Have you ever wished for something and it didn’t materialise? Did you hope for a particular situation and it didn’t happen? Do you wonder why the things you wish or hope for don’t seem to appear in your life?
The key to achieving what you wish or hope for is to turn your wishes, and your hopes into concrete wants. In other words, you must turn them into goals as this marks them as something you are determined to achieve no matter what.
Turning these wants into goals and achieving them is easier than you might believe. It does require a certain amount of time to focus on your desires, and it involves effort, determination, and time, but the rewards that your concentration will yield are well worth the effort.
By making goal-setting and goal-achieving a part of your ever-growing journey through life, you will live a life full of accomplishment; you will live life the way you want to live it.
The fact of the matter is anyone can set goals. The reason why many don’t is because they don’t know what they want, and when they do identify their wants they expect them to appear out of thin air, land on their laps without exerting consistent effort and determination to bring them about, and they wonder why they’re not living the life they wished for.
Here’s a simple process to get you started to set and achieve your goals. Make a list of all the things you want in life: losing weight, having more self-confidence, being a better salesperson, and beyond.
From that list, pick your top ten wants that you must achieve within one year. For example, say you want to jog five times a week. That’s a clear goal.
Now write those goals in the positive, make sure they are measurable (as in you can tell when you achieve them) they are your goals, and they are written in moving words – where the verb of the goal has an ‘ing’ at the end.
Using the jogging goal example, you can write, ‘I am loving jogging for one hour five days a week.’ This is just an example if you can only slow jog for five minutes, five days a week, and gradually build on it to one hour, great, make that your goal.
The next step is to pick one goal to be your main focus for the year. Again, it must be written in the positive, make sure it is measurable, it is your goal, and it is written in moving words. When done, write today’s date at the bottom of the page.
This gives the effect or impression of a written contract with yourself as opposed to just writing down mere whims.
Now that you have identified and written your ten goals for the coming year and the one that you intend to focus on deeply, it is critical that you write your ten goals once daily in your journal, and write your main goal ten times. Write your focus goal for thirty days or until it manifests, it’s up to you.
Now here’s a powerful addition to the goal-setting and goal-achieving process; after you write your ten goals and your main focus goal, write ten gratitude affirmations. These can be simple gratitude statements about anything: events, people, anything you feel gratitude towards. Start off each one with, ‘I am happy and grateful for…’ as recommended by Bob Proctor in The Secret.
Repeat them first thing in the morning, and repeat these morning gratitude affirmations throughout the day.
It’s debatable whether you should time-limit your goals. I believe it’s a personal choice. See what works best for you. Some goal-setters like to give their goals a deadline and thrive on the pressure to achieve them, others consider the deadlines to add stress.
So long as you focus your efforts daily to achieve your goals within the timeframe of a year as we have discussed, there’s no need to place specific deadlines for each goal, unless you prefer to.
Again, it’s your choice.
Go ahead, and spend some time on your goals. You may be pleasantly surprised at the power that lies within goal-setting and goal-achieving.