Setting Goals Is The Key To Your Magical Success

And this is a shame because your magickal practice has the potential to radically change your life! It’s time for us to cut through this aimlessness and get you practicing in a way that feels fulfilling and actually gets you results.

Magic Without A Goal Is Pointless 

For most people, the missing piece of the puzzle is having an overarching goal. In the context of witchcraft, goals are an absolutely foundational part of your practice. But pretty much nobody talks about goals in the context of magic. So when you are learning magic, you learn a kind of aimlessness in your craft. You might throw a spell at a problem here and there, or you might try spells just for the hell of it but your magic doesn’t have the kind of direction or momentum that it would if you had real goals connected to your magic.

Without goals, witchcraft becomes piecemeal and takes enormous effort. You cast spells that are all disconnected from one another. Nothing builds on itself. You have no structure, no rhythm to the magic, and no real way to gauge how effective your magic has been. Sure, you may cast spells, but they’re scattered and none of your spells are building on one another. There is no vision to your craft. And so, any results that you get are small, piecemeal results. They might change something small about your life but they will never be able to add up to the substantial, transformative changes that your magic is capable of producing. The problem is that too many people think that a goal in witchcraft is just an intention. A goal and an intention are not the same thing.

Instead, your goal is a desired end result in an all-encompassing way in your life. It’s not the result of a single spell, or even a handful of spells but the kind of goal that you can use to set many, many spells in motion working to drive your life in the direction of your final vision. That is the kind of magic that gets incredible results. And that is the kind of magic that a practitioner can feel truly good about doing.

Again, a huge part of why we’re talking about this is that a lot of people are not satisfied with the way that they are practice magic. They’re casting spells on occasion, but it never feels like enough. It never feels like they’re getting the result they want. It never feels like they’re doing enough magic. And the problem is that we don’t have a metric for what “enough” is.

Your goal gives you that metric. If you are doing enough magic to drive you towards your goal consistently, then you are doing enough magic. And the only way to get to that point is to do much more frequent spellwork. You will have to put together an entire strategy to drive you to this vision that you have created. And in spending time implementing this strategy, you will find your life steeped in the practice of witchcraft.

How Goals Help Your Magic

So how does having a proper goal help your magic? The first thing it does is it gives you a target to aim all of your spells at. Now this doesn’t mean that you can’t do the occasional spell for something outside of your goal. That’s not what I’m saying at all. In fact, you can have multiple goals working at the same time if you can balance them all. Your goal essentially gives you a focus for your spell work. It gives you a singular vision and endpoint that you can use all of your spell work to move toward.

The second thing is that a measurable goal gives you a measurable result. When you’re casting one-off spells that are all unconnected to each other, they tend to give results that are occasionally very obviously magical, but frequently they’re quite mundane. It doesn’t seem like a result of magic, necessarily. However, when you are piling many spells on top of one another, aiming for a larger vision or goal, the results start to pile up in a way that feels truly magical. If you want to feel the reality of your magic working, this is part of how you do that.

A single spell may get you a result, but there’s always a part of your mind that’s going to sit there and say, “Well, maybe it was the spell, but it could have just been a coincidence.” But when you have dozens of spells worked over months, all pulling you in a direction toward something that would take so much cumulative effort to accomplish, and you reach that end goal, there is no doubt in your mind that your spell work is what caused it to happen. Working magic with a proper goal kills magical doubt because you are able to see just how powerfully your magic can change your life.

The next benefit of having a goal is one that is less apparent until the magician looks back at the process that they’ve been going through. As witches and occultists, we are pretty much on a lifelong journey of studying magic, of learning how to use magic in a way that is effective and can change our lives. Magic that gives us tangible contact with spirits, that allows us to have out-of-body experiences, that allows us to make changes, to make more money, to find the love that we want.

The problem is that without direction, without some goal to move toward, there are too many things to learn and not enough ways to apply. We can end up reading and learning and taking in information that we never use, that we never put into practice. We might “learn” it, but it then becomes so much useless fluff in our brains. This is not how you become an effective practitioner of magic and witchcraft. Instead, by having a goal, by having something that you’re trying to change and create in your life, you are able to choose the learning materials and paths that best support your goal. 

For example, if you are focused on really transforming your financial life, that will allow you to focus on improving your spellwork skills. It will allow you to focus on contacting and working with spirits and entities that can help you with that particular goal. So rather than contacting Persephone, you might contact the demon Bune or spirits of Jupiter. It can show you exactly where your skills need additional honing to be able to get the results you want. This narrows the field of focus significantly. It reduces overwhelm, and it means that everything you are learning has a purpose and can be put into practice quickly. You will progress at an astoundingly fast rate in your magic if you adopt the right goal-setting method and start using it to direct your practice.

Setting A Magical Goal

To set a new goal, the first thing you need to do is figure out where you are currently. I know this sounds redundant, but you need to figure out where your primary problems actually are. What problems in your life, if you could fix them, would vastly improve the quality of your life overall? I really like using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for this. It breaks things down in a tangible way and allows you to analyze and focus on the various parts of your life with a hierarchy. It makes it very clear what is most important first.

It starts with your basic physiological needs, so if you are struggling with homelessness, if you don’t have consistent access to food, if you don’t have a safe place to sleep, those are the things you should be aiming your spellwork at. And then we move up to your safety needs. We get to your money, your career, are your relationships safe? And then we move into love and belonging. Your relationships with your family, your friends, your romantic partners, and so on.

Now I want you to look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and ask yourself, from the bottom up, where do things start to break down for you? A big problem that I see with how people set magical goals is that they will go straight for something like self-actualization or romance when their actual physical safety and security aren’t on point. Their money situation will be absolutely abysmal, but they will be throwing all of their magic at some man. That is not what we are going to do. Your first goal needs to be to secure your physical wellness and safety before you expand into personal growth or attracting your new best friend.

The goals of a witch have to be grounded in reality. If you are going to build yourself a truly great life, it needs to start from the ground up. This is of the utmost importance. You have to have a solid foundation to be able to hold on to and enjoy the things that are higher on this hierarchy. So starting from the bottom up, where does it start to break down for you? Then I want you to identify the specific problems that you have in that one part of the hierarchy.

So as an example, let’s say that you are currently having breakdown in the safety and security bracket of the hierarchy. You’re having problems with your career, with your money, and with your health and your physical self. This is where we want to take a look at all of the pieces that are involved in this level of the hierarchy. Notice, that I did not simply mention one part of the hierarchy, such as your career. When we have breakdown in one strata of the hierarchy, it usually is in multiple areas so we want to solve it in all of those areas.

Take a look at the keywords in each strata of the hierarchy and pinpoint every single item that it lists that you need help with. In our example, we’re going to look at health, money, and career. Then I want you to take those keywords, and you’re going to make a list under each one. Grab a piece of paper, write your keywords at the top, and we’re going to make a list. You want to list down the specific problems that you have, and how you feel about this area of your life in total.

Under money, you might write:

• I feel stressed all the time
• I have $X in debt
• My income is too low and I don’t have much money
• Trying to pay my rent every month is a struggle, and it gives me sleep problems
• I feel like I’m never going to get out of this
• It feels futile

Write everything down, and then you can move on to the next one, which is health.

Under health, you might put down:

• I feel tired and sluggish all the time
• I’m not sleeping well
• My digestion is kind of bad
• I’m too tired to exercise
• I feel like my health is slipping, and I don’t have any major concerns yet, but I know that at this rate it’s only a matter of time, and that scares me.

You will go through every single one of your major categories exactly like this. Identify the problems and how they make you feel. When you’re done, grab a new sheet of paper, and now I want you to write down how you would feel if these problems did not exist, if you had more than enough money, if your career was on point, if your health was where you wanted it to be. Get the big picture ideas down.

So you might write something like, “I make more than enough money to pay for my life, and I still have thousands left over every month for all of my goals and desires. Money feels easy and freeing and fun. It feels like a vehicle that allows me to expand and live the life that I truly desire”

Or for health, you might write, “I feel energetic and vibrant every single day. My body feels so good to live in. I sleep deeply. Movement feels like a joy, not like a chore. Those nagging headaches are gone. I can finally eat the food that I want to eat without having to overthink every single choice to make sure that I won’t end up feeling bad”

Now you have your basic vision. Beneath each broad vision for your keywords, I want you to create a bullet point list and start to get really specific with what you want. Keep it related to the main topic, but allow yourself to get into the specifics. 

A big problem that a lot of witches have with goal setting is that we set really vague goals. And a vague goal will get you a vague result. We don’t want vague results if we want a specific, measurable transformation in our lives.

So under money, you might write:

• I am debt-free
• I own my car outright
• I no longer have to make payments on it
• I can afford to not pay attention to my grocery bill
• I have enough money to buy the kind of decor I like to make my house feel beautiful and enjoyable
• My money gives me opportunities and allows me to network and meet people who will provide career advancement opportunities
• I am able to invest X amount of money each month
• I am able to save X amount of money each month

Get really specific with all of the things that you want in this area of your life. Make it a big bullet-point list, you don’t have to make it fancy or worry about phrasing it the right way. Don’t worry about positive or negative phrasing or any of that stuff. Just write it down. Get specific. We are not manifesting right now so please, all of those manifestation rules about how you’re supposed to phrase things, just throw them right out the window. You’re not worrying about that. Just write down what you want.

These pages are your vision. These are your goals. Put them somewhere near your altar space where you can see it very clearly. Keep it right in the front of your grimoire, whatever you need to do to keep this list top of mind. Now, the vast majority of your spell work should be aimed at this list, and creating this list as your reality. This means you have a huge amount of potential new spellwork that you could do.

If we’re talking about money, you can do broad spells to draw more money into your life. You can work with Jupiter spirits. You can work with the demon Bune. You can cast spells for specific goals, such as aiming a part of your magical campaign at your debt. Let’s say the debt is the first thing you want to tackle, so you aim not one spell, but numerous spells at that one goal for months if need be, until that debt is gone. This is exactly how I paid off $35,000 of debt myself a few years ago. I cast around 30 or 40 spells over the course of several months, calling on the help of almost a dozen different spirits and that allowed me to pay off my debt way faster than expected.

When you begin to aim all of your magic at something, and you hammer at it with every kind of magic you can think of you will get results you could scarcely dream of today. You can ask for the help of spirits and gods, you can cast spells aimed at different parts of the mechanics of this issue, and you can craft a team of spiritual helpers that help you overcome this problem. You will find yourself at the completion of that goal astoundingly fast.

I say this a lot and I’m going to say it again here. Do not do one spell and then leave it at that. Do many spells. Do all of the practices. Take this part of your practice seriously and use it to inspire all of the magic that you do. Real magic requires effort and repetition. The best way to accomplish your big dreams is to set goals and commit to working the magic for as long as it takes to see those big things materialize in a meaningful way. Magic works when you work magic so it’s time for you to do more magic!

If you feel like you’re not doing enough magic, go to your list. What spell work can you do to help you move towards what is on this list? What are the biggest hurdles and roadblocks here? What needs to be done first before other things can happen? 

Let’s say you need to pay off that debt before you’re able to start saving and investing. Start aiming your magic at that debt. You may need to increase your income in order to be able to afford the life you want. Okay, start aiming many, many aspects of your magic at your income. And then do not quit until you have the result you want! Until your income has doubled, your debt is paid off, until you get that promotion, until your health improves.

You might decide that one of these lists needs to be your sole focus first. If that’s the case, it’s okay. You can put your other lists aside and come back to them when you’ve made good progress on the first major problem that you’re trying to solve in your life.

As you progress and work your magic, over time you will add things to your list, remove things that you actually realize you don’t want, refine things, create a more detailed and focused vision for yourself. And that is exactly what you should be doing! Do not be afraid to edit this list over the coming months. It is allowed to change to suit your actual needs and desires. Always be ready to pivot when you discover something new about yourself or the situation.

Dedicate yourself to this vision you have created. Start working magic aimed solely at this goal, and watch your life transform. You will be astounded at how quickly your goal will become your reality.

---

Ready to become a witch?

Join my FREE Witchcraft Foundations class!