Yeah!  I did it!  My goal was achieved!    

After reaching the end of the journey, one feels elated, confident, and may think ‘what’s next?’.  Before you move on to the next goal, hit pause and assess how to sustain the success of the completed goal.  In this blog, we will discuss how to maintain hard-earned success.  

Tip 1: Understand lessons learned while achieving the goal

Whether your goal stops or continues, take time to understand the lessons learned.  This exercise will help you recognize

  • the techniques that worked well or needed improvement   
  • the resources spent –  energy, time, financials, etc. 

Use these steps to capture the lessons:

  1. List down the lessons learned in all phases
  2. Group them into two categories –  what went well, and what didn’t go well
  3. For each lesson, decide what to do –  continue or stop or start something else

A template is available for this exercise.

Keep checking on how to uphold the success

It is very important to re-evaluate your achieved goal and make a decision on whether you need to continue, adjust, extend or stop maintaining your goal. Let’s look at it in detail. 

Tip 2: Continue the routine(s) that led to the fruition

Long-term goals need continuous maintenance. If you are not consistently following the steps that helped you achieve the goal, you may fail or may not be able to sustain your success.

You need to have periodic checkpoints and make adjustments to your routine as needed.

Here is a personal experience: I set a goal for my child’s college education. I started putting money towards it. After many years of saving, my financial reports looked good. I stopped the contribution. I checked after several months and the funds seemed less than what was needed. I realized my mistake and had to start the contribution again. 

Tip 3: Adjust the course of action when the progress is not sustaining

If you don’t take the necessary actions when needed, you will be disappointed as you will needlessly spend your time, energy, and resources.

Here is my personal experience:

I had a goal for personal development by listening to philosophical podcasts four days a week. I used to do that while driving to work and it stopped due to working from home full time. When I was doing quarterly checks on the goal’s sustainability, it was clear to me that I needed to make adjustments as my personal growth was not going according to expectations. I adjusted my routine to listen to philosophical podcasts during my daily walk.

Tip 4: Extend with sub-goals to achieve more and continuously improve

Success may become stale or failure without continuous improvement.  Besides, you may find additional opportunities to achieve more.

To continuously improve:  

  • try to reduce waste
  • find ways to be more efficient 
  • add additional sub-goals 

Here is one of my experiences that taught me this tip:

When I got promoted to a managerial role, I was excited and eager to start. However, I paused and considered what was needed to be best at the job. I realized that my success would be fleeting unless I added two sub-goals: 1) Learn the corporate strategy in depth and 2) Enhance people management skills. Without this exercise, I might have realized too late and couldn’t have maintained the momentum to advance to the next level.

Tip 5: Stop maintaining the goal when it is no longer applicable

The goal might not align with your current values, or is no longer relevant or the effort and risk may not be worth the outcome.         

Keep assessing the effectiveness of your goal and stop maintaining it when not needed. 

I want to give you a personal example- I had a goal to learn how to skate. I joined the class and took the necessary steps to achieve it. I continued taking classes even after I learned how to skate. When I was doing a periodic check on my goal, I realized that I didn’t need to continue the lessons as my goal was to learn how to skate and not to go beyond. This decision helped me save time, resources, and energy.

In this blog, we discussed a few tips to sustain the success of your goals. Here is the summary: 

Conclusion

We covered Goals in three stages: 1. Setting up goals 2. Executing the goals 3. Sustaining momentum.  To achieve the highest rate of success,  we strongly believe all these stages are equally important. Check out all three blogs:

 If you have any suggestions, comments, or questions, post them here or contact us. 

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