Sometimes you do everything right—you make a plan, put in effort exactly how you intended to, and things still don’t work out. That can hurt, but most of the time, this isn’t the case.

Your end-goal has two parts. The first part, is that your intentions, if followed, should get you where you need to go. If you’re trying to launch a company, learn a language, graduate from college or lose weight, the plan you set has to at least have a decent chance of working out.

The next step is harder. It’s not enough to set goals, intentions or plans. You need to understand who is the person that will be acting on them.

Closing this gap isn’t easy, but there is a fairly straight-forward process. It has three steps.