Founder of Goalie Brooke Lowry Shares 5 Goal Setting Tips To Achieve Success In Your Business and Personal Life

If you’re like most people, you’ve got a history of New Year’s resolutions that you failed by the time March rolled around. It’s not that you didn’t have good intentions, of course you did, but life got in the way, the routine was comfortable, and it’s now August. Where did the time go?

We have all struggled to find motivation at times, even when it comes to the goals we’d happily pursue. Many of us have been caught up overthinking things, perfecting the idea, and focusing on the negatives, like, what if it doesn’t work out? In the spirit of getting things done, it’s time to stop thinking and start doing more.

Take a page from Brooke Lowry’s book. In 2018, Brooke, a passionate self-development aficionado from Sydney spun up a small team of Australia’s best tech talent to devise the Goalie app with a mission to help others achieve their goals. Brooke designed the Goalie app with gen z in mind. The app is for young, passionate, ambitious go-getters with lots on their plate and a lot of decisions to make, but with little effective tools to prepare them for the demands of today’s world. Cue the life skills we weren’t taught in school.

While some tech companies have tried to blend goal-setting and technology, Brooke saw how most solutions focused on productivity as opposed to behavioural science. Goalie amplifies the user’s motivations, helping them to visualize their goals like a vision board or digital journal, and keep them focused on taking purposeful actions to achieve their goals. There is no need to micromanage your life on the day-to-day as where’s the fun in that?

Brooke offers her top 5 tips for achieving success in your business and personal life:

1. Create the Conditions for Creativity

Perhaps you don’t consider yourself a creative person or your job doesn’t allow you space to create. Did you know you can create your own conditions to be creative?

You might notice the ideas flowing in after reading your favorite author, while in the shower or when you’re killing time on your morning commute. Set aside distraction-free time so you can get down to work without any expectations of what that work will look like.

Another tip is to immerse yourself in nature. Try setting up your desk in natural lighting with colourful décor or spending time in and around water. By being in nature, you’re entertaining your senses and allowing your brain to play; creating space for new ideas to enter.

Try allocating at least 10 minutes a day working on something creative and allow your brain to play.

2. Take the First Step and Let the Rest Fall Into Place

Many people push aside their goals because they seem insurmountable however remember you don’t need to do everything at once. Take that first step and meet a milestone towards your goal. Once you’ve met that milestone, this will create a domino-effect where the next action will flow into the next, leaving you wondering why you were so worried in the first place. Once you get the ball rolling, focus on the next step in front of you, adjusting until you meet each milestone and, ultimately, your goal.

Another great question to ask is, what’s the worst that could happen? If that’s not too bitter to swallow then go for it. People tend to regret what they didn’t do more in the long term than a short-lived failure that you can bounce back from.

3. Break Out of Your Bubble

Part of reaching your goals, according to Brooke, is seeking out opportunities. You don’t find opportunities as much as you make them, so how do you find them?

Brooke recommends expanding your network and search radius to help you discover new opportunities. Not everyone is a good addition to your network, however. The right people are those who are aligned with your own goals or with complementary talents.

While achieving goals involves repeated cycles of planning and acting, you’ll never get anywhere if you’re stuck in your own head. Brooke views the formula for success as 20% strategy and 80% action, so spending more time planning rather than acting may indicate that you haven’t found the right balance. If you need to, get out of your head by seeking feedback from someone impartial to your goals who can see things more objectively.

As the world re-opens, you can get out there and connect with more people than the pandemic allowed. And if the pandemic has turned you into a bit of a homebody, try connecting with people online who share the same interests. The internet has created infinite possibilities to connect with people around the world like you.

4. Be Accountable

Of course, we all know that accountability is important when it comes to reaching our goals. However many of us fail to strike a balance between accountability and punishing ourselves if we don’t meet our timelines or experience the occasional setback.

Brooke recommends setting milestones instead and basing them on events that scare you. This means you’re pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone where the reward for growth is higher. You’ll experience a bit of a rush as you reach those milestones, and you will find that you won’t need to micro-manage yourself nor compromise your daily happiness.

Brooke also highlights how easy it is to fall into the trap of fussing over perfecting the unimportant details. If you check your progress too often, you might become lost in the details and fail to see the bigger picture, ultimately leading you to settle for less.

5. Reward Your Hard Work

Brooke’s fifth and final tip for meeting your goals might be the easiest and most appealing on this list. She firmly believes that you need to reward yourself after accomplishing something important. Sometimes a sense of achievement just isn’t enough. However, any old reward won’t do. It needs to be something that you find personally meaningful if it’s going to motivate you to meet your goals.

This tip follows current research into reaching goals. In February 2020, a Queen Mary University of London team examined the relationship between the effort required to reach a goal and rewards. Results of the survey found that participants often focus on rewards when making goals and considering the effort. However, when it comes time to put in the effort, people forget about the rewards awaiting them.

The researchers suggest that flipping that focus can help you achieve your goals. By focusing on effort in the beginning, you’ll make more realistic goals. And when you keep rewards in mind when it comes time to do what you said you would, you’re more likely to keep going until you reach the finish line.

Setting a roadmap to achieve your goals might just be closer than you think! With ambitious plans to expand outside of Australia and New Zealand in the near future, you can keep up with Brooke and the Goalie app on social media, or stay up to date with all the exciting news and updates on their website.