Accomplish Your Goals

You need a strategy to accomplish your goals.

There is a step by step approach that will bring you to the achievements that you are haeding for:

1. Make a contract with yourself.

It’s OK to think: I’ll do this and that. It’s much better to write your goal on paper and define it clearly. Date this paper and sign it. Then place it where you can see it several times every day. … and keep your contract!
2. Identify specific rewards for positive action.

In this contract you can also enter the rewards you’ll give yourself for achieving certain landmarks on the way towards that goal. Treat yourself to things you really like when you manage to accomplish a specific step!
3. Establish certain penalties for procrastination.

This might work for some, for others it’s not practical. If you are sure that you will also use this intrument when you don’t go ahead and miss a landmark, then enter that into your contract as well. If you know that you will anyhow ignore the penalties, then just leave this part out. No use of stipulating something just for the paper…
4. Break your goals down into small steps.

OK, these small steps really are the key to your success! A large chunk might be just too much to get started at all. So break your plan into smaller mini-goals (the landmarks I refer to above) and make the steps manageable. Then it’s a lot easier to tackel one first step.
5. Schedule a time segment for each activity.

Try to estimate how long it will take to achieve each of these smaller steps and wrtie down, by when you want to reach the intermediate goals.
6. ACTION!

So, now you have a great plan and it looks all nicely organized. This is going to be useful only if you now take action. Do what you planned and enjoy the feeling of having reached each intermediate goal! You’ll see that by following this simple step by step system, you’ll actually enjoy doing what’s needed and the triumph of actually reaching a goal in the predetermined timespan is a feeling that you’ll start to love!

Have fun reaching your goals!

This positive energy and how to cultivate the right attitude is describen in ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne. It’s a great audio book that you can listen to on the go. This book will change the way you look at your life and how you’ll be setting goals and achieving the results you want!

Listen to a sample of ‘The Secret’ audio book here

 

Learning To Say ‘No’

So much to do! Not enough time! How will you manage to get this all done??? … You are overwhelmed. All good intentions to finish all these tasks will never be enough to really manage……

This ugly problem of too many things that are waiting to be done pesters way too many people. And it is so easy to overcome!

• Learn to say, “No!”

Say “no” to activities and people that do not contribute to reaching your goals. And with goals I don’t just mean work goals, I mean whole life goals. That includes pleasure and quality time with friends and family!

People will take advantage of your kindness and generosity, once you seem to say “yes” all the time. You end up being a stop gap for all the others, who manage to free their time by letting you do things with or even for them.

If you want to learn more about saying “No” and time mangement, then this audio will help you learn the right techniques: Andy Guides has written ‘A Guide To Time Management’ . He says:

Managing stress and time is a rewarding accomplishment that all must maintain in order to reach success. Each day we wake up, we stress to meet deadlines, demands, and finding time to spend with our family, selves and friends.

While these are challenges we all must face, there are tools and techniques that can help you to meet them in a better, balanced way without feeling as though you are at the end of your cord. I know this to be true because I discovered them and implemented them in my own life with amazing results and now I want to share them with you!

This is the most complete report on time management you will ever read! Not only does it include timely tips and hints on tools to manage your time but how to create a backup time management plan as well!

You can download this audiobook ‘A Guide To Time Management’.

 

Setting The Right Priorities – Eliminate Unimportant Things

Some people do not have a plan for the day or week, nor do they assign priorities. The result is shambles, things not done or not done in time, unhappy partners, family members  or clients etc. To have good intentions to do everything will end in disaster. Intentions are good, setting priorities is a lot better!

I’ve recently posted about goal setting and perfection. Both these disciplines come into play when setting the right priorities:

It’s not clever to plan the entire day or week and have every hour filled. If you do this you’ll start to overload and get into a pressure situation. Therefore when you do your “To Do” List, keep as much time as possible open, at least one third of a day should not be filled. Keep unassigned time for family, friends and yourself!

Take your Goals List and break it down into activities, add the dayly recurring activities and then look at the list again:

Ask yourself these questions:

• Does this task need to be done immediately, is it urgent?
• Is this task important?
• Is this urgent AND important?
• Is this task NOT important and NOT urgent?

Now order the tasks accordingly:

• URGENT AND IMPORTANT: Do these tasks first.
• IMPORTANT: Do these tasks next.

Eliminate the ‘not important’ tasks. They are time wasters and don’t bring you one step towards your goals. The 80 / 20 rules applies here too: Only 20% of all tasks are urgent and important. The other 80% don’t help you reach your goals!

It will take a bit of getting used to not doing everything you have on your initial list. But you’ll get better at this as you learn to select and judge what is really important to you. I can’t and don’t want to give examples here, because every person has his/her own priorities and goals. You’ll make mistakes at occasion, but that’s fine! We all make mistakes. So don’t let these mistakes stop you from making your “To Do” Lis.

Here’s an audiobook that might help you setting your own priorites better:

All of us are looking for practical ways to take control of our lives, whether in our personal relationships, our families, our work, our health, or our future plans. Daily challenges have a way of overwhelming us, making life harder than it needs to be. The good news is that the answers are out there. And they are Easier Than You Think: In the audiobook ‘Easier Than You Think’ Richard Carlson, Ph.D. tells you how to juggle the tasks without dropping the important ones.

 

Goal Setting – The Secret: Precision

Goal Setting is a task that most people take too lightly and underestimate: If you are setting a goal the right way, you’ve made already one third of the way to reaching it! If you are full of good intentions, but don’t set goals, chances are that you’ll never fulfill your wishes!

Let’s look why goal setting is so important: If you’re the captain of a ship, and you venture into the deep waters of the sea, without seeing land anywhere, how will you reach your destination:

• By letting the winds drive you wherever they want and not changing the sails, or
• By adjusting your sails according to the compas, so that the force of the wind is used to drive you in the direction of your destination?

The answer is really quite clear, isn’t it? The chance that the wind will drive you to your destination without you changing the settings of your sails, is quite small…. – and without knowing in which direction your destination is to be found, you can’t set your compas course!

The same philosophy applies to goal setting: If you let yourself drift and just hope that some day something good will happen, it may take longer than your life for your wish to come true… – So give your life direction and set goals!

Let’s look at what a good precise goal looks like:

• It defines a final state
• It is measurable in quantity
• It is measurable in time

Means: i.e. you could define the final state like this: “I want to have a circle of real friends, minimum 5 people who I can talk to about anything and who trust me and I know that I can trust them.” You have also defind the quantity with the number of five.

Now, that is great, but how long will you take to achieve this final state? Defining a time frame for this is impossible…. So we might need to define a second set of goals that will lead us to this final state:

Simply by getting to know more people and finally finding the ones that meet the category. Simply might actually not be the best term to choose in this case, finding friends like these is not something easy. But let’s see how we can achieve this.

This is what will really bring you to the final state: Start meeting new people. At the bus stop, at the waiting line in the supe market, in a bar, your choice really. If you have special hobbies or passions, go where people with these hobbies are to be found etc. Your time frame is in this case a repetition of an action until success:

• I will make contact with one new person every day.

Now we have all three points covered that make a good goal: final state, quantity, time.

You see, it’s not really complicated to set a goal.

Once you are clear about your goals, you might want to use additional help to reach these and to program your mind to help you keep drive towards success. Glenn Harrold has produced a Guide to Manifesting Your Goals and Dreams that uses hypnotic techniques. This works quite well, provided you have precisely defined goals and not just a wish…

 

 

Change The World By Changing Yourself

Maybe you have asked yourself what you can do to make this world a better place to live? Maybe you had even started to try to change the way others behave and live? Well, you’re up against a windmill…… Changing others is extremely difficult and and possibly frustrating. Why not start with yoruself?

“What I have learned is the only thing or person I can change…is ME. There is plenty of work to do right here and that requires a lot of energy and time and focus. I have learned that by changing me, by working every day to make myself a better person, I live a better life, and as my life becomes better….the world IS a better place. “

KathllenSue expresses exactly what personal development is all about.

This is also one of the central points that all of the people who have contributed to ‘The Secret’ say in one way or the other: Work on yourself and your environment will adapt.