When it comes to goal setting, sometimes we need a little motivation to help us along and remind us why we’re interested in pursuing a specific goal. Your mindset plays a huge role in determining whether or not you’ll achieve your goals.
The motivation that you need to get you in the right frame of mind to achieve can come from many different sources – your internal drive, family/friends, difficult life circumstances and even motivational quotes.
“Motivational quotes?! What the?” You might be saying to yourself. But it’s true. The right quote at just the right time can be a powerful thing. It can help you get into the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done so that you can achieve your goal.
In a previous post, I spoke about how motivational quotes can help you manage stress. In this post, I’m going to talk about 5 of my favorite motivational quotes that have to do with goals and goal setting. I’m gonna list the quotes, talk about the aspect of mindset they address and how that can help you reach for the stars!
Read on for 5 motivational quotes on goals and goal setting.
Reach For The Stars
SMART Goals
If you’ve been reading the Making Time blog for a while, then you’re well aware that I’m a proponent of setting SMART goals. SMART stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timebound
A key component of making a goal smart is giving yourself a timeframe in which to get it accomplished.
This quote by Robert Herjavec says it all:
“A goal without a timeline is just a dream.” - Robert Herjavec
If you don’t have timeframes built into your goal, how will you be able to tell if you’re making progress? How will you know if you’ve achieved it?
That’s where a timeline comes in. Two of the key components of making your goal SMART is making it measurable and timebound.
Making your goal measurable means that you put in signs (or measures) that let you see the progress that you are (or are not) making in reaching your goal.
For instance, when I decided to really develop my meditation practice, I included a measurement related to how many days in a row I would sit down to meditate for me to consider what I was doing successful. And I used a habit tracker to help me see at a glance if I was meeting the expectations I set for myself. Both things kept me on track.
As the quote makes clear, it’s just as important to make sure that your goal has a timeframe connected to it. You can’t have a forever goal. If there’s no timeframe, you can go on and on, never reaching it. For my meditation practice, I gave myself an overarching goal of 1 year to do it regularly and make it stick.
And guess what – having the milestones and timeframe helped motivate me and led to me having a solid meditation practice as part of my self-care routine.
Visualization
“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” – Tony Robbins
This is a great Tony Robbins quote and it’s absolutely true. All of us have hopes, dreams and desires that live inside. But how do you take what’s inside of you and begin to make it a reality?
By setting a goal. A goal is the beginning of a physical manifestation of what it is that you desire. And part of making your goals come to fruition is visualizing them.
In a previous post I spoke about the importance of visualization in reaching goals. To visualize your goal is to use your mind’s eye to imagine the future. A future where the goal that you have made has come to pass.
To visualize, close your eyes and think of your goal as if it has happened. Think about everything, what your environment is like, how you feel, who is (or isn’t) around: just everything about that moment.
And that’s how it begins.
Planning
“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” —Pablo Picasso
So far, we’ve talked about setting a SMART goal and visualizing that goal; two important parts of goal setting. However, that’s not everything. One extremely important part of achieving goals is alluded to in Pablo Picasso’s quote. It’s not enough to have a goal – to reach it, you have to have a plan.
Every time I set a new goal for myself, I make sure to use my goal setting process to help me achieve it. My process consists of:
Brainstorming
Writing the Goal Down
Visualization
Review
Reward
Here’s a quick overview:
Brainstorming is exactly what it sounds like. You think about what the things are that you want to achieve, pick your top 3 – 5 and write it down in the SMART format.
A written goal is the only goal that has a chance of being achieved. There’s something about putting a pen to paper that makes a goal crystallize in your mind and makes it infinitely more achievable. A goal when it’s written, becomes real.
I spoke about visualization previously, so I’ll move on to review.
Reviewing your goals keeps you on track. If you make sure that your goals are SMART a review is automatically part of the process just under a different name. Milestones. Regular milestones help you see the progress that you’re making towards your goal. And if you’re not making progress, they let you see that too so that you can revise as needed.
Now if you want to do your goal up right, you need to build in a reward!
Why? Because that’s the fun part and it helps keep you motivated! And as Picasso says you must believe and be motivated in order to achieve.
I’ll give you an example of reward. As I said before, a few years ago, I was at a point of wanting to really amp up my selfcare because I was stressed out. Because I’m naturally an introspective person, I felt that meditation would be a really great way for me to do this. So as a wrote down my goals related to meditation, I did some research about things that would make it easier for me to meditate and decided that as a reward for meditating daily for 3 months that I would buy the full version of one of the meditation apps that I enjoyed using. When the day came, it was like a party!
Motivation
“It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach.” —Benjamin E. Mays
This quote speaks to the heart of this entire post. It’s okay if you don’t reach your goals. There’s no shame in that. You can always reformulate and try again.
The shame and sadness comes from not having a goal and in not trying to reach those that you do have. If you have a desire that comes from deep inside, it’s there for a reason and you have to try to pursue it. See Mr. Mays’ quote for more details.
Self-belief
“You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream.” - C.S. Lewis
You’ve gotta believe. There’s no use in setting a goal if you don’t believe in your ability to reach it. Age should never be a factor in whether or not you take your dream and turn it into a goal. As two other famous quotes state: “Age is only a number” and “You’re only as old as you feel.”
There you have it! Five different ways that motivational quotes can help you with goal setting so that you can reach your heart’s true inner desires. Which is a way of helping you manage your stress before your stress manages you.
Let’s talk, what quote do you use to motivate yourself when it comes to reaching your goal? Let me know in the comments section.
Cassandra Martin-Himmons is a trainer, wellness coach and consultant who believes in empowering her clients and providing the tools that they need to make positive changes in their lives to manage their stress and increase their self-care. In her spare time, she enjoys papercrafting, volunteering and travel. Connect with her on Instagram or Linked/In