CREATING POWERFUL GOALS

“A goal properly set is halfway reached”- Abraham Lincoln

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream” - CS Lewis

“If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else” - Lawrence J. Peter

Hello all,

Recently I was leading a mentoring program for Females in IT&T (www.fitt.org.au) and some of the conversation came to setting goals.

As a coach with My Performance Coach, I often find that people are reluctant to set Powerful, Inspiring Goals prior to coming to coaching. Sometimes they have set goals and have had mixed success. Some people don’t even think they are unnecessary!

Do you seem to have an ongoing list of goals that you achieve some of and not others?

Think about all those well intentioned new year resolution you’ve set. How often did you go hard and achieve them? The odd one or two? Well you are not alone! Research shows about 20% of new year resolutions get achieved!

Goals are about taking RESPONSIBILITY for your life and your outcomes! Goals give you a sense of purpose, a direction and should be your inspiration. Goals help you establish what you will do, be and have in this world!! Without goals you are just aimlessly walking through life (like you are sleepwalking), hoping, that somehow, someway, you’ll get something that you want and if you don’t, well at least you can blame (them) out there somewhere!

Even though evidence suggests that Goal Setting is a significant part of achieving great success, most people really are not clear on how to effectively set goals to bring their ultimate future into reality.

Goals need to be realistic yet inspiring. They need to be powerfully motivating and come from a place of true toward motivation! Setting goals ensures you know exactly what you want to achieve! This creates the destination.

If you think of a goal as a destination on a map and if we assume you know exactly where you are today, then the route will become clear. The map also helps us see the different routes and if we get diverted or come across unanticipated obstacles we can see how to get back on track to get to our destination. We are also able to effectively measure our success towards our destination and continually motivate ourselves forward.

Setting inspiring goals from a place of strong motivation, enables you to get into the powerful habit of setting and achieving goals. When you start to achieve goals regularly your self-confidence soars!

There are a number of goal setting techniques which I will outline below.
However, any skill or techniques are only useful insofar as you have your head absolutely in the game.

I am often amazed at how many people (including myself on the odd occasion :) delude ourselves into believing we are good to go and just go blindly forward – sleepwalking! When it comes to inspirational, life changing or world changing goals, you need a whole other level of mindset!

Mandella didn’t become President of South Africa by having small uninspiring goals!

Phelps didn’t become an Olympic legend, with a goal of just 10 laps this morning!

Nothing can stop the with the right mental attitude from achieving goal; nothing on earth can help with the wrong mental attitude -Thomas Jefferson

As a coach and NLP practitioner, I spend a lot of my time studying success. I do so to assist myself and my clients emulate the best mindsets, skills and behaviours to achieve great success. So far, I haven’t come across anyone who has achieved phenomenal success, that didn’t have big inspirational goals. Some may say they didn’t articulate them, but they definitely were absolutely crystal clear on their goals in their mind and actions. You CANNOT achieve great success on luck alone!

Creating Powerful and Inspiring Goals

The first thing you need to know is what inspires you and what are you passionate about?

I find many people who come to coaching, have no idea to begin with. Many people don’t understand their value systems and are not feeling particularly inspired in life. Hint, if you have lots of “woulda, shoulda, coulda’s’ in your thinking, then that’s not it!!! Some people feel as though nothing in particular is inspirational. If you fall into this category I strongly recommend you consider a coach to assist you to move forward as this thinking is a strong resistance strategy to moving forward. I have watched people in this space time and time again, get disheartened, depressed or plain give up on things and just exist through life!

NO matter how much you think you want to achieve your goals your mindset will sabotage you if your motivation is not fully aligned with your vision!

STEP 1: Create a Long Term Vision. Think of a specific date 5 -30 years from now. What is it that you want to achieve? What will you be doing? Who will you be doing it with? How will you be doing it? Create a big picture vision in your head. It is often useful for whole of brain acceptance and thinking to create a vision and story board. This enables immediate recognition of your vision.

STEP 2: Create specific Goals. Now create goals that will help you achieve this vision. It is often more useful to start with the big hairy audacious goals (BHAGs) and work backwards! If you have done this well, you should have goals from now til your vision. Sometimes the medium goals are not clear to start off with. DON’T WORRY about that!! All will become clear. Just get clear on the big end goals and exactly how you are going to make a start!

STEP 3: Regular Review and Assessment. Being crystal clear in your focus is about 90% of the achievement of the goal. Take your eye off the ball and loads of nasty things can get in your way. Just ask Donald Trump! The key to achieving ALL goals is the regularly review where you are at!
And I don’t mean a quick checklist in your head. I mean a full and thorough analysis of your successes, how you got them, when you got them, what helped you. And thoroughly analysing your failures (which is only learning forward if used correctly) – what did you do, how did it go wrong (cause-effect), what caused it to go wrong, what significantly can you learn and apply.
Review your strategy and goals regularly, taking in your learning forward failures and see how quickly you start to tick off those goals!

Goal Setting Tips

• Ensure each goal is stated in the positive: Express your goals positively – To become a well known and admired successful business owner by 2018.

• Think BE, DO, HAVE: When thinking of goals think about what do you want to be (position, state of mind etc), Do (actions and behaviours) and HAVE (stuff you want)

• Only set goals that you have 100% power over: (see previous blog) I.e. how what you do (mindset, actions, behaviours) will get you what you want. Setting goals where you have to rely on others or random events to occur is not helpful to you and enables you to easily blame external factors for lack of achievement!

• Be Specific: Set a specific goal, with specific time frames. This is not as easy as it sounds. It needs to be rich in detail leaving you in no doubt about exactly what it is you are trying to achieve. Time fames can be amended later if necessary. I can’t tell you the number of times people write non-specific goals but convince themselves otherwise.

DO NOT fall into the too hard trap, so I will just make it fuzzy. If you set fuzzy goals, you will get fuzzy outcomes – end of story!! If you have a very specific goal, you will know exactly how, when, where and what you are going to be doing to achieve it. Remember, Olympians don’t have fuzzy goals like “come in first place! Or win GOLD” - They set very, very specific outcomes and know exactly what performance requirements will enable them to achieve their BHAG’s!

• Chunk it down: Make sure you chunk down your goals to bite size pieces. Create lots of milestones to celebrate on your way to fabulous success!

• Prioritise: Do have several goals with the same time frames and priorities. This will just get you into procrastination mode and you may feel overwhelmed!

• Write your goals down: If your goals ain’t written, they ain’t likely to get achieved (or the big ones in any event). People have reluctance to write them down and display them proudly because they already DO NOT believe it is possible!! If that’s the case, forget all I have said and go back to bed!

• Be realistic, but INSPIRATIONAL: It is vitally important to set goals that you THINK you can achieve. Note my language. What you think you can achieve! If you think you can’t achieve, I will lay money on the bet that you WON’T achieve it. Seen it all toooooo many times! So set inspirational, yet realistic goals to you. They should not be easily attainable, and you should have to put in a good level of effort and change to achieve the goals (otherwise they aren’t going to motivate you properly). Too hard and you’ll give up at the first couple of hurdles, too easy and you just achieve mundane little tasks! Remember great things don’t happen with minimal effort!

• Identify your BARRIERS now: Figure out what is going to stand in your way of achievement. BIG CLUE – Your thinking and behaviour will account for 95% of the barriers – fear, procrastination, etc. Also identify external barriers. KNOW how you will overcome them, otherwise, they will be effective in keeping you from your dreams! If you are not willing to overcome obstacles and barriers through hard work & persistence, again, I suggest you stay in bed and forget your goals!

Until next time, Remember - Life is not about finding yourself...Life is about creating yourself!