This post is all about how to achieve success in life!

Have you ever wondered what are successful people doing in their lives to be successful? What were the steps they followed to have the life they live?

And most importantly, what steps do I need to follow to achieve success in life, to live my dream life?

If this is something you´ve wondered about more than once, then you are in the right place. In this article, you´ll find a list of the 6 essential steps on how to achieve success in life, including things like how to create an action plan, the importance of your mindset, and some important obstacles you´ll need to overcome.

Let´s begin!

Determine what success means to you

The word success is so used nowadays, but what does it actually mean to be successful? Well, the truth is success means something different for everyone.

If you search on google for the definition of success, you’ll find that it means the accomplishment of a goal or aim. But you are the one who determines that goal or objective.

So the first step on how to achieve success in life is to actually determine what being successful means to you.

Sit down with yourself and think about what success means for you. What are your deepest desires? What are the goals or objectives that if you accomplished them, you would be satisfied with your life?

This is the time to reflect and define what would make you feel successful in every area of your life: professionally, personally, financially, health-wise…

Defining your dreams is a great exercise that will enormously help you to establish your goals and create a plan of action to successfully accomplish them (something we will talk about in a minute), as well as will give you meaning and clarity in your life instead of running around like a headless chicken.

Give yourself the time to think about this exercise, to properly define your goals and dreams, to ask what you want to make of your life. 

This may change over the years or maybe you are at a point in your life where you find it difficult to establish them. But start somewhere, write down everything that crosses your mind, no matter how small it may be. You will be surprised to see how when you follow your dreams everything slowly begins to fall into place.

Beating procrastination

Procrastination is an enemy that most of us face daily, that constant habit of postponing things till the last minute, which ends up causing us an enormous amount of stress and anxiety that does not benefit us in any way.

But why do we have the need to procrastinate in the first place?

Most of the time our procrastination is a protection mechanism, fed by our self-doubt, by our beliefs that we are not good enough or don’t believe we can achieve our dreams.

So we end up pushing things up until the last minute. But the thoughts in your head are not true, in fact, YOU have the power to determine what is true and what isn’t, what you choose to believe and what you don’t.

Remember that you get to decide your reality and you can, at any moment, change the dialogue and story in your head.

One of the best tips I´ve learned that has helped me beat procrastination is to ask myself why am I procrastinating and postponing this task. Is it because of limiting beliefs that I have? Because of something I´m are afraid of?

Another method that has helped me beat procrastination is something that I like to call the 5-minute rule.

And this rule works like this: every time you feel tempted to reschedule a task or postpone it, ask yourself is this task going to take me more than 5 minutes? If not, do it now without excuses. Surely you have five minutes to complete one minor task. 

If this assignment or chore takes you more than minutes then rescheduled it on your agenda at a concrete hour.

This way even though you are completing small tasks that don´t make a great difference, you are creating momentum and motivating yourself to complete other major tasks. 

Remember to celebrate even the smallest of accomplishments because this will help you break the cycle of procrastination and instead become a terminator.

There are many other techniques and tools out there that can help you break the bad habit of postponing and procrastinating essential tasks, so make sure to research them and try the ones that best suit you.

Create a plan of action for your dreams

Failing to plan is planning to fail

Benjamin Franklin

An action plan is an exercise where you create a checklist including all the necessary steps and tasks you need to complete in order to accomplish your goals. But why do you need a plan of action?

Well, because the truth is that your dreams will always be just dreams unless you take action. And even though it is extremely important to define and establish your dream, it is as important to create a plan of action for them.

That’s why this step is all about creating a plan of action for your dreams. But Sofia, how do I even do that?

To create an action plan to achieve success in life you just need to follow these 5 simple steps:

Step 1: Define your goal

Don´t be vague when describing your goals and dreams. Be specific, concrete. Write so much detail that you can almost create a mental image in your brain of your dreams.

For example, if one of your dreams is to be finally independent don’t stop there. Ask yourself what does being financially free mean for you, calculate the amount of money you need to live comfortably without having to work, research about the different ways you could do this…

Want to discover the top ways in which you can create passive income and become financially free?

Make sure to use the T.A.R.G.E.T Method to help you establish realistic, achievable, tangible goals!

Step 2: Make a list including all the steps you need to accomplish to achieve your dreams

Now that your goal is clear, what do you need to do in order to achieve it? What steps do you need to accomplish?

If we take the example mentioned before, the steps to achieve our financial independence would look something like this:

• Research about the different ways to achieve financial freedom
• Read stories about people who achieved this goal and how they did it
• Choose a method to become financially free from the ones I have been studying
• Learn more about this method chosen (read books, watch videos, follow the experts on that field)
• Start taking action to make money following the techniques and methods I have learned about

Step 3: Prioritaze tasks and establish deadlines

Once you have established your goal and the steps you need to accomplish them, it´s time to prioritize the tasks and steps you have written and assign them a deadline. 

This step will help you avoid the mistake of procrastinating everything, to push yourself to get out of your comfort zone, and actually motivate you to complete those steps and tasks.

Don´t forget to set deadlines that are realistic and achievable, but at the same time do not exceed the time limit to complete this step. The trick is to find a balance between a deadline that is achievable but still provides a challenge.

Step 4: Set milestones

Milestones are mini goals that led up to the main goal. You can use them to keep yourself motivated throughout your journey and have something to look forward to.

To set milestones start at the top, the main goal, and work your way down to the beginning, where you are now. Remember to celebrate those milestones and to reward yourself every time you achieve one.

Step 5: Measure, evaluate and update

Once you have defined and worked on the previous steps and have started to follow your action plan, don´t forget about measuring your progress and evaluating your performance and achievements.

To give you an example these measures could be things like the amount of time you are investing in this goal? Or evaluating if there are any steps or tasks that you had not foreseen and need to include in your checklist? Are you satisfied with the progress you are making?

In addition to these steps here are some things you must include in your action plan:

• A clear and well-defined description of your goal. I know this is technically the first step, but I write it here again to mark the importance of having a clear idea about what you desire.
• The tasks you need to carry out to accomplish the goal
• Define milestones and deadlines for the tasks and steps
• The different resources and skills you´ll need to reach your goal
• Set various measures in which you can evaluate your progress. This simply consists of thinking about all the ways you could measure your progress (which you will use in step 5), including the milestones you have established yourself or any other tool you can think of that can help you track this.

Change your mindset

Our mindset is one of the most determining factors of our lives. It impacts the way we view the world around us and inside us.

Our minds can either be our most powerful ally, or our worst enemy when it comes to achieving our dreams. the way we view the world and ourselves can help us accomplish our dreams or, on the contrary, be our downfall. But how so? What is our mindset defined by?

Our mindsets are actually determined by our beliefs, which are repeated ideas that influence our thoughts, decisions, behavior, actions…

Our beliefs and limiting beliefs (beliefs that limited our potential) that are programmed in our subconscious can affect the way we view money, or success, how we face obstacles, our discipline ad motivation…

For example, you cannot expect to be rich and financially independent when you have negative and poisoning beliefs about money and wealth.

It is incredibly important to make a deep reflection and internal observation to be able to determine what kind of beliefs we have (empowering or limiting), to be able to identify our limiting beliefs and replace them with ideas that help us to prosper, to be abundant, happy and successful.

Related post:

Learn how to change your mindset and destroy your limiting beliefs to change your life

Never stops learning

No matter how advanced you think you are or how much information and knowledge you think you have learned, never stop learning.

Always be humble about how much you think you know about a subject. Doing this will benefit you in two ways:

• The first is that you will avoid making silly mistakes that you could have avoided with a little preparation and knowledge, plus as you move forward with your projects and dreams you will need more information to help you succeed.

• The second is that thanks to today’s technologies the world is constantly evolving, every day there is new information and discoveries that can help you achieve your goals in a more effective and faster way.

Remember not to become obsolete with yesterday’s information and to always stay one step ahead. Keep yourself curious and hungry for new information and new knowledge.

Find the teaching in every moment

People who avoid failure, also avoid success

Robert Kiyosaki

A big part of being an entrepreneur is the risks we take for the chance of success. And some of these risks involve a lack of stability and security.

The path to success is full of obstacles and challenges where you´ll find it tempting more than once to give up.

That is why the most valuable tool that an entrepreneur has and must develop is their mindset- as we talked about earlier- but also how they react to failure.

In today’s society failure is seen as something negative, as something to be ashamed of, as a sign to quit.

But let me ask you something, when a baby is taking its first steps and they fall, you don´t think “oh, they fell, they are terrible at this, they should probably stop trying”. You think something like “it´s okay to fall, they are learning something new that they have never done ” right? You encourage the baby to keep trying until they stop falling.

Then why are we so hard on ourselves and feel so ashamed when we are not good at something for the first time, when we make mistakes or fail?

Because we don´t want to be seen as vulnerable, as something other than perfect and successful.

If you want to achieve success whatever that means for you, in any area of your life, you have to be willing to be vulnerable, to not be perfect, and to accept that you WILL fail, multiple times in fact.

But what matters the most and what will define you as a person is not the fact that you have failed, is what you do after you fail.

Will you give up your dreams, on your potential? Will, you deny yourself everything you have ever desired and deserve?

Or will you stand up, stronger than before, and see that failure and those mistakes as what they really are- a lesson you needed to learn in order to reach the top, in order to reach your goals?

Thank you so much for investing your time in this article. I hope the tools, tips, and exercises found here will help you achieve success in your life. Now you have the tools you need to go out and take on the world, go girl!

What tools have helped you achieve a goal or dream? Love to read it in the comments!