Showing posts with label goal setting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label goal setting. Show all posts

The Supreme Power of Goal Setting

May 15, 2020 Posted by Success Routines , , ,
white book with text
You must always commit your goals in writing. By putting your goals in writing, you will have already accomplished more than 95% of everyone else. Your subconscious will guide you in achieving your goals. As long as you make a daily effort to achieve your individual goals, you will reach them eventually.
Meditating on goals is one thing, but you still have to take massive inspired action for them to come to fruition.
In writing your goals, be realistic. If your goal next year is to earn $50,000, chances are that you won't be able to buy the Rolls Royce that you wanted (you may have to wait a little while for that one). If you have ambitious goals and desires, you just need to be more aggressive in your approach. Remember, you can get whatever you want out of life. It's all up to you.
Like many of you, I've heard for years that written goals help you succeed. Unfortunately, it has only been in the past few years that I actually established a written set of goals. My business and personal life then started to take off. I'm kicking myself now because if I had written my goals years ago when I first heard of this technique, I would have achieved my successes a lot earlier in life. Don't think that you are "too good or too smart" to write down your goals. Just do it now.
What Do You Really Want? Nowhere is fuzzy thinking more damaging than in building wealth. More than half the people I work with are afraid of investing. Why are they afraid? "The risk." "I don't have enough money to pay my bills, let alone invest!" "It's too much work." "I can't understand this stuff." And so on.
It's time to now fumigate your brain one more time of all the "stinkin' thinkin'" that might pollute your prosperity.
You can't get what you want if you don't know what you want.
Sounds obvious? Ask yourself - why am I reading this article anyway? Because you want to become wealthy.
There's more to wealth than just money. You need to figure out what you want out of life in general. You must be specific on what you want in every area of your life - financially, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
You've got to have something strong, solid, and concrete, with specific dimensions. You can't build a 5,000 square-foot home on a lot for a 1,200 square-foot bungalow. Dreaming, desiring, and even being willing to work hard are all fine activities. But now you are going to add specificity to them - and specificity is what makes or breaks an investment strategy.
As the saying goes, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."
It's easy to get overwhelmed when you begin to plan out aggressive long-term goals.
To be able to achieve your long-term goals, you will need to first hit smaller easily achievable short term goals along the way. As you hit every small short-term goal along the way, you will have a sense of achievement and your confidence will begin to grow. As your confidence grows and you see progress, you will begin to try even harder to reach your goals.
By following the strategy outlined here, you will achieve even your most aggressive goals at lightning speed.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3436738

Create SMART Goals

May 14, 2020 Posted by Success Routines , , , ,
person aiming on dartboard


Internationally renowned business philosopher Jim Rohn says, “We want to set the goals that our heart conceives, that our mind believes and that our bodies will carry out.” We are intelligent beings and as intelligent beings, we need to have SMART goals. 

The acronym S.M.A.R.T. outlines the set of criteria that your goal must follow in order for it to be a well-focused and achievable goal. That set of criteria is:



Specific: Do you know exactly what you want to accomplish with all the details?
Measurable: Are you able to assess your progress?
Attainable: Is your goal within your reach given your current situation?
Relevant: Is your goal relevant to your purpose in life?
Time-Sensitive: What is the deadline for completing your goal?

Create Specific Goals
Jack Canfield in his book, The Success Principles, states that “Vague goals produce vague results.” There is no place in your life for vague goals. Your subconscious mind will fulfill whatever it focuses on and if your goals are ambiguous or incomplete, then you will achieve results that are also ambiguous or incomplete. You want to make your goal as detailed as possible in order to achieve the specific results that you desire. A specific goal is one that is clearly defined in such a way that anyone could come by and understand what you intend to accomplish. Your goal should contain a detailed description of what you want to accomplish; when you want to accomplish it by; and the action(s) you will take to accomplish it.

Bad example: “I want to write a book.”

Good example: “I want to write a book on time management that is at least 200 pages in length and have it done by December 16th. I’ll commit myself to write at least 2 pages every workday until I reach completion.”

Create Measurable Goals
Always set goals that are measurable in some way. You need to establish a measuring stick for assessing the progress towards your goals because if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. A good measurable goal will be one where anyone can come up to you at the deadline and, by viewing the results, determine whether or not you have completed your goal. You also want to be able to see the progressive changes that you make on your goal so that you can judge whether or not you are reaching the completion of your goal. Select a standard unit of measurement that will enable you to see exactly how far you have come from the start of your goal and how far away from the completion of the goal you are.

Bad example: “I want to be rich.”

Good example: “I want to generate $100,000 in passive income within 5 years from this date.”

Create Attainable Goals
Having high goals that stretch you is important, but you need to also need to create goals that are realistic for your situation and skill level. Many people, unfortunately, set their goals and dreams so high that they are just not very realistic and, as a result, they never seem to reach their dreams in life. Creating goals that are not attainable is very disempowering and will only serve to demotivate you in life. Remember to set high goals, but be realistic about your goals. On the same note, goals that are too easily accomplished do not stretch you or make you grow as a person because they are not challenging enough. You will want to find that right mix of goal that is challenging, but not extreme.

Bad example: “I want to become a millionaire in 2 months.”

Good example: “I want to become a millionaire within 10 years by starting my own personal development company and doing seminars all over the world and by creating a line of passive income products.”

Create Relevant Goals
Having goals is great, but what is the underlying purpose of those goals? You want to create goals that are in-line with your personal mission statement or your purpose in life. Relevant goals ensure that you are dedicating your effort towards goals that are focused on who you are as a person. It is similar to a college curriculum that focuses on specific courses for each major. All of us should create a mission statement for ourselves which is basically our purpose in life and all of our goals should spawn from that mission statement. Goals are just a means of achieving that mission in life. A goal can be very evil in nature and still abide by all the other criteria, but relevancy is the ethical check on that goal to make sure that this particular goal fits within your purpose in life.

Bad example: “Within one year, I want to become a warlord and have many loyal soldiers who will commit acts of terrorism on my behalf.”

Good example: “By the end of the year, I want to build a philanthropic foundation that helps feed the homeless.”

Create Time-Sensitive Goals
Every goal that you create must be time-sensitive in nature. Not having a time element attached to your goal breeds procrastination. We would simply be motivated to put the goal off for a later time and never get around to it. Goals must have definite starting points and ending points and milestones along the way.

Bad example: “I am going to do my homework.”

Good example: “I am going to finish my homework by 8pm tonight and I’ll achieve this deadline by spending one hour on each subject.”

By spending some time towards making sure that your goals fit the SMART criteria, you will ensure your success.

How to Write Your Way to Achieving Your Goals!

May 13, 2020 Posted by Success Routines , , , ,
three pens on white paperMany of the most successful and famous people in the world have one thing in common - they have spent time every day writing down their thoughts and goals! Learn how writing down your goals will increase your ability to be successful.

Recently a book came out in my country about the early life of one of our most famous political leaders.

I found the reviews of this book very interesting, because as a very young teenager, this boy who later became a famous prime minister, used to write constantly in his letters and journals such thoughts as, "I must become a great man". Or he would write "It is very important that I become a great leader of this country."

This man did something that is very common among people who later become successful and achieve their goals: he started writing down his goals, his thoughts, and ideas, on paper from a very young age.

Researchers who have studied what makes people successful have discovered that writing down goals and ideas is very common among those who later become successful.

In general, only about 1% or 2% of the population ever writes their ideas and goals down on a regular basis.

Yet, among those who become famous or successful, writing every day about their goals and ambitions is very common.

So, does this mean that people who later became successful were always so ambitious and conceited that even from a very young age they believed they would be important and they wrote about it constantly?

Or does it mean that writing about what you want to accomplish helps you to achieve your goals?
When I was researching my book on how you can be smarter, I came across the ideas of Dr. Win Wenger who has studied many techniques to improve intelligence and has written several books on the topic.

Dr. Wenger noticed this connection between writing out your goals and later success in life, and he believes that the very act of writing about your goals and thoughts will stimulate more development in your brain and will help you achieve your ambitions.

So, if you have had any goals that you have been putting off because you don't have confidence, or don't know where to start, why not start writing down every day what you want to achieve, and why, and how you will achieve it?

Writing by itself isn't going to be enough to make you successful, you still have to go out and do things to accomplish your goals, but very often, writing about your goals every day can be an important part of giving yourself a boost of mental energy and confidence.

Now you may be wondering, can't I just type out my innermost goals and aspirations on my computer? After all, this is the modern age. Wouldn't a computer work just as well, or maybe even better, in expressing my goals as writing them out by hand on a piece of paper?

Well, the answer is, nobody knows for sure. We don't know yet whether using a computer to type your thoughts will stimulate your brain, in the same way, to achieve your goals as you would get by writing out the words by hand using a pen and paper.

You see, computers are so new in the history of human beings that we haven't yet been able to sort out all the effects of computers on our development.

We don't yet know whether people who type out their ideas on a computer will have the same sort of positive results as people did in the past when they wrote their ideas out on paper. It's just too early to tell.

However, it is quite likely that writing out what you want using a pen and paper will work better than typing out what you want into a computer.

When you write with pen and paper, especially if you try to make your writing neat and legible, and if you try to make your thoughts complete and grammatically correct, you will use more of your body, and more of your brain than when you simply sit at a computer and type out words.
You are probably activating more of your brain when you write words out by hand.

Here is one way you can get started using the act of daily writing to stimulate yourself to accomplish your goals.

First, decide what goals you want to work on. They might be personal goals or professional goals, spiritual or financial or artistic. You decide what you would like to accomplish in your life.

If like most people, you have a lot of goals, and you don't know what to tackle first, write them all down, and then choose from your entire list, ten goals that are practical, achievable, and important to you.

Then, out of your top ten goals, choose one to work on at a time.

And this is important: start to work on the easiest one first!

Why? If you choose a difficult or vague goal, you may get bogged down for many years trying to accomplish it, getting frustrated, while other more easily attainable goals get ignored
.
When you choose an easily attainable goal, you will feel encouraged by your success to move on to something more difficult later.

Make sure that you express your desired goal in simple language, with all the details you require to visualize it clearly.

Every day, for ten minutes in the morning, and ten minutes in the evening, commit yourself to write about your goal. Write about your goal as if it is easy to achieve. Write about how you have all the talent and willpower necessary to achieve this goal. Write about how it will benefit those around you if you achieve it, and how it will benefit you.

Never write as if your goal is difficult, or as if you doubt yourself or as if you doubt your talent or your right to succeed.

You can even write about your goal as if you have already achieved it, and you are happy about how easy it all was.

Every day, take some time to read out loud, with feeling, what you have written.

Feel within yourself the same sense of happiness and relief that you would feel if the goal was successfully accomplished.

Once you have successfully achieved your first goal, go back to your list and pick another goal to write about and to work on.



In this way you can eventually work your way through your entire list!

Article source:

Why Goal Setting Is Important - A Powerful Method To Achieve Your Goals

blue marker on white printer paper
why goal setting is so important? 
Why do people set goals? One of the main reasons why setting goals is important is that it is human nature to strive when in pursuit of a goal. Having great goals makes us feel alive, gives meaning to our life. That's the reason why many people feel empty after they retire from their job if they don't take the time to set new goals to achieve.
In our professional life, we generally have goals set but we usually don't really take the time to set clear goals for our personal life. Many people spend a considerable amount of time planning their next vacation in detail, looking for the best location, comparing prices, buying the necessary equipment but how many people really take the time to plan their future? 
If you start planning everything in advance and constantly setting goals I guarantee you that you will achieve way more than you would normally achieve.
However, there are no point setting goals you cannot achieve. That's why you need to have a clear strategy to ensure you will achieve your goals. With the right strategy, most of your goals are achievable. Most of the time the reason people fail to achieve their goals is not that their goal is too hard, but because they don't have the right strategy.

How to Set Personal Goals You Will Achieve
The biggest mistake is to set goals that are vague. For instance, "I'm gonna lose weight" or "I want to become rich." Your goal should be very clear. Clarity is the key!
I will lose 10 kilos by March 31st
I will earn $10,000 per month by December 31st of next year

Decide how much and when.
Decide on the day or even on the hour by which you will achieve your goal. The clearer the better. It is very important! You should constantly try to find a way to measure any of your goals because otherwise you cannot be held accountable and cannot track your results. When you find a way to measure your goals it will become suddenly more real, more tangible.

Choose a goal that you know you can achieve but that will be quite challenging
You want a goal that will push you out of your comfort and make you feel better once you achieve it. If the goal is out of reach you will have no motivation or you will feel desperate and your self-esteem will suffer. Don't compare yourself with other people. No matter how small is your achievement, if you had to push yourself a little bit to achieve your goal it is a big success that you should celebrate. It might not be a big deal for others but it is for you. And you matter!
Ambitious goals are good, but they should be followed by massive actions in order to be achievable.

Write all the reasons why you want to achieve that goal
Why is it so important for you? Make sure your goal truly matters to you and is not something you are doing just for your family, your friends, or your colleagues. Intrinsic motivation is always better than extrinsic motivation. Make sure you don't spend years pursuing a goal that is not going to make you happy.

Write down your goals.
Writing down your goals makes them more real. A pen and a piece of paper can work wonder when you think about your life! Make sure you write your goals using positive words and read your goals every day.

Make the necessary preparations before starting your goal
If you would like to be thinner, spend all your time with skinny people. Have all your meals with skinny people - Vasant Lad
You have limited willpower. Save it as much as possible. Don't try to become a vegetarian if your father is a butcher! (just an image) Try to create a friendly and supportive environment that will help you achieve your goal. If you want to become a vegetarian buy recipe books, fill your fridge with vegetables and fruits, join a vegetarian association before getting started.

Share your goals with as many people as possible.
For instance, if you want to lose 10 kilos, make a public announcement at work in front of your colleagues. Tell all your family members about your goals. Whenever possible, tell people you encounter that you are on a diet and you will lose 10 kilos by March 31st. You should commit yourself so that you have no way backward. Make it your reality. If you don't feel confident enough to do that, it means that your goal might be too ambitious for you right now and or you don't really want it. In that case, you might want to check whether your goal is achievable or not and modify it if necessary.
When talking about your goals, avoid using vocabulary such as "I will try", "I think", "Maybe", "If it goes well" but use "I will", "When I will achieve", "I know I will", "I definitely will."

Anticipate all possible ways it can go wrong and elaborate a strategy.
The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate - Thomas Watson
We tend to be over-optimistic regarding our ability to achieve a goal and more than often we underestimate the amount of work and the time necessary to perform a task. Ask yourself what things can happen that will prevent you from achieving your goals? If your goals are long-term goals, chances are that you will face multiple setbacks before you succeed. In the past, I had many goals but I didn't achieve most of them. One of the reasons was obviously my lack of confidence. Other major reasons were that I was overly optimistic and was not prepared mentally to face major setbacks. I would try to create a blog about Japan but would give up due to the many technical difficulties I encountered. I would wait for everything to be perfect before launching the blog. This blog was never created. I planned to make videos of my trips abroad and publish them; it never happened. Once I understood that failure was actually part of the process and not an anomaly It helped me significantly to achieve my goals. Here is how I see setbacks or failures: setbacks are here to test you, to see how bad you want it. When you set a goal, you have to be clear not only about your goal but about what you are ready to go through to achieve that goal. If you already made your mind that huge setbacks are likely to occur, you will be prepared to face them and be able to keep pushing and move forward. You should already know how you're going to react to potential setbacks before they occur.
Avoid to put yourself in difficult situations
If your objective is to lose weight or to stop smoking, for instance, you should avoid temptation. Identify all those situations where you are at risk, think of what makes you fail in your previous attempt, and see how you can avoid those situations. Maybe you like to have a cigarette when you are drinking coffee, when you eat outside or when you are under stress. Identify those kinds of situations and come up with an effective strategy.
Sharing goals with other people is a great way to push ourselves to take action. Do you have any goals you are working on currently? Please leave me a comment below and let me know how it is going.

Post Traumatic Growth Can Help

difficult roads lead to beautiful destinations desk decor
One of the problems of failure in one area of your life, say the loss of a job, is that it can put a lot of strain on other areas, too. Your marriage may suffer. Because you aren't earning any money, you may lose your house. Almost certainly, you'll find that you have to sell things to make ends meet.
Back in January of this year, on a worldwide basis, 70,000 people lost their jobs in a single days, while 50,000 to 60,000 lost their jobs on each of the ten days following. But of course, it needn't be something as big and drastic as job loss or a house foreclosure. One way to keep yourself from brooding on failure is to keep your life multi-dimensional. Have plenty of interests so that if you have a failure in one area of your life, there are plenty of other areas which are doing quite well.
Equally, can you really call it failure if you lose your job? More than likely, it isn't through any fault of your own that it happened. It's arguable that you could have seen it coming, in which case it's equally arguable that perhaps you could have done something about it, but what? Found a new job in this sort of market? Unlikely in the extreme.
The only thing about losing your job is that it does open up new opportunities. There's a sort of 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' aspect about it.
There's little doubt that failure's vital for growth. Without mistakes, you don't learn. And you probably don't progress, either. After all, if you're afraid to start anything because you may fail, then you'll be stuck in a rut for the rest of your life.
Psychologists have discovered something they refer to as Post Traumatic Growth. This occurs when very negative sets of circumstances engender high levels of psychological distress causing a major life crisis. Such occurrences produce extremely unpleasant psychological reactions.
Now, apparently, growth doesn't occur as a direct result of this trauma, but it's the person's struggle to deal with this new reality in trauma's aftermath that's crucial in determining the extent to which post-traumatic growth occurs. In other words, you're pushed so close to the abyss, that you're forced to change in some way or the other.
You may be faced with a life-threatening illness and while you simply can't see life past this disability, basically you're forced to sooner or later.
You may have made a monumental blunder, resulting in a huge failure of some kind, probably financial. And this is the whole point. Has this ever happened to you? You sit down and think; 'What in the name of goodness am I to do. I just don't know.' It's then that this Post Traumatic Growth can occur.
Through the new reality, you create by struggling to find a way out.
This, I feel, in the hands of a highly qualified hypnotherapist, could be something that's extremely useful. We urge you to go and have a look at Mike Bond's website, The Hypnosis Attraction [http://www.wealthyoldman.com], and have a good read about everything that hypnosis can do for you

Strategies for Implementation-How to Follow Through on Your New Year's Resolutions

April 12, 2020 Posted by Success Routines , , , , , , ,

silhouette of person fist during sunset

For most of us, the start of a new year is a time of reflection. A review of the year gone by and an opportunity to set goals for the year ahead. Intentions are good and motivation is high.
Make no mistake. Setting goals is easy. Following through is the hard part. To assist you in seeing those New Year's goals and resolutions come to life, Bywater Consulting Group presents you with:The challenge lies in the predictable loss of steam that ensues as we move past the holiday season and back into our workaday lives.
Liz Bywater's Strategies for Implementation: How to Follow Through on Your New Year's Resolution

1)  Review your goals. Keep the important ones. Discard the ones that don't make sense.
2)  Prioritize. Decide what requires immediate action, what belongs in the mid-term, and what can be deferred to much later date.
3)  Organize. Figure how to best approach the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual tasks entailed in meeting your goals and resolutions for the year. Put a system in place for efficiently attending to each of these tasks.
4)  Enlist help. Don't try to tackle it all yourself. Delegate where feasible. Outsource where appropriate.
5)  Share the news. Tell someone about your goals and your strategies for reaching them.
6)  Create accountability. Set up a system for reporting your progress to someone who's invested in your growth. This can be a business partner, a boss, a peer, or a spouse.
7) Celebrate your successes. When you've made progress toward a goal, recognize it. Take pride. Use it as an incentive to keep moving forward.
8) Get feedback. Ask others how they see you and your progress. Use their input to build upon your strengths and neutralize your weaknesses.
9) Don't obsess. Plan, prepare and then execute. Don't get caught up in over-analyzing or striving for perfection.
10) Give yourself a break. Remember to take the time to relax and refresh yourself. Don't run yourself so ragged that you lose focus, stamina, and creativity. They're vital if you are to reach your goals and see your New Year's resolutions come to life.

Five of the Most Basic Tips on How to Follow Through on Your Goals

April 11, 2020 Posted by Success Routines , , , , ,

            Five of the Most Basic Tips on How to Follow Through on Your Goals


As you can imagine, in my line of work as a life coach and executive coach, I regularly come across people who say to me "Every time I set myself goals I never follow them through!" And they ask me for tips on how to do this differently.

Although everyone has their own personal way of doing things, and there's no one answer that works for everyone, I have found that the following suggestions work for many people:
- Be clear to yourself about what your goal actually is; take the time to word it as specifically and as detailed as you can. Strangely this action alone is really powerful in moving you towards your goal.
- If you are able to write down the specifics, the details about your goal, then it is definitely worthwhile re-reading what you've written as often as you can; this could be once a week or once a day, it does not actually matter. The purpose of re-reading your goal is simply to bring it to the forefront of your mind as often as possible.
This is similar to learning a language, maybe you learnt French or Spanish at school; we were taught French in high school, and each time at the start of the class, the teacher would ask us what is the date today, so 30 years later I still remember how to say "The date today is..." in French.
The relevance of this story to your goals is simple: if you think about your goals regularly, you stay very focused and consciously aware of them all the time, which leads you to think about actions and activities to move you closer to your goals. This is essential. There are studies that show that people who are very successful are those who are clear about their goals and know exactly what they want to achieve. Whereas, if you ask every person you meet what are their goals, you will most likely find that most of them have no idea! Therefore, they are not progressing in their lives, they are simply standing still.
- Some people are more visual and prefer to imagine their goals rather than writing them down. This is an excellent practice too; it is as good as writing as long as you remember to go into lots of detail.
- When you visualise your goals or when you re-read your goals, allow yourself to daydream, yes, definitely, this is so very important. Let yourself imagine you are living your goals, as if they're happening to you right now. This is so simple and so powerful, and in the very least it can leave you with a wonderfully good feeling.
- Trust yourself and have confidence in the goals you've chosen for yourself. If you have decided these are what you want then no-one in this world has the right to tell you otherwise. People often feel uncomfortable about their goals, they don't believe in their own goals; if you feel this way then you are not going to be powerfully and confidently focused on achieving what you want.
There are lots more things you could do, yet if this is all you did, and you did it consistently, I am sure you will find yourself taking action more and more in a way that moves you towards your goal. Coaching is mostly common sense, the reason people work with a life coach or an executive coach is sometimes it is easier to do things when we feel we are accountable to someone else.
All the best,
Natalie Dee Life Coach & Executive Coach
Natalie Dee is a specialist in life coaching and business coaching with clients throughout the UK and worldwide. Her clients achieve positive, focused results in six sessions on average; find out more, visit http://www.natalie-dee.com
Natalie Dee is also the co-author of an ebook on self confidence, for more details visit her website (as above).