New Year, New Goals: How This CPA Candidate Achieved Her Goal of Becoming a CPA (And Much More)

For Sara Schubert, becoming a CPA was challenging herself. “Set the goal and see what you are capable of,” she says. “When I approached it that way, I surprised myself.”

See how you can put Sara’s advice on goal-setting to work for you in 2021 to not only beat the CPA exam but achieve more of your dreams.

Know What Your Obstacles Are

Sara wanted to be a CPA, so she set that goal. Boom! Simple, right?

Well, everyone sets goals, but few actually achieve them. Reality gets in the way. Obstacles rise up and don’t seem to go away… until that is, you find a way to overcome them.

Like most CPA candidates, Sara’s biggest challenge was finding the time to prepare for the CPA exam. She had to make time and that meant scheduling her life and sticking to it.

“Having kids, I had to plan on studying around them,” she says. “I would study at 4:30 in the morning before work and at about 7:00 every night after dinner.”

On the weekends she kept the same schedule. “I spent the weekend days with the kids except for the weekend before the exam. I would cram everything in again at that point.”

The way Sara tells it, she discovered her time was studying. “But it’s only temporary.”

Do A Little Bit Every Day

Sara made sure to keep up the schedule and the timeline set in Wiley’s exam planner. To stay on track for her exam date, she had to complete lessons every assigned day.

“I literally put myself and my life on the back burner,” she says. “I spent as much time with my kids as possible and did all the housework that I could keep up with. But I let pretty much everything else go, even eating healthy, which takes time, and I gained weight because of it.”

Carry It With You Everywhere

Throughout her ordeal, she made sure to keep her Wiley test prep materials handy. “I listened to Wiley lectures and Ninja audio whenever I had a chance,” she says. “Listening to the lectures ahead of reading the material and doing the quizzes really helped.”

 Wiley test prep worked for Sara not only because of the material’s high quality but because free updates were available until she passed. “I liked that I didn’t have the pressure of everything expiring after 18 months. In the beginning, I really didn’t know how long it would take to pass the first test so I didn’t want to lose my study program in the middle of it all.”

Combine Your Life Goals

While she didn’t lose her study program, of course, thanks to Wiley’s guarantee, Sara did lose something else: the extra weight she gained while she was focused on studying. Indeed, she had set a goal to pass her exams, and she did everything she could to achieve it.

Once she achieved the goal of passing her exams, she proved to herself that she could attain virtually any goal she set for herself, including losing weight. “I lost over 25 pounds after I passed the exam,” she says happily, “including some baby weight!” We guess then that it was only temporary.

Sara approached her goals with clarity, intention, and purpose. She knew it would be challenging, so she made a plan to overcome her obstacles and got help doing it.

What can you achieve in 2021? Now’s the time to set your mind to it and make it happen!

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