Personal Goals Achievement

I was talking to a friend of mine this morning about her financial goals for the year. After listening to her for a few minutes, I interrupted to ask how she felt about those goals.

There was a long pause. Finally, I asked if I could share my thoughts about goals – why I don’t set them for myself, and why I think they’re terribly limiting and frustrating.

By the end of the call, she was in tears, and I nearly was. I had been in the right place at the right time for her, and had helped her see a new way of approaching her business, her clients, and her whole life – a way that felt scary, but spacious and even inspiring in ways that traditional goal-setting just can’t achieve.

Are you ready to try something new? Here’s what I shared with her; I hope it will be as inspiring to you.

Goals are like Boxes
When you were a kid, it was fun to play in big packing boxes. But squashing your life into one is a very different feeling. And that’s what goals do.

I’ve observed over and over again, with myself and with clients, that setting goals creates limitations – and panic! Once a goal is set, you immediately start thinking about it; you can’t stop thinking about it. Everything you do is focused on achieving the goal. My friend saw all her potential clients as walking dollar signs- not very comfortable for her or for them!

“How will I meet my goal? What happens if I don’t succeed? Will everyone think I’m a failure?” Then, as my friend commented this morning, there’s always the “Oh, I didn’t really mean that” thing that happens when a goal starts to feel unreachable.

On the other hand, when you finally reach your goal you think, “Ahhh… I achieved it. Now I can relax.” And you put your feet up and take a deep breath. Whether you do this literally or figuratively, you’ve stopped. What amazing things would happen if you kept going? You’ll never know.

An Invitation to Be
So I asked my friend, “Who would you be if you weren’t so focused on financial goals?”

There was another long silence, but this one was full of electricity – I could almost see the exclamation marks flying in her thoughts. Finally, she said, “I don’t know!”

“I’ve asked myself that question before,” she added, “but it’s always been what would I do. I never thought of asking who I would be.”

When you start with an intention to be something special, to be more of who you really are, the goals you might have set are nothing compared to what you’ll actually receive, accomplish, and experience. Just as I’ve seen people box themselves in with goals, I’ve seen them set themselves free with an intention to be.

The more powerfully you set the intention, the better. Set an intention that stretches you, that pushes you out of your habits, that makes you feel nervous and vulnerable. Set your intention with commitment and heart, even when it frightens you.

I know someone who was always giving. Immensely generous of spirit and in action, she felt threatened and vulnerable in receiving. When she set an intention to be someone who receives as well as giving, she knew it would be challenging. What she didn’t know was how amazingly rewarding it would be. She received gifts of friendship, service, joy, peace, and love that have changed her life forever, in ways she could not have imagined.

And all she did was set the intention – and then she noticed whether she was being in alignment with that intention.

What will you be?

As a writer/author/editor/web designer, et al, I find that in order to make a “go” of my business, I must periodically refocus or reshape the direction in which my business is moving in order to remain relevant and profitable. If you, too, run your own business you probably have learned to do the same. If not, you may be missing some important trends that can impact your bottom line. Please continue to read on for some helpful advice on how you can set attainable goals for your enterprise.

My business is always in a state of flux. At times, web design is the hot item while at other times article writing surges to the top of my list of tasks. Several other competing responsibilities including advertising, resume design, and special projects also weigh in. My job isn’t boring, but if I don’t keep a firm grasp on my myriad duties, I can find myself going in the wrong direction without warning. This can be both a career killer and a financial disaster.

Some goals I make for myself are specific, such as, write more personal finance articles, while others are general, such as, the following goals I recently made to provide even better service to my clients:

1. I will do the best job possible for you and at a competitive price.

2. I will work for you as if it matters to me. That’s because it does.

3. Your success is my success. If you do well, I do well. If your project fails, I have failed too.

Of course, more generalized goals give you more room to move [and breathe!] while specific, set-in-stone goals are just that: immovable. You will either reach your goals or you willfail; there is no middle ground!

So, why not do both? Have specific goals which you know you must reach and generalized goals which you can meet, but can also be reshaped on the fly. Divide up your goals into those that must be kept a specific way for one category, while placing the remaining goals in the second, more fluid category.

You will likely attain your goals if you give yourself some wiggle room. If you don’t, you will soon grow disinterested, forget your goals, and your business and your customers will suffer the consequences.

Can you guess about the future of any organization by looking at the faces of few employees and observing them for some time? I guess that you can. Let me tell you how. Any organization that is heading towards worthwhile goals shows strong enthusiasm. The leader conveys the goals to the employees and the employees feel good about working in a organization that is not heading in a wrong direction or going downhill. The leader sells that vision to the employees and looking at the employees one can find out if they feel enthusiastic working or not.

If your goals are worthwhile and look attractive your employees will feel love working for the organization because they know that they will be reaching a great destination. While discussing about great goals let us quiz ourselves about the quality of the goals. The first question should be- if the top management set the goals or the common employees were involved in the process. Was goal setting a participatory process?

The second question should be if the goals are realistic. Setting highly unrealistic goals may dampen the spirit because they will always look unattainable. If you set realistic but ambitious goals, you can enthuse your employees to achieve them.

Regular feedback will tell your employees about how much they have achieved and if their achievements are in line with the overall growth.

Goal setting and goal achievements, both require employee participation of high order. They need to feel involved and inspired. Use right techniques to set goals and you will come out as a winner.

A wise man once said that going through life without a purpose is like sailing without a compass, which is the essence of the human need for targets and goals. It is true that there are some people, even successful ones, that do not have clear goals and no foreseen targets and yet they are moderately successful, but the huge difference here is that while some successful people have no goals all the rest of the successful people certainly have a few clear goals.

Why is setting goals important? Well naturally the first thing to say about setting goals is that it is important just so you have a reason to get up in the morning, to start your day and set you going. Most successful people will tell you that a goal puts a lot of drive and ambition into ones life, adding a true feeling of passion about your goals and placing you in a mind set of readiness to achieve and to work hard at it.

Many people do not know how to find their goals, it doesn’t mean that they would never have goals or that they lack the motivation to create a goal from themselves, it is simply a question of imagination and self trust, or self confidence. Try and think of a successful, famous person, the biggest internet entrepreneurs or the space scientists at NASA, they clearly did not have any solid base to create their goals on, they had to imagine how a market will evolve or ? even more simply a goal. When a person wants something, it is clear to him, kids used to say “I want to go to the moon” without considering the chances of actually making it to the moon, this is what they wanted, if you look at things this way you will be surprised to realize that the road to your goal is much more possible than what you first thought it was.

This brings me to the second part, believe, you must believe in yourself and in your goal for it to be a real goal. This is not a lottery ticket that you fill in and forget about it, a goal is something very demanding, you will need to focus on it and passionately involve yourself towards getting it almost every waking minute of your life, and once you achieved one goal you would probably move to a new one, because the moment you start living by goals you will not want to spend your time on anything less great than striving and achieving goals.

When you think of the goal try and imagine it as clearly as you can, the idea is to set clear goals just like walking towards a point in space, imagine that you are in the desert, there is nothing around you, no building no tress or body of water, as you walk you see something in the horizon, it looks like a tower, now you will walk as straight and as directly as you can possibly walk towards that tower ? this is the perfect way to set a goal and start getting it.

One last important thing is that you have to keep working on the goal, finding paths that leads you to reaching it, and monitoring your advancement as you go, do not close your eyes and run towards the goal since you never know what’s on your way, trust your instincts and keep believing in yourself. You will need to work hard to get your goals but the good thing is that if you can dream it, you can make it real, this is the only thing you need to remember.

At the age of twenty two, I read a book that described the importance of having a goal in life. In the books example, a survey had been carried out at a school. Students who had just taken their GCSE’S were asked to answer various questions, one of which asked, “Where would you like to be in five years time?”

If you had asked me that question, when I was sixteen, I would have had to put down, that I had no idea, as it was not something I had ever had thought about.

The people who carried out the survey reported that only five out of one hundred answers were accepted as having a goal. Five years later, the students were tracked down and the five people who had had a goal, when their net asset worth’s were added together, the total amount was higher than all of the other ninety five’s added together. Now of course money is not everything, however to me this shows that people who have a goal in life are more likely to be more successful than people who haven’t.

I then looked at my life I was twenty two and had a net asset worth of zero! I had been working for six years and had nothing to show for it. I then started to think about the future and started setting some of my own goals.

This has helped me in a very big way, to purchase for example my first house. I was not happy paying a landlord rent for the rest of my life as this was like throwing money down the drain. I decided that I wanted to buy my own house however knew that I required a deposit. I created a three year goal to obtain this deposit and worked out how much I would need to save each year etc.

I have also had weight problems and had a speech impedimet called stuttering. I decided to try to improve my life by overcoming the stutter and having a weight that I felt comfortable with. These were another two goals I created and reached.

Some people may see me as a bit of a freak, I do not care though as this new found attitude and belief in the importance of having a goal has made my life so much more happier and easier.