Go for the Goal: 9 Steps to Reach Any Goal

Your Goal-Getting Plan

I'm pretty good at maintaining my health goals, if I do say so myself. Eat nutritiously? Yep, most of the time. Exercise? I've got my regular routine. But my other goals? Not so much. There's that book idea I've been kicking around, the website I want to launch, the new fitness classes I've been meaning to master. But every night, by the time the baby is in bed, something more pressing always pops up.

A lot of people are just like me, it turns out, and get trapped in a state of inertia. Some are perfectly content with where they are and see no need to reach higher, and that's okay, experts say, as long as they are truly happy. But most of us are stuck in place because we're afraid to take a risk and fall short. "The major cause of fear of failure is low self-confidence, when we're convinced we just don't have what it takes to be successful," says Heidi Grant Halvorson, PhD, the author of Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals and a social psychologist in Easton, Pennsylvania, who has spent years researching what motivates us. The more we doubt ourselves, the less likely we are to pursue anything but the easiest of goals, she explains.

So how do you stoke your confidence and become a go-getter? Well, it helps to have a little kick in the pants. "You've been talking about launching a website since websites existed!" my mother exclaimed, exasperated, when I brought up the subject recently. I realized she was right. It was time to stop discussing and start doing. So I asked Halvorson as well as some other top experts to help me bust my rut. Here's what they taught me about how to turn a dream into a reality.

Use this plan as your road map to success.