It can be difficult to watch the lack of progress of so many promising women. They’ve dreamed for so long about creating a solid, sustainable life, and yet, all they do is dream.

You know the people I’m talking about. They attend conferences, sign up for free webinars, buy paid training etc. And yet week after week, month after month, year after year, they don’t make any progress toward their dreams.

Are they just lazy? No. It’s something worse. They don’t know how to move from a dream to a plan and they’re stuck.

Start With the Long-Term

If you’ve ever been on a job interview and were asked, “Where do you want to be five years from now,” you might have thought it an odd question. But that might just be the most important consideration you can have.

Without knowing where you’re headed in the long term, it’s impossible to create a map to get there. You need to know what your destination is, so that every day, week, month, and year you can check your progress to be sure you’re still headed in the right direction.

Create Milestones

Once you know your ultimate destination, you can draft a plan for getting there, and create the interim goals that will help you stay on track.

For example, if in five years you want to buy a house, then you need to know a few pieces in place before that can happen:

• Where do you want to live?

• How much do you need to save up for the downpayment?

• How much do you need to save up for the moving costs?

• Can you get time off to move effortlessly?

With this list, you can then work backward from your five-year goal, and create milestones along the way. If you know you’ll need to save say $100,000 for the down payment, and right now you and your partner can save $20,000 a year, then reasonable milestones might look like this:

• Year 1: $20,000

• Year 2: $40,000

• Year 3: $60,000

• Year 4: $80,000

• Year 5: $100,000

With these milestones in place, it’s much easier to figure out exactly what you need to do to achieve them, any gaps you need to fill (such as the moving or closing costs), by setting monthly, weekly, and daily goals to keep you on track.

Create Small Goals

If you say to someone, you need to save $100,000 in five years, that’s a pretty overwhelming task. After all, most people will look at that and immediately dismiss it as impossible since most people don’t save money – especially in that amount.

But when you break it down as we have above, and then again into smaller steps, it suddenly doesn’t look so daunting.

In the plan we outlined here, that is without interest. If you keep the savings in a high-interest account, you will have more than $100,000.

You can further break that down by adding odd jobs here or there, or doing no spend months, or getting a raise. It’s possible that you will reach the goal faster than outlined!

That might mean fewer nights out, or not buying things you don’t “need.” The point is, reaching the smaller goals is far easier than thinking about that five-year plan.

I highly suggest starting really working on your vision, goals, and your five-year plan.

So what’s your big dream? How can you deconstruct it into achievable milestones, workable goals, and finally, daily and weekly tasks? If you can do this (and you definitely can) then you can achieve anything in life.

If you’re stuck in your own head, and not seeing the big picture of the milestones you hit, let’s hop on a call!

xo