Leadership, Goals and More

How important is to get goals set properly from the beginning? Well, if you do not know where you want to go, then how will you get there? If you were to hop in your car right now thinking, “I want to go somewhere, but I’m not sure where,” where would you end up. You may drive for hours, get really frustrated because it doesn’t feel right, then run low on gas, far from home and then it hits you, you actually wanted to get milk from the shop 5 minutes from your house. If NASA launches the shuttle just one degree off, then it will miss the target by a huge margin! Goals are the same.

Define your goals. Make sure your goal is your goal. Do not feel obligated to live someone else’s goal. So many people end up setting their parents goals for themselves. You will be unhappy unless you decide what you want to do and set out to achieve it!

How many times have you failed at achieving your goals? Some of the time? Half the time? Well, Harvard Medical School did a study and the results show that the average person fails to reach their goals most of the time! Our sub-conscious becomes accustomed to these failures. When you think to yourself that you are going to go to the gym at 5am, or start your home business, or read a book your sub-conscious knows that there are no consequences of not achieving your goals. Sure you’re a little disappointed, but that’s about it. Why don’t you substitute the word ‘goals’ for something else? There are many words to choose from: mission, duty, purpose and many more. Personally- I use the word promise. Harvard Medical School did a study and found the average person achieves their ‘promise’ all most ALL of the time!

Start rephrasing your written list replacing the word goal, with the word promise! And make sure you have enough clarity for each promise that you know exactly how you are going to get there!

Make sure you have identified your positive and negative motivators. Your positive motivators are people you are achieving your goals for. This could be your wife, children, parents, maybe a charity. Your negative motivators are the people you are achieving your goals to show. These are the people who said you would never achieve what you are aiming for. They never have to know who they are; even when you are a success, this list is for you, not them.

Have you ever tried to do a puzzle before? Try picture a 1,000 piece puzzle of anything, could be something really difficult, or something really simple, but 1,000 pieces. It takes time to put a puzzle this size together. Every now and then a piece goes in the wrong place, but eventually it gets there.

Life is like a puzzle. The only problem is that when people try and put the puzzle of life together, they are trying to put it together upside down. Next time you try a puzzle, try do it upside down and make a note of how successful you were. You would not do a puzzle upside down, you would look at all the pieces, separate the four corners and then the sides and start with those so you have a frame to work with.

The question I ask is WHY do we not do life this way? When was the last time you sat down and wrote a list of goals for the next 5 years, year, month, week and day?

Even though a puzzle is trivial and fun, when completed all the people involved have a sense of pride about completing it. They accomplished something. But before they accomplished it, they knew what they were setting out to do. That’s one of the cool things about puzzles; they come in a box with a picture on the front.

The moment you start to dream is when you start to paint the picture onto your box. The problem here is that when most people dream they still try and put the puzzle together upside down!

When you start writing your goals is when you start to pull out the 4 corners and sides of the puzzle. Working towards your goals is putting the middle into the puzzle. It is sometimes frustrating and can get dull, but unless you stick with it you will never have anything to show for what you are dreaming about.

Take the time to go, right now, and dream. Put on your favorite song and let your mind wander, let your dreams reveal themselves. Then take a pen and paper and start writing them down. Once you have written your dreams down, write down the actionable steps it will take to accomplish your dreams. Go and live the life you want to live. It may take years to put your puzzle together, but when it is done it is YOUR puzzle and YOUR accomplishment and YOUR dream!