that you are both going to go for an hour walk after work. Or maybe it’s calling a couple of the gyms in your neighbourhood to see how much they cost per month. Whatever is the easiest thing to cross off your list, do that Just For Today. Once you’ve completed the easiest thing, take the next easiest thing and complete that one, too. Start (or restart) your momentum to complete your goals. You can do it!

What step did you take today towards completing your goal? Let us know by leaving a comment below. Thanks!

For a list of all of the Challenges, see the Just For Today Challenge page.

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Tagged as: Goals, Just For Today Challenge, Take Action