What are your goals? Do you have any? Or perhaps what you consider to be your goals, are just wishes?
There are so many different ways to set goals, different people have different ideas. Just find the way that suits you & WORKS for you.
Write down 10 things. Things you consider to be goals. Now write down WHY you want them. If there isn’t a Why, then it really is just a wish, & it won’t motivate you enough to achieve it.
So now it leaves you with the real goals. Next step, put a date on it. This is where you need to be careful. You need varying lengths of time for your goals. Very often bite size goals achieved, can motivate your brain. You will believe that you can achieve the bigger ones. Having just those huge, perhaps, once in a lifetime goals, will excite you to start with, but because they are SO big, & it is taking SO long to achieve them, your brain has dismissed them saying, my goal is to achieve that in 5 years time, so no need to worry about busting a gut now, there’s plenty of time. What happens then, is the goal will get further & further away & you’ll never reach it. You have to trick your brain. Show it that you can achieve those smaller, shorter term goals, those baby steps, & use the smaller goals to achieve those long term goals.
‘Thoughts become Things’ (Mike Dooley in ‘The Secret’) Imagine you have achieved a big goal, possibly that you have booked your dream holiday. Feel the sunshine. Feel the sand between your toes, or feel the breeze whilst you look out to sea on your cruise. If it’s a dream house, close your eyes, walk through the rooms, & down the corridor & as you walk past an open doorway, feel the sun coming through that doorway as you walk past. Your imagination is such a valuable thing. Use it, use it until you get that tingly feeling then remember it & relive it. Look at your bite size goals & work on them as steps towards this mega goal. So where did I get the idea for getting that ‘tingly feeling?
Everybody has a favourite book, & mine, I have to say it’s not one of those books you hear mentioned much. It’s ‘Excuse me, your life is waiting’, by Lynn Grabhorn. I related to this book straight away, it made me take stock of what I was thinking, & it taught me to create a type of feeling that I could use to help me motivate myself to get what I wanted in life in general. I just ‘got it’. So whatever you do to goal set, bring in a sense of excitement & anticipation about what you want to achieve.
You should see your goals when you go to sleep & when you wake up. A vision board is important, but equally important are pictures of what you’ve achieved, so that negative part of your brain can see that you can & have achieved things, so why shouldn’t you be able to achieve more, possibly bigger goals.
I didn’t realise at first, how important to future achievements, it is, to be reminded of what you have achieved already, until after my first hip replacement. I was booked in for physio afterwards as normal, & after a couple of visits & being left with ‘homework’ – exercises to do at home – I had to admit to my physiotherapist, that when laying on my back, I was not able to lift my operated (left) leg. She smiled & said, all it needs is for the right leg to show the left leg that it can be done! She was absolutely right, next time I did my exercises, I lifted my right leg first, & like a miracle I was able to lift the left one. It only took that once for my brain to recognise that if I can see achievement, then I can duplicate it.
So, just because you have a ‘goal’, it won’t just ‘happen’ no matter how much you want it, also just having a picture on the wall of that cruise ship won’t make the holiday suddenly materialise. You’re going to have to take action & work towards it. A vision board is there to motivate you into doing the stuff you need to. The stuff that would have otherwise seemed hard, & easier not to do. That sort of thing in your life that is easy to do, but even easier not to do.
Find out what you need to do. Make a plan. We were always told to decide what we wanted & work backwards. That’s SO important & essential to achievement. Plan those steps backwards to the present day. You can then work forward one step at a time.
If it’s a business goal, that will achieve more income, so that you can afford your ‘goal’, & you’re not sure how to plan, ASK someone. In our business, VivaMK, there’s always the person that brought you into the business that will help. They may even recommend someone else to assist too.
Everybody needs goals, if you don’t have any, this is your wake up call!! I would be presumptuous here, by saying that you actually do have goals, but you really don’t realise it. You really do need to get your life in order’. Life is too short to just amble through it. It only took one person to tell me that my life was not a dress rehearsal, & that I should do things NOW, because I wouldn’t be able to go back & re-start it like a computer game. This is it, this is your life. Make yourself a plan, a list, a bucket list, whatever gives you inspiration – but do something!
I have only ever met one person that actually said, ‘I don’t have any ambition’. Now that’s sad. I did try to help, but it’s true what they say, you can’t change others, they have to do that themselves. This is where reading helps. There is one master in motivation & that’s the late great Jim Rohn. So these last words are his.
“Unlike your fingerprints that you are born with and can’t change, character is something that you create within yourself and must take responsibility for changing.”
“Nothing Will Change Unless YOU Change. If You Change Yourself, You Can Change Your Life. You cannot change the circumstances. But you can get stronger, wiser, better. Life is about constant, predictable patterns of change, and the only constant factor will be our feelings and attitudes toward life.”
