No matter what goals you’re trying to achieve in your life, there will always be temptations to stray from those goals. If you’re prepared for avoiding temptation, you can create a plan that will get you through and help you stick to your goals. Let’s look at the ten tips for avoiding temptation that will help you reach success.
1. Know Your Goals – It cannot be stated enough how important it is to write out your goals in a very specific way. What exactly do you want to achieve? Describe it in as much detail as you can so that you know what type of work will go into it.
2. Give Them a Deadline – When you set a goal, don’t leave it without a time to finish it and experience success. Instead, set deadlines for each goal that you create, and even smaller goals in between the big ones so that you can note progress as it’s happening.
3. Know Your Why – For the most part, your goals will inform your why. For example, if you have a goal to set up a new website in 90 days, why? Do you need it because you’re having a new launch? If you want to lose 15 pounds this year, how much do you want to lose each week or month and why did you pick that number? Those details will help you.
4. Be More Self-Aware – This means that you know how you feel and why you feel how you feel. You can note that you’re extra tired, so you better get a healthy snack before you grab a piece of chocolate cake so that you can avoid temptation in the first place.
5. Keep a Gratitude Journal – It’s hard to fall off a path you’ve set for yourself when you take the time to be thankful for the journey. You don’t have to take a long time. Each evening, just write down three things you’re thankful for and why.
6. Be Accountable to Your Promises – Most of your promises are going to be to yourself, but some will be to family, friends, or maybe a boss. It doesn’t matter who you have obligations to but it’s important to be accountable if you fail – and also to be accountable when you succeed. Taking time to accept success will create more success.
7. Develop Habits – One thing to do about temptation is to develop habits over willpower. For example, if you want to drink more water, set up a system that makes it easy to get the amount of water you want in your body. Then do it the same way daily. After a month or so, it’ll be a habit and it’ll come more naturally.
8. Create a Vision Board – It always helps to visualize the potential results of reaching your goals. It will make it feel real when you can see it.
9. Create a “What If” Plan – When you know you’ll be in situations where temptation exists, talk to yourself about it. Craft a plan on what you’ll do to avoid temptation if it happens.
10. Start Over If Needed – Even if you realize right in the middle that the goal was wrong, or the plan to get there was flawed, it’s okay. You can start over. You can tweak anything and fix it so that you can keep going forward.
Developing your self-discipline is almost all about avoiding short-term temptation to get off the path toward reaching your long-term goals. When you learn to avoid temptation in the first place, you won’t have as much of a chance to fall off the path.
