I want you to think for a moment about whatever goals you may have in your life right now.

What would you like to achieve this week?

What about the next six months?

The next five years?

What about a life goal?

Which of these are you working on right now?

We all have goals.

We all need goals.

Today, I want to explain a technique I teach people to help them figure out how to create a goal, how to plan the journey to that goal, and how to actually reach it.

It’s an activity you can use to help you think about what you want to improve and how you will go about it.

You can use this technique for anything at all. I use it myself to plan my goals and help me figure out a course of action.

Here, I’ll explain it in the context of language learning as that’s what most of you guys are interested in.

In a way, it’s related to my post called This Verb Kills Motivation And Productivity. If you haven’t read that post, then do so.

It’s a technique I call Desires, Needs, Goals, Action.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

It is.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

You simply complete a simple series of statements, and the end result is clear goals, a clear course of action, and guaranteed success.

We all have goals, some big, some small. We all have things that we want to achieve.

The thing is, the more we want to reach our goals, the less likely we are to start working towards them. The goals that we most want to achieve in life are often the ones that we never end up achieving.

Why does this happen?

Well, there are a few reasons. One of them is what I call the ‘big, scary elephant effect’.

When you think about your biggest goal, it’s often the fact that it seems so big (and therefore unrealistic) that we almost avoid it. We put it off, saying we will start it later.

But as always, later becomes tomorrow.

And tomorrow becomes never.

The other reason is that people are not very good at creating goals. People confuse goals with desires. But the two are very different, and if you confuse them, you can set yourself up for disaster before you even start.

I call it the big, scary elephant effect in reference to the common saying related to achieving goals:

How do you eat an elephant?

– One bite at a time.

When you think about the whole elephant, it can be a bit intimidating and easy to put off.

When all you have think about is taking one bite, then another bite later, it removes the big and scary thought of the bigger picture.

And this is where you can use my Desires, Needs, Goals, Action technique to break down a big goal into smaller, easy-to-eat pieces.

People also get stuck because they see a big, scary elephant that they want to eat, but have no idea how to do it.

They get stuck on what they want to achieve, their desire, but they don’t have anything that they can act on.

It is only a desire, and a desire is nothing until it becomes action.

Only action matters.

Take, for example, the classic goal of , “I want to lose weight”.

It’s not really a goal.

First of all, it’s much too general. How much weight? Secondly, there is no clearly defined route, or a point at which they achieve this goal. When? And thirdly, there is nothing actionable. There is nothing the person can DO right now.

It’s no surprise that it’s one of the most common desires out there, and the one that people least often achieve.

They are stuck with their desire, their elephant. You need to take the desire of consuming a whole elephant and turn it into individual, actionable parts.

(side note: if you do want to lose weight, I don’t recommend eating a whole elephant)

As I said, the person can’t just lose weight today. But, the person can do something today that will help them to achieve that desire.

The technique I use takes this big, scary elephant (the person’s desire), and breaks it down into small actions that you can do today.

The big, scary elephant will demotivate you. With this technique, you never have to think about your end goal or desire. You only have to think about and do one thing at a time.

The natural result of doing these small things every day will be that you achieve whatever goal you set.

It’s simple, you can use it for anything, and it works.

Let’s go.

Desire: I want to improve my listening skills.

Starting with a desire gets you thinking about what you want to achieve.

Need: To do this I need to practise listening in English every day

The need is the essential thing, the basic thing that needs to happen in order for the desire to become a reality. The desire can never be reality without this fundamental part.

Goals: To do this I can do dictations, listen to the radio, watch films or series, listen for specific information, …

This is where you get your creative juices flowing. You think of individual actions, small bites of the elephant, that you can do today, right now. Think of as many as you can. I call these your goals because it puts the focus on small, daily, easy-to-achieve actions.

Action: I’m going to do dications on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays during the first ten minutes of my lunch break. I’m going to listen to the radio every day on my way to work. I’m going to watch a film in English on Saturday evenings. I’m going to do an activity to listen for specific information first thing in the morning when I wake up.

Here, we go super specific. You plan when, where, and how you will do each thing. You commit yourself to the task. You also realise that it’s actually really easy to do these things.

Forget the elephant, plan the bites, then take one bite at a time.

Complete the following sentences with whatever you want:

I want to…

To do this, I need to…

To do this, I can…

I’m going to do [what] [when]…

The difficult thing about achieving a goal is never the end goal itself (unless it’s climbing Everest), it’s creating the goal, taking the first steps, and sticking with it that’s difficult.

This technique removes all those obstacles so all you have to think about is taking one ‘bite’, then another, then another.

Do this exercise once a week and you never need to worry about achieving your goal or worrying about motivation. Just plan the route towards your goal, then do small things every day.

If you just take small bites, the natural result is that you will achieve whatever you want.

Now go eat that elephant.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]