No words can perfectly describe the feeling of being able to achieve your goals. Whether you’re a person who’s currently working or still studying in school, knowing that you’ve smashed your goals is a feeling that goes beyond motivation—It’s addictive.
If you’re a student, you may have adopted various methods to ensure that you’re always on top of everything. You may have taken memory boosters, practiced mind mapping techniques or have had help from education websites like Revision Village. These strategies ensure that you remain focused while also encourage you to keep working towards your goals.
How To Reach And Stay Committed To Your Study Goals
This may sound harsh, but goals aren’t often easily achieved. They require discipline, dedication, and a huge amount of work. However, their very nature as goals means that they’re reachable, too. This list will provide you with potential ways on how you can make any educational goal happen:
1. Always Start With A SMART Goal
Creating a SMART goal isn’t something specific to business organizations anymore. The flexibility of the concept makes them even a great practice for students who want to achieve more in their academic life. For those who don’t know what a SMART goal is, it’s an acronym for goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
To make your goals as specific as possible, learn how to break them into short-term and long-term goals. Learning to use technology to become a better student is a great long-term goal, while acing your English exam is an achievable short-term goal. In this way, you can have a better perspective on how you can tackle the difficulty of each one.
Another aspect to consider is measurability. This means that when you set a goal, it’s not enough to write it down such as: ‘Get high grades in Algebra’. This is a good start, but ensuring that it’s measurable will help you think of ways to achieve it easily. What you can write instead is, ‘Get a grade of 90% or above in Algebra’. This will help you have a concrete basis as to what you hope to reach and achieve.
It’s also a good practice to allow time to think about if your goal is achievable. It is recommended to find a balance, however, of choosing goals that you know you can achieve and ones that may challenge you. Goals relating to financial management, for example, may be achievable, yet challenging at the same time for many students. This is especially true when you’re in college, with parties around and other activities to interest you.
Relevant goals are also those that are aligned to your values, or those that you think will enhance the quality of your school life. For a student, this goal could be joining specific clubs or organizations in the college.
Lastly, to make you feel more committed to your goals, it’s recommended for them to be time-bound. This is important so you’ll be able to learn how to manage your time wisely and know which activities need your attention most.
You can also try another version of this goal-setting method called SMARTER. It’s still made of the same elements but with the addition of evaluation and re-adjustment.
2. Always Think About Your Purpose
You might have succeeded in coming up with your SMART goals, but there’ll always be instances when you feel like giving them up entirely. To make sure that you remain committed to what you’re doing, it’s always important to reflect on your purpose.
Some questions to ask yourself when you feel like quitting may include:
- What is motivating your study?
- Why is there a need to have these high grades?
By going back to your whys, you’ll be able to stay motivated and resist the temptation of doing something against your goal of graduating with honors or taking a course that’s different from your peers.
3. Try Different Study Techniques And Strategies
Your mind is a wonderful and powerful thing, and understanding how it works can help you to excel in school.
There’s the time-tested mnemonics, which is a great tool to help you memorize information faster. This works by simply coming up with an acronym for the first letters of the information that you want to memorize, like how the word ARITHMETIC may stand for ‘a rat in the house may eat the ice cream’.
Another effective tool for memorization is chunking. This is a tool that works well when memorizing numbers. Instead of memorizing each number, you group them into chunks of three to four numbers. Say, for a 12-digit number, it’s better to divide them into three groups. Take note, however, that the first and the last groups are usually the easiest to memorize, so make sure to take the time to remember the middle group of numbers.
The last study technique that’s worth giving a try is mind mapping. There are many ways to go about this method, but the most popular one uses a room you’re familiar with, whether at home or in a rented-student friendly accommodation offered by websites such as American Avenue. Usually, bedrooms are suggested to be used as they’re the most familiar to many people. The next step is to assign the information to each item in your bedroom. For example, to memorize the states of America, you might want to look for objects to represent each state. Don’t worry if their connection is ridiculous at it’ll make recall a lot easier.
4. Learn To Celebrate Small Achievements
The road to reaching your educational goals can be long and tiring. To make sure that you stay motivated, it’s important to find the value in celebrating small wins, such as giving your time and efforts for an upcoming test.
Many say that although focusing on the big picture is a great way to achieve them, you might end up feeling burned out or too tired while working towards them. What you need to do instead is to stop for a while, and appreciate the steps that you’ve taken so far.
Final Thoughts: Educational Success Is Attainable
Succeeding in school isn’t easy work, but it’s doable. At the start of the school year or the semester, make it a habit to sit on your goals, make them SMART, and write them down. Once classes begin, you can also try different study techniques to help you in recalling information faster and easier. Lastly, don’t forget to go back to the purpose of your goals and celebrate small achievements so you’ll always feel motivated to work on them.
By learning to smash the goals you’ve set for yourself while still at school, you’ll be empowered with all the skills and mentalities necessary to face what real life has to offer.
