Home Pastors Articles for Pastors 9 Actions You Must Take to Reach Your Biggest Goals (Part 1)

9 Actions You Must Take to Reach Your Biggest Goals (Part 1)

There is nothing more powerful than a focused life. The more focused your life is the more impact it will have. Goals are extremely important in life, as is the action on our part it takes to reach them, but too few of us set goals in life. And when we do, we usually overestimate what we can get done in a year and underestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years.

You will always need a dream in your life. You will always need a vision in your life. No matter how old you are, whether you’re retired or not, you need a goal, a dream, a vision. Because if you don’t have a dream, you’re not living; you’re just existing. You’re just drifting. Without a dream you drift.

To focus your life and reach your biggest goals, there are at least nine actions you need to take.

1. Determine your present position.

You can’t figure out where you want to go until you know where you already are. You’ve got to know your present position, your current condition. You have to know where you are right now.

Where am I now financially? Where am I now emotionally? Where am I now in my career or ministry? Where am I now relationally? Where am I now spiritually? What’s my GPS right now?

Then you want to ask yourself the question, What would I like to change? As long as you’re alive, as long as you’re breathing, as long as your heart is pumping blood, you need a dream.

2. Describe exactly what you want.

I suggest you actually write it down on paper. What do I want to accomplish in the next 10 years? Don’t be vague. Vague goals are never accomplished. The more specific you are the better. Nothing becomes dynamic until it becomes specific. And it needs to be clear. It needs to be concise. It needs to be compelling.

To do that, you have to ask four questions:

  • Who do I want to BE?
  • What do I want to DO?
  • What do I want to HAVE?
  • WHY do I want it?

At Saddleback, we’ve set enormous, huge goals for our church in every decade—in the eighties, in the nineties, in the two thousands and now in the two thousand tens. And every time we’ve set these enormous goals, we’ve had no idea how we were going to accomplish them. God has shown us the ‘how’ once we understood the ‘why.’