3 Steps for Making Your Resolutions and Greatest Goals Inevitable

Making resolutions that you definitely can and will stick to is easy, really, once you understand how. First, let's talk about what makes it virtually impossible: setting resolution-goals of outcome only without setting appropriate task or action-goals. An outcome-goal might be to lose 15 pounds and be in great shape. An outcome-goal can also be an action goal if the goal involves repeated performance, such as exercising for one hour each day, 5 days a week.

For an outcome-goal to come about, you need to take some kind of action that leads to it. Focusing only on the end result is like looking at a photo of a driving destination that you want to reach without picking up your keys, going into your car, and driving there. This makes your outcome-goal impossible to reach.

An appropriate action-goal is a task that you select to engage in that contributes to the outcome-goal you want to reach. As long as you make your action-goal truly do-able for you, your success is guaranteed.

Each time you successfully complete an action-goal your motivation, confidence and concentration levels build, making you more focused, determined and unstoppable as you bring your outcome-goal about by degrees.

To prove that your action-goal is truly do-able, set an actual time for its accomplishment. If you don't take that action by that time, you have set an action-goal that is actually beyond your current capacity. While not doing what you planned to do may seem like failure, you don't have to see it that way. Use it as a learning experience to help you come up with an action that is easier, that you actually can and will do.

What often defeats us at this point, until we realize how our mindset interferes with our success, is regarding what we can do as too meager to make a real difference. This mindset paralyzes us and makes our outcome-goals impossible.

To have any chance of achieving your goals and sticking with your resolutions, you are going to have to trust that your best really is good enough. This trust constitutes belief in yourself. Without that, you do little more than doubt your power to do anything at all.

Delightfully, you can even overcome a lack of belief in yourself by following these steps that make success inevitable:

1. Decide on your outcome-goal.
2. 
   
3. Decide upon a do-able­action-goal that contributes to your outcome-goal, and set a time for doing it.
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5. Do it. If you don't do it, re-set your action-goal to make it easier. If you do it, repeat these 3 steps until you achieve your outcome goal.

And avoid these 3 common mistakes that undermines our performance and achievement:

1. Focusing on an outcome-goal only, without deciding on action-goals that contribute to our outcome-goal.
2. 
   
3. Creating action-goals that are actually beyond us, so that we never actually do them, or we do not do them consistently.
4. 
   
5. Believing that what we can do is not enough.

Here, then, is how to fulfill the outcome-goal of having sufficient belief in yourself to take the actions that will lead to your success.

1. Decide on your outcome-goal: "Believing in myself enough to take action for what I want".

2. Decide on an action-goal. This can be anything, even something symbolic, to move you in that direction. For instance, as a symbolic action you might raise your hand up high and affirm: "As I lift my hand I lift my level of belief in my ability to succeed".

Symbolic action is the easiest way to move forward. Your subconscious does not differentiate between real and symbolic action. In other words, an action means what you decide it does, as long as there is some logical connection between the act and your intention. For instance, a symbolic action to help you to achieve an outcome-goal of losing weight might be to shove an imaginary plate away, as you say to yourself, "I can easily stop eating."

A symbolic action that might help you to achieve the outcome-goal of exercising for 1 hour 5 days a week might be to walk 10 steps as you affirm, "As I take these steps I move into exercising for 1 hour a day, 5 days a week, every week."

Taking symbolic action seem childish and inadequate to make any difference, but believing that expresses the self-defeating mindset described earlier, which we can refer to as "the analysis that leads to paralysis".

Every action-step you take makes it easier to make another action step, and to engage a larger effort in future actions. So, what begins as a merely symbolic act eventually turns into the motivation, confidence and actual ability to do more.

A crucial key here is to stick with it until your outcome-goal is reached. Don't worry about falling back into a smaller action if you find that you cannot continue making the same level of effort. You might have to fall back to a symbolic action, say, after actually exercising 1 hour a day for 5 days. As long as you keep at it and do something you are in the process of succeeding. Stay focused on the doing of what you can, without worrying about what you cannot do, and you will experience the joy of succeeding, and more of the results you are after.

Here is one final point that is important here. If your outcome-goal has a time attached to it, you need to be willing to be flexible. For instance, if you have a goal that you will be out of debt by the end of the year, that may or may not happen, even if you follow the steps outlined here. If your outcome-goal does not happen when you planned, decide if you still want to achieve that outcome, and decide on a new time for its accomplishment. You might give your goal of exiting debt another year.

We cannot control the timing of an outcome with absolute power. We do not always meet deadlines (and yet we do not die!). But you will definitely accomplish more as you apply these steps for keeping resolutions, than if you fail to connect outcome-goals with do-able action goals.

A sample parenting resolution:

Outcome-Goal: Stop screaming at my children

Action-goal: Right now I will go to my child and say something with awareness of the volume of my voice and deliberately speak in a comfortable, soothing tone of voice.

Why it works: It begins to build a new habit of speaking with more conscious self-control.