How many incomplete goals do you currently have on your agenda? If you’re anything like the vast majority of us, chances are that you have hundreds of projects that you started and never completed, countless goals that you told your friends but never saw through and all kinds of dreams that seem to be getting less and less likely to come to fruition.
And it is for this reason that you may find people roll their eyes when you tell them your ‘next big project’. When you start a new training programme to lose weight, and everyone – including you – knows that you’re likely to have lost interest by month two. Or when you talk about the application you intend to make, the website, or the business project. Or when you talk about that dream trip to another country.
This is the way of things for many of us. We work incredibly hard at things we don’t feel passionate about just to put food on the table but when it comes to fulfilling our dreams, we are remarkably ineffective. It’s time to change all that and start making those goals happen. But how can you turn it all around?
Accomplishing goals is about strategy; it is about making a cognitive shift to change the way you’re thinking and it’s about being smart about how you approach each goal. It is also about knowing how to choose your goals and even how to phrase them.
This book is going to show you how to make those changes. You’ll learn how to choose and write goals effectively, how to write effective action plans and how to make sure you stick with your goals and never give up.
This book is a little different from most goal-setting books. After we have given you the broad tools you need to start setting and accomplishing your goals, we are going to take a look at how you can begin to put them into practice.
While a goal can be anything, for many of us they are going to fall into one of a few different categories. Most of us have goals for our relationships, goals for our fitness, goals for our careers and goals for travel. We’re going to provide not only the abstract strategies you need to start making effective goals, but also the step-to-step processes that will let you apply these strategies in each of these areas.
By the end of this book, you’ll be proficient at setting and accomplishing any goal. And at the same time, you’ll have powerful strategies for improving your relationships, your fitness, your career and more.
Learning how to set goals properly is arguably the most powerful skill that you can possibly learn. Why? Because it will allow you to accomplish a huge range of other goals. When you know how to set goals, it allows you to effectively work toward anything. This is the key to unlocking everything you could want from life.
So ironically, the first goal you should focus on is the goal of setting goals! And until now, you’ve probably been doing it all wrong.
Sure, any objective is a worthwhile one, but the way that you phrase your goals and structure them, is going to massively change your likelihood of finding success.
Let’s take weight loss as an example because it’s one of the more straightforward goals that is easiest to implement. When you set out to lose weight, you should start with a concrete goal. And for most people, this will look something like this: “Lose 2 stone by next year”. This is a terrible goal. Why? First of all, it is far too vague. How are you losing weight? Weight from where? Why do you want to lose the weight? What do you actually want to look like?
At the same time, it’s out of your control. Even if you are completely committed to your goal, you may find that outside forces prevent you from being successful. Maybe you get ill, maybe you accidentally follow the wrong programme, maybe it turns out you have a bad metabolism!
Finally, the goal is too far in the future. If your goal is to lose weight by next year, that essentially gives you a license to procrastinate. The target is so far away, that you indulge yourself in a little overeating or put off exercise for a while and not worry about it until next month. Six months pass and you realize you’re actually further from your goal. And because it’s too late, you’re likely to just give up at this point. Not a good goal!
So, what does a good goal look like? How might you phrase this same objective in a manner that will increase your chances of success?
The first thing to do is to focus on things that are immediately within your control and that are not influenced by outside factors at all. These goals should be things that you can accomplish in a guaranteed manner and that you will be immediately graded on a pass-fail basis.
So for instance, instead of aiming to lose 2 stone by next year, you would use this goal: “I will work out three times a week, every week, for at least 15 minutes”.
Now that is a goal that you can aim for. Regardless of your metabolism, or of injury, or of any other outside factor, this is a goal that you can accomplish. It also means you can’t ‘put off’ the goal and it means you’ll never reach that disappointing point where you can no longer stand any chance of completing it. At any point in your life, there is no reason that you can’t set out to accomplish this goal and expect to be successful.