Personal Goals Achievement

Do you remember that feeling at the beginning of a new school year starting with brand new school supplies? That sense of freshness and new beginnings as you open up the first page of an untouched notebook and hold a new sharp pointed pencil poised to make the first mark? Usually the first few pages of my notebook would have my best neatest writing, which then deteriorated as the time went on. My desire to do my best, reaching for higher standards of excellence dwindled as the day to day routines of daily living took me back to standards of mediocrity and just getting by.

The beginning of a new year is often the time when we reflect on the year that has past and see things that we would like to change and do differently. A new year represents a new start, a new chapter and a clean unwritten page in life. There is a desire to live better, reach new goals, and make a fresh start. We make New Year Resolutions and promise ourselves that this year we will do them. We summon up our will power and determination and step into the New Year with the greatest and sincerest of intentions.

New Year Resolutions have become almost the joke of this season. It is well recognized that those well intentioned New Years resolutions often fail as quickly as they are made. One common resolution is the goal to lose weight by eating sensibly and exercise. It is the busiest time of year for Fitness Centers, but statistics have shown that new memberships are rarely kept up more than month or two. One thing that New Year resolutions do show is that good intentions are not sufficient to make permanent changes in our lives.

Why do most New Year Resolutions fail?

We are motivated by pleasure in life rather than pain. Many resolutions involve some kind of deprivation of pleasure whether it be eating, or stopping a bad habit. We know that although we enjoy our bad habits, their consequences are ultimately not beneficial for either our health or life. The desire for instant gratification for short term pleasure is far stronger than any mental logical sense of reason in most cases. We know in our head what we should do, but doing it when it opposes our immediate desires is tough.

Our mind is composed of two parts; the conscious and subconscious mind. Brain activity takes place through neurons. In one second of time the conscious mind uses two thousand neurons, and in that same second the subconscious mind uses four billion neurons. This means that every second there are two thousand neurons making conscious decisions and four billion neurons making subconscious decisions. Which part of your mind has the greatest control do you think?

The subconscious mind is trained by the constant repetition of the beliefs, values and lifestyle that you have taken and lived from an early age. It automatically follows the familiar and well trodden path of well ingrained thoughts, beliefs and behaviors. The subconscious operates from such a well established history that it responds automatically with learned responses and behavior. This is why it is so difficult to create new habits of thoughts and behaviours, the subconscious mind will always try to revert to old familiar way of doing things, because they have become so automatic. The conscious mind has a hard job to make permanent changes because of the power of those four billion neurons. It can be achieved, but it takes hard work by the conscious mind to retrain our subconscious mind.

It is said that you need to do something at least 30 times to create a new habit. For changes in life long learnt behaviors it can take far more than that. For example have you ever got in the car and driven to your destination, and not really remember the journey there. You have been driving using the learned behaviors of your subconscious mind, and your conscious mind has been thinking about something else. However if you were to drive in a different country whose custom is to drive on the other side of the road ? your conscious mind would be working very hard to correct the learned and instinctive behavior of your subconscious mind. In fact the whole experience of driving on the other side of the road feels wrong and uncomfortable, and if you lose your concentration you could find yourself automatically going back to familiar patterns and become a road hazard!

Here are tips for working on those New Year’s Resolutions:

Don’t expect instant results – it’s a process
Plan small attainable steps to your desired goal
Celebrate each successful step towards your goal and work on it until it feels automatic before progressing to the next
Don’t give up when you experience relapses and set backs
Review your new steps and goals several times daily.
Visualize what reaching your goal will look and feel like
Write down your steps and goals.
Find people who will support and encourage you on the way.

Welcome another year!

Why do most New Year’s Resolutions fail? By now, many New Years resolutions would be thrown out, forgotten, shrugged off. There is always next year.

Why do they fail? Perhaps, because theseBy now, many New Years resolutions would be thrown out, forgotten, shrugged off. There is always next year.

Diet? Lose weight? Cut down on the use of credit cards? Be more prompt with bill payments? Cut down on shopping. Read more, pursue that elusive dream, whatever that is. Be a better partner, parent, friend and employer or employee. This is a common one: Exercise!. Meditate.

Time is passing by, welcome to 365 days of procrastination. Time to change your strategy. Yes, life entails strategies, planning,action and implementation.

But, build it one step at a time.

Think of the company you work for. They have a business plan, a budget; they make sure they have the resources needed, financial, time and human . They assess their position on schedule. They implement, they act decisively when it matters.

This is their challenge in order to succeed.

So, what is your challenge?

Replace the worn out resolutions that you make year year.The words lost their essence, their meaning long ago. Re-think, plan a strategy to meet your challenge. Make it worth your while.

In a nutshell, are these pursuits challenging ?

Healthy lifestyle:

1. good , healthy nutritious food

2. healthy portions of food

3. balance work, family and recreation, each area gets a time of their own

4. exercise choose what is best for you, a lot to choose from

5. time for yourself- discover, nurture and listen to your inner self

Financial Health

1. budget- a well planned budget

2. outline major expenses for the year- car, house repairs, travel

3. analysis of spending habits- what you need and what you want

4. pay down debt- mortgage, credit cards

5. no matter what age group- a nest egg /retirement/emergency funds

Try a 21-day challenge.

This is not an original idea. But studies show that if you try your best for 21 days, it eventually results in developing a healthy habit. A forum I’m on has this 21-day challenge. It turns participants into doers. That’s what you need to become- a doer.

Take it one challenge at a time. What is important to you? Diet, weight loss?

Challenge yourself to adopt a healthier eating habit. If fast food and take-out food is your style, there are healthy choices in this area. BUT-is cooking such an aversion and bother that the convenience of take-out or frozen meals are so tempting. There are benefits to cooking. You can choose, experiment and be creative. It’s actually a rewarding endeavour. Surprise yourself.

You love food, eat very healthy portions, you never feel full. More food is good for you. OK- think aboout this seriously.

Vegetables. Yuk. What wants them? Think again. You do!!! Get the idea?

Try this for 21 days. Focus on this challenge,with dedication and enthusiasm.Do it! If you succeed, your 21 days would act as your spring board to the next challenge .

One challenge at a time, you can build it up to eventually meeting all those New Years Resolution you’ve dropped by the wayside.

I was thinking about my New Year’s resolution today. Out of curiosity I decided to do a little research to see just how many resolutions are actually kept.

I found that 50% of resolutions are broken within the first two weeks. I went on to discover that by the end of January a full 95% of resolutions are abandoned.

Only 5% of New Years resolutions are kept beyond January.

This caught my attention. I looked a little harder for the reason so many resolutions fail within such a short amount of time. I found that the majority of resolutions fail due to:

1. Procrastination
2. Lack of discipline
3. No game plan
4. Doing it alone

In summary, I concluded that the majority of resolutions fail because only a small percentage of people with resolutions ever do something about it.

Don’t let this happen to you.

Whatever your goals are for the New Year, I urge you to put them into action. Don’t wait any more. Action creates results.

If you’re really serious about making some changes this year, here are some surefire ways to make them happen.

1. Schedule a Meeting to Map Your Way

Stay with me here. You wouldn’t drive anywhere without knowing the way, why would you feel any different for something as important as you. Ask yourself an important question like “Where do I want to be, one year from now.” And write down your response. This will give you a clear indication on the direction you need to go.

2. Have a Daily Planning System

We know from above it would be just plain wrong to drive somewhere without knowing the way. It’s just as important to know why you’re going there. Writing down your goals will effectively prove their worth to you, and give you the reason to start driving toward them.

3. Define Your Key Results

Key results provide an indication of your progress toward your goals. These will be milestones or signs that you’re heading in the right direction. It’s important to determine your key results and write them down, so you know you’re on track.

4. Take Action

Action creates results. Now is the time to take everything you know about your desired goals, and prioritize your activities to achieve results. You can do this by selecting the most productive actions to reach your key results.

The important thing is that you take the actions that will give you the best chance of reaching your objectives. Remember to write these down so you have a concise roadmap to succeed.

5. Give Yourself a Reward

If you’ve followed the above for any length of time you’re bound to be making accomplishments. Rewarding yourself will motivate you to further reach your goals. You can now appreciate the fact that you are one of the motivated 5% who made it! Pat yourself on the back – you deserve it.

Once you’ve experienced the power of this kind of goal-setting, it will be hard to do it any other way. But don’t delay; take the time right now to define your goals for 2006.

Create your plan and take action. You’ll be glad you did!

Kind regards
Matthew Sherborne

Ever wondered how some people have everything that the dream of and for many it just remains a dream? Here are some tips on how to help turn your dreams into reality. Fortunately, it’s not a question of genetics or luck; it’s down to the thinking strategies that we use.

Understanding what is important to us. Craft goals in line with our values.

If a goal is in line with our values we get energy and motivation that lead us toward the goal. Most of us have experienced this type of energy and motivation at some time in our lives; maybe Birthdays and Christmas as Children and as Adults buying a house, getting married or looking forward to a holiday in the sun.

The curious thing is how little we target the use of this behaviour towards things that we want in life. It’s because we spend little time working on making our goals fit that we have such a high failure rate at achieving them.

I’m sure you’ve set New Years resolutions. How many of those did you achieve? What was different, I wonder, between those that you did achieve and those that you didn’t? I suspect that for those that you did not achieve, beneath the reason for not doing so, the cost in terms of time, money or loss of something else was too high.

If we have a greater understanding of our values, craft our goals in line with them, and address some the other key areas listed here, we are rewarded with the energy and motivation to make them happen ? with ease.

Optimise the use of our time.

To optimise our time on and towards what we want we must first gain a greater insight into what is important to us, and having done so we must then distinguish between the activities that we do that are important and urgent.

In my experience this is not a regularly practiced technique; too many people are reacting, reacting to activities that are asked of them or are left to the point of being urgent. Examples of this are leaving the utilities bills to the last minute or working under a demanding boss or chaotic organisation.

Once understood this essential time management technique is easy to master and is commonly taught in time management programmes. Understanding it within a great context of achievement makes it that much more relevant to learning and putting into practice.

Start with what you have now, with the end in mind

Having both established goals that are in line with your and optimised your time, you need to make a start. It’s important that the start is made with the goal in mind and with a degree of realism on the resources that are available now. Delusion is the result of setting off without a realistic view of what the present situation is. And Delusion soon turns to disappointment which in turn turns to frustration and ultimately little or no significant progress.

At the end of the day we only have 3 resources: Physical and mental energy, time and money. It’s key that we learn how to make optimal use of these resources.

Meeting challenges
No amount of planning is going to cater for every eventuality. Many people consider these unplanned events to be problems that prevent progress and give up at that point. People that achieve are not put off by these events and are more energised by the richness of the opportunities that are enveloped in these events.

With the right mindset the journey to achievement can be viewed as one opportunity after another to reinforce the ability to succeed.

How we use our imaginations

All human beings are blessed with incredibly powerful imaginations. However many imagine outcomes of the future that are not going to be to their advantage. Imagining negative outcomes leads to worry, stress and fear and drains our energy and motivation.

Imagining a positive outcome of the future releases more of the energy and motivation that we need to succeed at our goals.

Fortunately the structure that we use in our minds is the same for both negative and positive imaginations. And with the right know how one can use the skill that generates fear into one that generates excitement and anticipation.

Forming our goals well

When forming our goals it is essential that we consider a number of factors; a compelling view of how things will be when we have the goal is as important as a clear understanding of what we will lose when we have it. Many times the likely loss prevents us from achieving what we want because we have not adapted our thinking around the loss.

A prime example of this is giving us smoking ? many people fail to give up because having a cigarette provides them with a valuable 5 minute break. When the break is factored into the future along with the goal the chances of success are considerably increased.

Believing that it is possible that that it is for us

It is important that we hold certain helpful beliefs about the goal. Many people hold negative beliefs about whether the goal is achievable, whether they will ever achieve it and even whether it is really for them.

It is important to overcome these beliefs or sabotage will result.

Fortunately we are not born with our beliefs and the ones that we develop through childhood and in to the present moment can be changed.

See the rest here:
Communication Coach Ric Shares G.R.O.W. Model – Jan 2009

Communication Coach Ric Phillips is invited once again to be on CBC News TV on January 01 2009 to discuss how we can apply the coaching GROW model to achieve our goals and New Year resolutions. You will see a ‘calmer’ more subdued Ric in comparison to his 2008 interview. Watch and compare and then go set some goals!!! (communicationcoach.ca)