Stop Burning Out and Take a Step Toward Achieving Your Life Goals Now

1. Core Habits Setting

The first mistake people make, especially at the end of the year (and in the beginning of the year), is trying to achieve too many goals all at once. The second mistake is expecting immediate progress. It’s pretty unrealistic to think you’ll start eating better, working out, and getting eight hours of sleep—overnight!
A better approach is to identify and build “core habits”, an idea outlined in Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit.  If you want to be healthier, for example, one good keystone habit might be waking up earlier. It’s a pretty easy change, so you’ll start each day with a small victory. Also, with more time for yourself each morning, you’re more likely to reach your other goals—like cooking a healthy breakfast or getting to the gym.

Finally, this change is energizing, because it will empower you to make better choices in other areas of work and play.
Looking for a new keystone habit? I highly recommend beginning and ending each day with meditation. Whether you’d like to run a marathon or get a promotion—meditation carves a focused time each day to mentally prepare for your morning run or engage in elevated thinking about your work.

2. What’s your motivation block?

Napoleon Hill, author of Think And Grow Rich, writes that, “the starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.” Behind every goal lies a deeper reason that is motivating your desire for change or achievement. Whether your goal is financial freedom or moving to the C-suite, knowing the deeper reason is vital to reaching your desired result.

Unfortunately, these greater reasons for career or personal change often get lost amid the daily noise of emails, events, and immediate deliverables. Without them, it’s easy to become discouraged. Even if you’re steadily maintaining your new habits, what will happen you face challenges or a plateau?
Say you’re looking to change fields, and you’ve diligently set aside time every Sunday for job-hunting. But, after a month, you still haven’t secured an interview. Unless you can hold onto the deeper reason why you’re searching for a new job—perhaps you want to do work that you’re passionate about—you may consider giving up.
In The Power of Habit, Duhigg explains that there is a significant chance of relapse (even after you’ve successfully replaced old habits) when you’re under pressure. So, in times of increased stress or challenge, do the following: Create a vision board that includes pictures and words that illustrate exact goals and feelings. Write down specific and detailed reasons for each new goal on a piece of paper, and place it where you can clearly see it each day. Make these visual sources of empowerment immediately accessible, and openly share them with friends, family, or like-minded peers.

3. Use Apps for progress lane tracking

The success of any viable corporation is measured through daily accountability, quantifiable progress, and recognition of smaller—as well as larger—milestones. Likewise, your year-long goals should be broken down into measurable pieces, during which time you hold yourself accountable and celebrate achievements.
There are many user-friendly apps to track progress toward personal and professional goals, using real-time data. For fitness, Seven challenges even the busiest person to do just seven minutes of high-intensity workouts each day for seven months—using no more than a chair, a wall, and your own body weight. This app guides you through the workouts with illustrations, timers, and spoken instructions while tracking your progress on graphs and calendars. Charlie App makes meeting prep painless by syncing with your Google calendar and doing automated research on your new contact. The app combs the internet and sends you a one-pager on your contact’s social profiles, bios, interests, and as well as their tweets and common connections. And Wunderlist lists daily priorities, sets reminders, and categorizes tasks.

At the end of each month, use the aggregate information to study your progression and highlight any areas needing attention. Then, make the journey more meaningful by celebrating growth, small or large. Spotlight mid-year achievements with a special trip or treat. Send thank you gifts or take friends who’ve been there for you out to dinner. Balancing the discipline and professionalism of a business mindset with gratitude and self-love creates a motivating environment for growth.
Every new goal is an opportunity to grow, personally or professionally. Use these effective and integrated tips to track progress and achieve your goals.

1. Endeavor to be generous – when needed

Making the world a better place – by being free with your time, energy and money–is a good place to start. By doing so you can create a domino effect that encourages others to follow in your footsteps.
In fact, a recent study conducted by Cornell University sociologists Milena Tsvetkova and Michael Macy supports the idea that generosity is contagious. They point to remarkable “pay it forward” situations, such as the drive-through shop customer who a year and a half ago picked up the tab for the next customer in line at a Manitoba coffee shop, setting off a chain reaction that kept going for the next 226 cars.

Their research, which involved an incentivized game people could invite others to play and thereby bestow financial rewards to them, demonstrated that receiving help increased the likelihood that a person would be generous to a stranger.
“We concluded that observing an act of kindness is likely to play an important role in setting a cascade of generosity in motion, since many people can potentially observe a single act of helping. But we found that it was receiving help that sustained the cascade as it spread through the group,” they write.

2. Stop hating and Start loving – Avoid Jealousy

There’s a reason it’s called the green-eyed monster–jealousy is ugly. And where did it ever get you, anyway?
Whether you fear losing a relationship or wish you had things other people have, you need to let go. When it comes to your relationships, nothing is more attractive than genuine confidence. And as for having stuff, remember: You can’t take it with you, so why fret about what you’re supposedly missing?

3. Be Thankful

Besides, you have a lot! Consider that penicillin, the first antibiotic, wasn’t clinically tested and mass produced until the 1940s. Before that, billions of people throughout the course of history died from bacterial infections. Losing a child to sickness–something most people loathe to imagine–was commonplace.
You also live in a society in which you are completely free to choose your own destiny and pursue happiness. This isn’t the case everywhere on the planet and much of the world’s timeline has been stained with murderous wars that, again, have taken the lives of billions of people.
You’re alive. Be grateful for it.

4. Exercise – this helps in body building (and more)

It’s hard to be appreciative when you feel like crap. Exercise every day and always take the stairs. Drink water instead of diet soda, which is remarkably bad for you. Eat foods rich in anti-aging antioxidants – things like berries, red peppers, dark green vegetables, garlic, tea and fish.

5. Absent the fear of failure in your life

Fear of failure can deter people from taking action yet if you never try anything you’ll never achieve anything.
In fact, falling on your face can be a good way to learn valuable lessons. Successful entrepreneurs, for example, realize the importance of failing as quickly as possible when launching a new venture because the faster you find bugs and problems, the quicker you can get rid of them. Failing isn’t easy or fun, but you can’t let it dictate how you live your life.