Breaking Down Your Goals

A wise Chinese sage once said,

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Wise words? But what do they mean to someone who is trying to achieve their goals in life? That’s what we’ll be talking about in this article.

I am sure that you have some big goals in your life. Perhaps you want a mansion in the countryside, a sports car, or your own boat.

I am also sure that you may well be looking at this goal and thinking “How the hell am I going to get that?”

And this is where our wise philosopher comes into play.

Pick one of your major goals that you don’t know how to achieve and examine it more closely. Think about the goal and you will realise that it is made up of a number of smaller goals, each of which is in turn made up of other smaller goals.

Grab a piece of paper, write down a major goal at the top, and below it, write down the steps you can take to achieve this goal. In effect, each of these steps represents a mini-goal, and each of these mini-goals can be broken down further if necessary into more manageable chunks.

Do not become obsessed with achieving each minor step on your way to the major goal. You may find that some steps can be skipped, some become unnecessary, and that new steps appear. Review these minor steps regularly as they will change often.

Now you’ve just done this quick exercise, and you should never leave the scene of a decision without taking some action, so go do something to get yourself on the path to your goal!

An example may be that you want to buy a farm in the country. You know nothing about farms. You may break your goal down into something like:

1) Find out about farming – is it for me and what does it involve?
2) What sort of farms are there and which type do I want?
3) What is the best area for the type of farm that I want?
4) How much money do I need to buy the farm
…
…
…
Buy the farm

This is a very simple illustration of breaking down your goals. Each one of these may be broken down further into actions you can take.

Now you realise, that the journey towards a goal starts with a single step, and is made up of many steps.

Originally posted 2009-08-30 01:22:23. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

How To Set Goals

How to set goals? First of all, don’t confuse wishes or desires with goals. Often, people want things, situations or accomplishments, and call these goals. Then they’re disappointed when they don’t get them. Just naming your desires isn’t effective goal setting. Good goals have some or all of the following:

1. Good goals are specific. A goal like, “I want to be healthy” is too general. “I want to lose weight and walk three times a week,” is better.

2. They’re realistic. Unfortunately, even if it is possible that you could become an astronaut, if you’re already 55, you better try to become a pilot for now. Unrealistic goals set you up for failure.

3. They’re written down. Writing down your goals is a way to make them more real, and this influences your subconscious mind, especially if you review the goals regularly.

4. They’re measurable. Exactly how many pounds do you want to lose? How much money do you want to make? How will you know if your relationship is better?

5. They’re motivating. Setting a goal for the right reasons is a good start. Good goals get you excited when you think about the benefits of accomplishing them. You should also learn how to re-motivate yourself, and reward yourself when you make progress.

6. Good goals become plans. Taking a goal and making it into specific steps makes it much more likely to be achieved. It’s easier to take one step at a time.

7. They have specific deadlines. By what date will you have a new job? Setting target dates really helps you measure progress, and motivate yourself.

8. Good goals consider personal factors. Will you succeed if you feel like you don’t deserve it? Possibly, but unlikely. You have to learn how to set goals for your personal development as part of any other major goals.

9. They’re followed by action. A secret of motivation and to getting where you want to be is to start with any movement towards the goal. Action begets action. Start slow if you must, but start.

10. They’re not written in stone. All major goals naturally evolve. Why would you become a family doctor once you learned that you liked doing lab work better?

That last one is a tough one. A change of course and an excuse are not the same thing, but to know the difference requires a certain level of self-awareness. Develop that, and you’ll be more likely to get to where you want to be. Especially if you use all ten of these keys to how to set goals.

Originally posted 2009-09-17 01:18:44. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Personal Development Goals

photo credit: nDevilTV

Among the most beneficial contributions we could give to ourselves and our family is to get better people. To accomplish this, we require personal development goals. These development goals will determine who you’ll become following year, in 10 years, and for lifetime.

Personal development goals are a way of developing new skills, increasing our consciousness, broadening our understanding and maturating of our body, mind and soul. Our personal loyalty to development is the driving force behind the setting of development goals.

Through personal development goals you can discover your weaknesses, your short-comings, and character defects and how you’re going to improve them.

There’s no denying that the world we life in is turning more and more sophisticated. There’s a global market place with fierce rivalry. We require to be capable to add new skills on an ongoing basis. We need to get adaptable, capable to accommodate to new thoughts and challenges. In order to succeed we need to embracing change and bear the challenges that it brings.

Suitable skills are moving from conventional technical abilities to personal abilities, which is where the rules of personal development and success come in. The ability to set and achieve goals, coupled with discipline and perseverance will be required to succeed in the future.

Even the human relationship we have are getting more difficult. This is because our human relationship have become more complex. We altogether battle with a sort of problems from day one. Whether it’s in our relationships, businesses, finances, or health, we altogether have problems. One solution is to upraise our level of awareness, to develop beyond our present situation, and have a certain destination of what we would like to reach altogether these factors.

Set your own goals. This will pave the way to a successful personal growth plan.

Do you have a detailed set of goals for your life? There are a lot of people in certain businesses that are continually challenging themselves with motivation, success and personal development or else they barely won’t last.

Whenever your friends and family assure you to take the comfortable road, don’t hear to them. Whenever you’ve already set your goal, continue on. Acknowledge that you are in a choice group for very few people have ever made that first step forward.

People have a trend to stay acting the same things again and again. There is always that thought that everything is good enough. In the end, things will become redundant. We have to keep developing with the changing world and continue growing to get better than we already are. This is the purpose that our goals will play.

It’s very significant to remember that goals are not stable. As our circumstances change, without doubt our goals will as well need to modify. It’s crucial to remember that when your conditions change, review and, when requirement, adjust your goals. The first rule of development goals is to complete the goals you set for yourself.

Originally posted 2009-05-09 00:30:36. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Focus On Your Goals Without Envying Others

Many of us waste too much time envying others instead of getting on with our own goals and dreams. This is stupid to put it mildly.

For a start, we would probably not envy others if we knew what their lives were really like.

Many young men envied and still envy Evis Presley but who wants to die sad, disillusioned and divorced at the age of 42?

Billy Connolly, the great Scottish comedian who now lives in California, tells an amusing story about misguided envy:

In World War I two men were squatting side by side over the only toilet available. This was a ditch in the ground full of sewage.

One of the men was constipated and had been there a long time.

His knees were painful from squatting down for so long and he had also developed back ache.

The unconstipated man squatted there for about one minute and then there were three loud splashes.

The constipated man said: “You’re so lucky”.

The unconstipated man replied:

“I’m not so lucky. That was my knife, fork and spoon.”

The famous celebrities that we all admire and envy often lead miserable lives when they are not actually performing. Elvis was one celebrity who only felt alive when he was on stage.

Even if all celebrities lived amazingly happy lives both on and off stage, we are still wasting our time envying them.

Instead of envying others and focusing on their talents, why not spend time discovering our own abilities and making the most of these? Let’s focus on what we can achieve with whatever talents we have.

These talents may well be far greater than we think. In fact, we probably need to focus on just one of them and develop that thoroughly before we move on to any thing else. Otherwise we will end up as the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none.

By focusing on one talent or one opportunity at a time and learning as much as we can and developing all the skills necessary to succeed in this area, we could well be astounded at the results we achieve. If, however, we chase after two rabbits instead of one, we may well end up with none.

When I first started studying the martial arts, I attended a Kung Fu class in the morning and a Shotokan Karate class in the afternoon. My Karate instructors told me to focus on Karate. If I didn’t I would end up chasing two rabbits instead of one and would fail at both. They were right. I did not well at either style and eventually moved on to Taekwondo where I finally achieved my first black belt.

In business, many of us and especially me, chase after one opportunity after another or we read one course after another without actually following through on anything. We are then surprised that we are in debt and no further up the ladder to success.

To sum up, focus on your own potential and not the achievements of others and then focus on just one talent or opportunity of your own until you see some kind of a result.

Originally posted 2009-10-16 17:42:15. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Creating the Perfect Goals for Success

Why do we need goals? We need them so that we know where we want to go towards, right? Without goals, we are basically wandering around in the darkness hoping that we reach the right place. But, we also use goals as a motivational tool to give us that boost of energy to work towards them.

If you ask any motivational speaker, one of the key points they will tell you to achieve success is to write down your goals. Well, that’s not the whole story though. Just writing them down doesn’t give you that energy boost that you need to achieve success but I’ll tell you my secret to goal setting.

First, you have to start dreaming again and not the dreams that you have when you sleep at night, but the dreams that you had when you were kids like, “I wanna live in a mansion when I grow up.” Don’t be afraid to dream big because odds are, if you dream big but only reach half way, that’s still half way farther than if you didn’t dream at all.

Ok, so let’s talk about your mansion. Just writing down a mansion in your Goals list isn’t enough. Write down details. What kind of architecture would it be? Would it be a fairy tale type of castle? Would it be an Italian Villa? How many bedrooms? What about an indoor pool?

Another secret to goal setting is to find images of some of the things you want so that you can picture them clearly in your mind. It gives your goals a sense of realism than if you were to just think about the word “mansion.” Find some pictures of Italian Villas or indoor pools or whatever it is that you want and just imagine yourself in there.

For me, I’m a car guy so I’ve got a few cars on my list. Right now, I drive a BMW M3 but that’s not enough. Like I said, you have to dream big if you want to hit it big so I’ve got Porches, more BMWs, and even Ferraris on my list. I’ve saved images of these cars onto my computer and even set a couple of them as my desktop images on both my monitors. I know the colors I want and all the options that each car provides. It makes it much more real when you get down to the details.

So, you can start with making a list of your goals but you need to go farther. Get into the details. Find images. Picture yourself owning those items already. Doing this will only help you in whatever venture you choose to go with.

Originally posted 2009-09-15 01:18:53. Republished by Blog Post Promoter