Creating Your Goals
I’m sure you’ve heard it before; setting goals is essential to becoming successful in whatever it is you choose to do.
If you don’t believe this then you need to change your belief right now because without goals we have no direction in life. Without goals we don’t know where we want to go. Without goals we have no reason to take action and move our lives forward towards the hopes and dreams you have in your thoughts.
And the goals you set should be big. Really big. Something you can achieve without breaking into a sweat isn’t worth achieving. You need something that will be taxing, that will get your mind racing and that you’ll enjoy working towards.
A good test is to ask yourself: are those goals BIG enough to make me get out of bed in the morning and work on them? If they’re not, they’re not big enough.
So how do you set your goals? Well, setting goals is actually quite easy to do provided you do it right. There are a number of criteria you need to know about setting goals before you can go ahead and actually do it.
It might be worth you writing these things down, so if you don’t have a pen and pad handy, pause the audio and go get them now.
(slight pause)
So then, here are those criteria:
Always Aim High
Like I just said, anything you can achieve with very little effort isn’t worth achieving. Don’t make life too easy for yourself – give yourself massive goals to go after.
And you must be honest. If you want to earn $1m, make that your goal. Don’t cut it down to $100k because you think it’s more reachable. The only way to reach your goals is to have honest goals to begin with.
Plan Your Goals in Great Detail
You must meticulously plan your BIG goals and get into as much detail as you can. Simply saying ‘I want a big house’ isn’t good enough. Imagine hiring an architect to build you a new house. Would you simply say to him, ‘hey dude, I want a BIG house. Now get to work!’
You need to clearly define as much information in as much detail as you can about your goals to give yourself a clear picture of exactly what you’re going after.
Give Yourself a Realistic Deadline
Don’t give yourself a BIG goal to achieve ‘before I retire’ or ‘a million bucks before next Tuesday’ because in the first instance you’re not giving yourself a reason to take action and in the second you’re being completely unrealistic.
Your goals need to be time-lined so they ARE achievable, but so that you DO actually have to work towards them. Again, goals which you can achieve with little effort aren’t worth achieving and goals which aren’t possible won’t give you the motivation to get started.
Only Plan Goals Which Are Controlled By You
Making goals which are out of your hands are pointless. YOU are in control of YOUR destiny, and you need to make sure the goals you create can only be controlled by YOU.
Don’t plan to, for example, win $10k at the races, or win the lottery, or get your boss to like you more; they’re all out of your hands. Make your goals all about YOU and YOUR life and what YOU can achieve.
Write Down All Your Goals On Paper
You MUST write your goals down on paper. Get a personalised, hand-written look at what you want to achieve instead of having wishy-washy thoughts in your head.
The best way to do this is the same way creative people come up with their ideas: have a brainstorming session where you write down everything you want to achieve, then tidy things up and get down to the nitty-gritty.
Oh, and be sure to write down your goals in full sentences that make sense and contain lots of information. For example, you could say ‘I will earn $500,000 before my thirty fifth birthday by offering my services as a web designer, or a middle man, or a writer’. Well you get the idea. And don’t forget to go into detail!
Sacrifice Is Required
It’s a fact that at some point, if you really want to turn your dreams into reality, you’ll have to make sacrifices.
More often than not, the two biggest sacrifices are time and money. You will have to lose some of your spare time because if, like most people, you’ve got a regular day job, your goals are going to involve doing something outside of office hours. This means sacrificing your spare time.
But this is far easier to do than you think: I mean, how many hours of TV do you watch each week? Instead of watching others do what they enjoy and living out their dreams, put those hours into achieving your dreams instead.
The same is true with money. Most goals are achieved through spending cash to attain something (and not always to attain more money – learning to fly, for example), so be prepared to get your wallet out if necessary.
If you’re not prepared to make certain sacrifices to reach a particular goal, then strike that goal off your list. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. If a goal you’ve thought about isn’t for you, then there’s no point beating around the bush; get rid of it now.
So there you have it. That’s the criteria you need to stick to when planning your goals. Now it’s time to actually craft your goals to see what you really want your own compelling future to be like.
To set your goals you need to break your life down into sections. You see, your life is made up of several main areas, and all of these areas will usually contain things you’d like to achieve.
Each of these ‘things’ need to be written down and properly defined as a goal. So with your pen and pad, and using the criteria we just went through, let’s set you some goals.
