Personal Goals Achievement

Setting goals is extremely easy, although it can take some time to decide exactly what goals you should set for yourself. An easy way to begin is to first create a list of everything you would like to do in life.

It doesn’t matter what you write, and the more things you can think of the better. When writing the list, try not to think of whether something will be possible or impossible to do, but instead write as though you were writing a wish list where you could have anything you wanted.

By doing this you take one step closer to achieving your goals, as often many of our goals are simply left in the mind and forgotten about because we believe that we are incapable of achieving them. However you would be surprised at how many things you thought were impossible, were actually possible if you just took the time, and made the effort to go after them.

Once you have created your wish list you should now choose 5 goals that you want to start working on immediately. These goals can be anything you like, although to give your life balance it is a good idea to choose 1 goal for each area of your life. For example, a goal for financial, romantic, personal, spiritual and health are good areas to begin with. Although do what you feel is best, so if you want 3 financial goals and 2 health goals that would be ok. However avoid concentrating your goals on one single area, as this will unbalance your life.

Whilst it may be tempting to choose more than 5 goals, 5 is a good number to begin with as it allows you to focus your mind on a few specific goals, and devote more of your energy to accomplishing them. If you choose too many goals to begin with, you may feel overwhelmed and give up before you even begin.

Once you get the hang of goal setting, you can then begin to add more goals later. In fact it’s a good idea to have as many goals as you can, but only when you feel comfortable with the process of setting goals.

With the 5 goals that you have chosen, your next step is to write them in a goal format. This simply involves writing your goals in the present, positive tense. For example, I have or I am.

This is extremely important as it tells the mind this is what you should have, rather than what you want or will have. So writing I Will or I have should be avoided.

Now that you have your goals written in goal format look at them daily, and rewrite your goals in the morning and night to burn them into your mind. The more you focus on your goals, the stronger the desire will be to accomplish them.
If you need more detail on goal setting please visit my website for more tips on how to set goals, and how to choose the goals that are right for you.

It is that time of year once more when many people are working on the goals they have set for themselves for the new year. It’s the same thing every year. The goals that people set for themselves are usually along the lines of, “I want to lose weight”, ” I want to quit smoking”, “I want to exercise more” etc. Newsletters and Magazines are full of articles on how to accomplish these things.

Although the normal resolutions are good and healthy for you, they make you focus on negative aspects of your life, essentially, what you should not be doing?smoking, eating badly, being lazy etc. The problem I see with these resolutions is that it makes people think negatively and feel guilty, especially when February rolls around and they realize that they were not able to keep up with their resolutions. By thinking negatively, we set ourselves up for failure.

I want to suggest something different to you. Let us not dwell on new year resolutions that go down the drain by February, let’s focus on something a little different. Positive thinking brings results. Results make us happy and content. When we are content and focused on positive things we will find that many negative aspects of our lives fall away on their own. It is as if the body says, “I don’t need these negative things in my life anymore” and voila, they drop away without effort.

My suggestion to you is that this year we dwell on positive things. Instead of dwelling on what we want to rid ourselves of this year, let us dwell on what positive things we want to see in our lives. Let us focus on our dreams and make them a reality in our lives.

Many people don’t give much time thinking about making their dreams come true. They are caught up in the rat race of life and a worldly way of thinking. My suggestion is that we focus on a more spiritual way of thinking. Let us take the time to think about what we really want in life and then focus on setting goals that will bring us closer to our dreams.

Yes, even when following your dreams, one must set goals or we will never accomplish that which we dream of. Don’t get caught up in wishful thinking but put some action behind your thoughts. The secret to realizing your dreams is to break your objective into small steps. Ask yourself, “What do I need to do in order to accomplish this goal?” then break it down into bite size pieces.

This week we drove from Hamburg to Munich because we had to check out our new apartment and see about my fiancé’s new job out there. It is a very long drive and if you drive fast and push your limits (which most people want to do) you can make the journey in 8 hours. BUT, if you don’t want to stress yourself out, you have to make sure you take time for breaks and stretching so it ends up taking between 10-12 hours, depending on traffic etc. Then you end up at the end of the journey relaxed. Tired still, but relaxed

Think of your dreams as your destination. It may not be right around the corner, most dreams aren’t, but if you have patience, and pace yourself you WILL arrive at your destination. The problem most people run into with goal setting is that we think we can accomplish it much faster if we push themselves to the limit. When we hit problems that will slow us down, we end up getting frustrated and often give up. If, we would relax and think clearly when we hit a roadblock to our dreams, we would be able to figure out alternative routes to our destination. Detours do not mean failure and stalled traffic does not mean that we must give up and forget about our destination. We will reach our goals if we relax, persevere and be willing to figure out alternatives to our situation. We don’t need to drive ourselves like maniacs in order to reach our destination. Life is not the autobahn!

Road plan to your dreams:
1.Figure out what you want the most in life. What is your dream?
2.Set small, realistic steps so you can clearly map out the way to your destination, your dream. Remember that you cannot swim the ocean.
3.Be prepared to take an alternative route if you run into roadblocks.
4.Don’t give up. You WILL reach your destination.

This new year, let us think about the positive things we want in our life. Take the time now, to think about what you really want and then set about making up your road plan. Wishful thinking won’t accomplish anything. Make plans and follow your dreams!

“Shoot for the moon, if you miss at least you will end up amongst the stars”- Author unknown

Recently, I spoke with a client who wanted me to do a workshop at an upcoming conference. I offer a number of different talks, so I asked her what the focus of the meeting was in order to be able to suggest a relevant topic. She said that although the committee members had already picked several programs, they had not yet identified a focus for the conference. My first thought in response to this was, If you don’t know what you want, then how are you going to get it? However, I am savvy enough not to insult people, so we spoke a little longer and we came up with a program that she wanted me to present.

It never ceases to amaze me that people do not identify outcomes they wish to achieve. While the above example is related to a conference, it is by no means limited to that area. Many people engage in activities in their careers and businesses, but they haven’t defined what they want to attain. They are completing tasks, but they aren’t focused on accomplishing clear-cut results.

When I was a human resources executive, I often worked with people to determine the appropriate jobs that were needed in their groups. Many department heads would complete job descriptions for key jobs, which described all of the tasks that the employees would be required to do. It took a great deal of effort for me to get these individuals to realize that employees in key positions are not paid to perform tasks, they are paid to produce results. Through much coaching on my part, we were able to identify the outcomes that the individuals were expected to achieve in the various positions.

Why is it so critical to determine outcomes for a job, a meeting, a department, or any other situation? Because if you don’t know what your outcome is, the odds are that you will spend a lot of unnecessary time and money trying to reach a fuzzy target. And there is a very strong chance that the target will not even be reached. Outcomes let you know where you are going. They give you important information about how to use your resources, time, money, and employees. When you know your outcome, you can continually make important decisions is this going to help me reach my goal or will this take me further away from my objective?

Clearly defined outcomes can also be very motivating. I worked with a coaching client who had an idea about a new business that she wanted to start. When she first got the idea, she was very excited about it, however, she never took action to get the business moving. She continually came up with excuses about why she wasn’t doing anything to make the business a reality. I finally got her to sit down and write a detailed description of what the outcome was that she wanted to achieve with the business. That was the missing key. As soon as she wrote down the detailed outcome, she began to do the things that were necessary to get the business started. For her, defining the outcome spurred the action that is required in any business. Five years later, she has a very successful business that she absolutely loves.

Some people have a great deal of difficulty in trying to determine outcomes. It is because they are looking into a future that isn’t certain and they can’t identify what it is they want. An easy way to get around this is to imagine that the outcome has already been achieved and then to describe what it looks like. Going back to the situation with the meeting planner, the question that I asked her was, Let’s assume it is six months after the conference and you know that it was a huge success. What would have happened to let you know that it was successful? People are much more able to describe the past then they are to identify an unknown future. By asking the question this way, I was able to find out that according to the planner, the criterion for a successful meeting was that the attendees would have the tools they needed to be able to more easily and effectively handle the many changes that were going on in their industry. When I discovered this outcome, I was able to suggest a program that would help the organization achieve this desired result.

Before you take action (small or large), you need to identify what your outcome is what do you want to achieve? When you do that, you will cut down your time, streamline your efforts, accelerate your progress, and reach your desired goal. When you know where you are going, there is a good chance that you will end up getting there.

No matter what you do in life, it’s important to have a goal to work toward. It gives you something to focus on and something to be proud of when you reach it.

This is especially true when you stay home with your kids, whether or not you work at home. It’s so easy to lose sight of everything but raising your family, forgetting your own interests and dreams. But with a little bit of work you can do better not only for yourself but those you care about.

What are your goals? It could be to start a home business, lose weight, be a better parent, start a hobby… there are all kinds of goals. Some will take only a little time to achieve once you decide to go for them, while others may take years.

Finding time to work toward your goals isn’t always easy. You will probably have to cut back on something else. It’s always a matter of finding the right balance for your life. Most people spend more time than they need to on something that really matters less to them than reaching their goals, if they’d only stop to think about it.

Take a look at your daily activities. Do you spend a lot of time watching TV, chatting on the phone or wandering on the internet? Any of these activities are likely to hold some degree of interest to you, but are they a real priority when compared to your goals? Could you cut an hour or even just 15 minutes a day from one of these activities to work towards one of your goals?

The hardest part of getting things done sometimes is changing old habits. It’s so easy to keep doing the same thing. Find what will help you to keep trying. For some people keeping a calendar and writing down what they’ve achieved will help while for others it will be enough just to know what they’ve gotten done.

Obviously, for parents it’s very important to maintain that balance that keeps your family running. However, many goals can include the kids or the entire family. My daughter loves to exercise, for example, and will come running up to my desk to see if it’s time yet.

You could also try working toward your goals as the kids do their homework. It may help them to see you use the self discipline you want them to have about doing homework in order to achieve your goals. Children of all ages learn a great deal from example, and working hard on different things at the same time can be a wonderful experience and a way to share.

Don’t forget to reward yourself when you reach your goals. It doesn’t have to be much of a reward, but it is just nice to have a way to tell yourself that you’ve accomplished what you set out to do.

I just Googled the phrase “goal setting”, and found approximately 3,600,000 web pages that relate in some way to that phrase. This shouldn’t surprise us, because conventional wisdom is that goal setting is an important skill.

It is easy to document both through anecdotal evidence as well as through research that setting goals can help us achieve more. There are hundreds of books, tapes, speeches, workshops, and websites that will provide us with tools and processes to set goals. One would think for something as important as goal setting, with as many tools as there are available, that everyone would be a goal setter.

This however isn’t the case.

While I could fill a book with the reasons why, there is one that is very important.

People don’t set goals now because they didn’t achieve the ones they set in the past.

They’ve followed the goal setting process they learned or read about, but the seminar or book stopped at the wrong time. The seminar stopped with the setting of the goal. That is like ending the game after the first play, then going to sit on the sidelines, while the goal is out on the playing field.

My advice to you, if you can identify with what you’ve just read is to stop worrying about goal setting. And start focusing on goal achieving.

In other words, stop worrying about which goal setting model to use, or which software to track your progress with. Stop making the goal setting process the focus, and start putting the focus on goal achievement.

Here are three things you can do to put our focus on goal achievement and drastically increase your success:

1. Get sick and tired. It is often said that people really begin to reach new health goals when they become “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Achieving a goal means that you want something different than you have now. To build your ongoing and sustaining drive to achieve the new item, knowledge or situation, you must become disgusted and dissatisfied with the current situation. This doesn’t mean that you should become bitter or grumpy, but rather it means to develop a healthy dissatisfaction with the way things are now (current profitability, the cycle time for new product development, or your inability to find a bathroom in Brazil).

2. Get (and stay) excited about the result. To sustain the challenges, setbacks and disappointments along your way to goal achievement, you must have another motivation as well. You must really want the benefits that will come to you when the new goal is achieved. Build a clear and compelling picture in your mind of what you will feel, sense, see, and believe once your goal has been achieved. Focus on the results you will gain from the goal, rather than just the goal itself. This is important because in the end this is what you are after, not “just” the goal itself. As you work towards your goal, the goal might shift, but as long as the desired results remain clear, you have improved the likelihood of achieving the end result you desire.

3. Start a plan and get started. Notice I didn’t say to lay out a complete plan of all the steps between you and your goal. If your goal is of any size and importance at all, it will require many steps, and it will be very difficult/impossible to identify them with any degree of certainty at the start. Too many people think they need the perfect plan. They delay starting so they can get the best information. They want to talk to one more expert, read one more book, examine two more options. Get started already! Give yourself a clear idea of a general approach, and some clear first steps. Allow yourself the luxury of knowing that the next specific steps will become clear as you stay on the path.

Doing these three things will drastically increase your success in achieving any goal you set.

Actually, let me say it more strongly. Until you have these three factors going for you in large (although potentially varying) amounts, you won’t achieve the goals you set. You will lose momentum. You will lose focus. You will lose hope. You won’t be able to overcome the first setback. And you will fall into the convenient and comfortable thinking that goal setting “doesn’t work” for you or that you need a new tool, a new technique or a new guru to help you set “better” goals.

Whether you are setting goals for yourself, the team you lead or for your organization at large, take this advice to heart.

Focus less energy on setting the perfect goal and spend more time preparing yourself for ultimate success. Stop worrying about the resolution, and start focusing on the resolve that will be required to succeed.

Doing this will bring you greater success, less frustration and will help you and your organization move closer and closer to your potential.