How to Achieve Your Goals A Comprehensive Guide Introduction Have you ever looked at someone successful and thought any of these things? "Wow - she is so lucky." "I wish I could do that!" "He is way smarter than me - I could never have done that." "I would do that too, but I don't have the time." All of those thoughts are self-limiting. More important, though, they are not true. Achieving your goals does not happen by luck or by chance. You don't just win success like a game of Monopoly. Maybe you've read books before about setting goals, and you've been disappointed. I can understand that! But that's why this book is not just about setting goals. It's about achieving goals. Achieving all your goals. Or else you may believe that it would take more effort than you can put in, to achieve your goals. But achieving your goals is not out of reach! The proof? Hundreds of others have achieved their goals. People from all walks of life, all fields of discipline, have followed the goal-achieving process and attained their success. What's keeping you from achieving your goals? Do you even know what you want? I love that quote from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. This underlines the importance of setting goals - or, in Carroll's words, knowing where you want to go. "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" (asked Alice)
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the cat. "I don't much care where-" said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the cat. "-so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation. "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the cat, "if you only walk long enough." You see, Alice didn't know where she wanted to go, so any road would be alright. And often, we are like Alice - we would love it if someone would just tell us "where I ought to go from here", without even knowing ourselves where we WANT to go. In the second chapter, you'll learn how to define your goals. If Alice were reading this, by the end of the chapter she would instead be asking, "Would you tell me, please, how to get to this particular destination I've chosen?" or something along those lines. You have the power to accomplish your goals, and it simply starts with defining your goals. Of course, no amount of 'just defining your goals' is going to accomplish your goals for you. There's a lot more to the goal achieving process than that! But remember! It is just a process! And it is a process that hundreds of others have learned. And because it's a process, you can use it to achieve everything from tiny little daily goals, to giant and monstrous life goals. Here's what you'll learn in this book: The Goal Achievement Process How to Write a Strategic Map So You ve Started on Your Trek: Now What? How to Stay Motivated Making Time to Achieve Your Goals Holding Yourself Accountable What to do When You Face Setbacks Toolbox: Cheat Sheets & Tricks Goals are powerful. But remember, "A goal without a plan is just a wish." Thanks to Antoine de St- Exupery for such an awesome quote about goals! You ll meet that quote again later, in big fancy red font, because it is so important.
We'll teach you how to write your goal. How to set your plan. And what to do, day after day, to achieve all your goals. This book isn't a book that you'll just read once and forget about. This book is the kind that you'll read...re-read...print out a section and hilite parts of it... Maybe you'll forget about it for a while, after you've really internalized it, but then one day you'll be trying to overcome some obstacle and you'll remember: "Hey! That was addressed in the section What to do When You Face Setbacks!" And you'll open it up and read it again. But the funny thing is, that as you establish the habit of achieving your goals, you'll find yourself surprised that other people don't know what to do to achieve THEIR goals. Because you will fully understand that achieving your goals... is a process and that the process is repeatable and when you repeat the process it becomes a habit and when you master the habit of achieving your goals you forget you ever didn't know how But enough waffle! Let's dive right in. The first chapter is The Goal Achievement Process. Because before you even put pen to paper to express your goal, you must understand The Goal Achievement Process. Because like I said earlier, unlike many books, this book is NOT just about setting goals. It's about achieving them.
Chapter One: The Goal Achievement Process Congratulations! You re ahead of more than 90% of the rest of people. Why? Because you have taken the first step to achieving goals thinking about them. Most people don t even think about achieving goals, or living a goal-accomplishing life, and the fact that you have looked this up and are wanting to achieve goals and are wanting to learn how to achieve goals sets you apart from the crowd already. Less than 3% of the population of the US has written goals. Crazy and do you know why it s crazy? Because the few that actually plan out their goals and think about what it takes to achieve their goals achieve far, far greater success than those who don t. Just acknowledging that you have goals and that there is something you want to have or to do different than you are now, gives you a much higher chance of success. Achieving your goals is not fluke. People don t just happen to end up successful. I know what it s like, to look at someone and think, Wow, they are so lucky. While it is true that luck can play a role it is also true, as Louis Pasteur said, Chance favors only the prepared mind. In other words, you create your own luck! In fact, like so much else in life, achieving your goals is just a process. Look at the graphic above. The process is: Dream > Goal > Plan > Act.
DREAM Because it is a process, before we start on goals, we actually have to back up a step and talk about dreams. Because until you have articulated your dreams, and what you want to be or to accomplish, you can't turn that into a goal; and until you turn it into a goal you can't turn it into it an action plan; and until you turn it into an action plan, you won t know that steps you need to take to accomplish it. To begin setting a goal you have to be able to imagine a better state then you are in right now. If you are setting a financial goal you're going to imagine yourself as having more money or more financial freedom than you currently have. You have to articulate your dream put it into words how you imagine your future can be, if that dream were to come true. (Please note we are not talking about literal dreams! Rather, we are talking about those vague wishes you have for a better life, or how you imagine yourself to possibly be if everything works out in your favor. For the purpose of this book, we ll call them dreams.) It takes guts to articulate your dreams. Sometimes we hold back because of feeling that we don't deserve it or we don't have what it takes to accomplish them. So we don't even express our dreams! Am I good enough to even have this dream? This happened to us when we were shopping for a house. We knew we wanted a bigger house in a nicer area, but when a lovely house came up for sale that was so much better than what we had even hoped for, we initially held back because it seemed that it was too good for us! Luckily, because we are used to actioning our goals, we did in fact put an offer in, even though it seemed too good for plain old us. A year later, we are still loving our dream house, and more than ever we are trying to help others accomplish their dreams too. Or you might hold back from expressing your dreams, because you re scared of what others will think of them. After all, when you bring it out into the open, others are looking at it (or at least you think they are) and you wonder, Will people laugh at my dreams? Will they think my dreams are too ambitious? Or silly?
The answer to this is to initially express your dreams just to yourself. As you become comfortable with what you want to accomplish, you will find it easy to gauge when to tell someone your dream or when to keep it to yourself. You won t want to share it with people that are going to be down on it, but at the same time, you ll find there comes a point when it no longer matters what people think you ve already accomplished 30% of your goal, so you know you can see it through regardless of what anyone else thinks. But it is important to analyze your dreams, and to make sure that the dreams you chase are truly the ones you want. Our dream of a bigger house was tied to both our love for our kids, and our need to care for our aging parents. GOAL We come now to the GOAL part of setting and achieving goals. By this point, you ve expressed your dreams in words. Having articulated your dreams having expressed them in words, and written them down you have a good idea of where you would like to be eventually, and it is time to turn your dreams into goals. You re too smart to wait for a lucky break, right? You know that you re going to create your own success. There are two parts to the setting of goals and to actually making them happen. The first part is setting smart goals S.M.A.R.T. and the second part is spinning your goals. S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym standing for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Specific: This means that you are as careful as you can be to say exactly what you want. With our house, for example, we knew and stated the minimum number of square feet; we knew how many bedrooms and bathrooms we wanted; and we wanted a bedroom on the main level. We were specific with the kind of
neighborhood we wanted live in, and the size of the dining room, and the type of kitchen we were looking for. Measureable: M is for measurable. That means you can measure whether you re succeeding or not. With buying a house, that's a simple yes or no did you get the house you wanted or not? But if you're setting a financial goal, you might say, Have all of our credit card paid off in 2 years. Or if you're trying to lose weight, you might re-write your goal to say Weigh 140 pounds by 12 months from now. Actionable: This means there's something you can do about it. You can t change the weather, so setting a goal of having 365 sunny days a year in the city you live in just might not be in your power. Nor can you do anything about what kind of car your brother-in-law drives, or if your spouse s boss is vegan. You can t change the economy. But it means that when you set your goal, make it something that you CAN do something about. Realistic: Realistic is a very important one. In the dream phase, we wanted you to dream as big as you could. However, in the goal phase, it's important that you set a realistic goal. You want your goals to be ones that you actually can achieve. Of course you want them to stretch you they re not goals if they don t! but they should be attainable. If you re currently 35 years old, it might not be realistic to say that you want to be financially independent in 2 years, but it might be realistic to say that you want to be financially independent by the time you re 50 or by the time you re 60. Time-bound: Which brings to the T of S.M.A.R.T., which stands for time-bound. You must put a time line on your goals if you want to accomplish them. Whether it's a short small goal that you want to do this week, or whether it's a life goal that you want to do in the next 30 years, you must put a time-frame on to your goal. Set your goal to start your new career by this fall, or to complete your studies in 2019. So remember: set S.M.A.R.T. goals! Make them Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timebound. Finally, before we go on to actually making our goals, it's important to learn a little trick called spinning your goals. I learned this is from Michael Linenburger in his book Master Your Now! and it is a powerful method of keeping your goals in front of you, and really making them happen faster. The trick is to write your goals out as if each one is already accomplished and you're enjoying the benefits of it and the satisfaction of it. Use powerful words like love, and home, and your children's names to really imagine yourself in this position of having already accomplished your goals.